Rating and value of paintings and drawings by Henri Regnault

If you own a work by or based on the artist Henri Regnault and would like to know its value, our state-approved experts and auctioneers can help you.

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Artist's rating and value

Henri Regnault produced a wide range of works, including paintings, watercolors and prints. He mainly depicted country landscapes.

His naturalistic landscapes are particularly sought-after at auction, fetching several hundred thousand euros.

A case in point is his oil on canvas Automedon and Horses of Achille, which sold for €200,000, against an estimate of between €150,000 and €230,000.

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

Style and technique by Henri Regnault

Henri Regnault's painting is dazzling, where the ardor of gesture is combined with an almost goldsmith's precision. A descendant of academicism, he nonetheless turns its codes on their head with a flamboyant approach, seeking not so much cold perfection as dramatic intensity.

His impeccably rigorous brushstrokes come to life under the impetus of a bold palette, where fiery reds and sumptuous golds exalt his compositions.

Fascinated by the Orient, he transcribed its splendors with a luxury of detail reminiscent of Persian miniatures, but injected a dynamism derived from Baroque painting, playing on contrasts of light to amplify the effect of relief and movement.

His brushwork, agile and incisive, sculpts shapes in deep shadows, while the pictorial material, generous without being heavy, lends his works an almost tactile vibration. His attention to rendering, particularly in fabrics and armors, sometimes verges on the illusionistic, with every reflection and transparency rendered with dizzying precision.

But beneath this dazzling virtuosity lies a tension, an epic breath that inscribes its figures in a dramatic space where majesty rubs shoulders with fury.

Through this fusion of academic rigor and chromatic exaltation, Regnault fashioned a unique style, at the crossroads of classicism and visionary orientalism, whose dazzling modernity would only be fully appreciated after his premature death.

The life of Henri Regnault 

Henri Regnault embodies the dazzling brilliance of a destiny broken too soon. Born in 1843 into a cultured family, he trained at the Beaux-Arts in Paris under the tutelage of prestigious figures, but it was his confrontation with the Académie that shaped his ambition.

He soon made his mark with his precise brushstrokes and powerful coloring, two qualities that placed him at the crossroads between academic classicism and the more innovative explorations of the time.

Winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1866, he stayed at the Villa Médicis, where his work was influenced by tradition, yet nourished by the discovery of Antiquity.

But it was mainly in Spain and Morocco that he forged his artistic identity.

Seville, Granada, Tangiers: each stop nurtured his eye, and Orientalism became a language that he appropriated with verve.

Regnault ventures into large-scale scenes, translating the light of these foreign lands with a vibrant palette, capturing the sublime in the dramatic tension of the figures he paints.

Salomé and L'Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Execution without trial under the Moorish kings of Gran ada) reflect this fascination with exoticism and restrained violence, where every movement is frozen in a rare intensity.

With his bold compositions and powerfully expressive figures, he seems to capture the soul of places, the brutality of the moment and the beauty of light, while foreshadowing the more radical painting that was to emerge at the end of the century.

On the eve of the 1870 war, just as his career was shaping up to be a triumph, he voluntarily enlisted in the Garde Nationale, an act that sealed his fate.

On January 19, 1871, he fell to Prussian bullets at Buzenval, aged just twenty-seven. His untimely death froze his work in an unfinished promise.

His name remains that of a virtuoso of dazzling talent, whose chromatic audacity and nascent modernity never had time to reach their full potential.

In just a few years, Regnault showed that he knew how to break free from academic dogma, and he will forever be remembered as the painter of an era that was both moving and tragic.

Focus on Salomé, Henri Regnault, 1870.

In 1870, Henri Regnault painted Salomé (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), a work that not only recreates the sensuality of the biblical character, but also places her in a darker context, where beauty becomes an accomplice to violence.

Salomé, though a mythological figure of seduction, here becomes the embodiment of icy sensuality, a being suspended between desire and pain, in a moment of pure dramatic intensity.

True to his bold approach, Regnault transforms this biblical scene into a kind of confrontation between eroticism and terror.

Salomé's very posture, frozen in a hypnotic dance movement, is enhanced by the brilliance of her drapery, where warm tones of red and gold seem almost to burn the canvas.

The light, playing on the reflections of her body, accentuates the sensation of contrast between the softness of the skin and the hardness of the message.

Everything in this work speaks of tension: the volumes of the body, enhanced by the light, the fixed expression, at once devoid of emotion and yet perceived as an act of violence.

This is no mere portrait of a woman; Regnault pushes the viewer to look beyond beauty, confronting him with the tormented soul of the character, while offering a fascinating vision of the ambiguity of desire.

Thus, far from being a simple image of seduction, Salomé becomes a tragic work where light and shadow intermingle, and where the viewer perceives the underlying dangers of a too-perfect universe.

Regnault succeeds in revealing this double face, that of beauty and menace, in a canvas of rare power.

Henri Regnault's influence on his era

Henri Regnault, in his time, embodied the archetypal painter whose imprint on the artistic scene went far beyond a simple aesthetic quest.

In the 1860s and 1870s, as art struggled between an academic heritage and the first influences of modernism, Regnault established himself as a resolutely audacious creator, transforming the representation of emotion and movement.

He departed from the conventions of his time, notably the pompous classicism that still dominated the artistic milieu, to venture into territories where the psychology of the character is just as primordial as the scene itself.

His compositions, marked by a palpable tension, brought a revival to genre and history painting, fields hitherto dominated by a more formal approach devoid of the psychological depth he infused.

In works such as Salomé and Le Bataille de Gravelotte, he sought to highlight beauty in a new, often more dramatic and tragic light, seeking to awaken in the viewer not only aesthetic admiration, but also a questioning of the human condition and its flaws.

In this respect, Regnault is part of an aesthetic evolution that undermines academicism, where protagonists are no longer simply depicted in idealized poses, but in moments of tension where emotion takes precedence over appearance.

This unique approach, blending the sublime and the dramatic, had a profound impact on his period, placing Regnault at the forefront of an art that, while remaining attached to tradition, ventured towards new forms of expression and perception of the human figure.

Henri Regnault's stylistic influences

In the early 1860s, Henri Regnault's work was still strongly influenced by academicism, particularly in his early historical compositions.

His admiration for Antiquity, the masters of the Italian Renaissance and Classicism is evident in his rigorous execution and meticulous attention to detail.

However, in the manner of Delacroix and theBarbizon SchoolRegnault's art gradually moved towards a more intense exploration of light and color effects.

This stylistic evolution was refined during his stay in Spain, where, struck by the works of Velázquez, he learned to render the human form with greater intensity, while approaching characters with a new empathy.

Following this trip, the painter, while remaining faithful to an academic compositional structure, sought to insert a more narrative and expressive dimension into his canvases.

He also borrowed from realist painting, adopting a more immediate approach to the subject and introducing elements of movement and dramatic tension.

This evolution, between the legacy of the classical masters and the emergence of a more direct pathos, crystallizes a reflection on the nature of beauty, which moves away from idealized representations to open up to the evocative power of reality.

His dedication to depicting Orientalist subjects enabled him to establish himself as one of the most talented Orientalist artists of his time, alongside painters such as Henri Pontoy and Émile Aubry.

Through these influences, Regnault, at the frontier of several styles, constructs a visual universe where the ideal is tinged with the complexity of emotion, oscillating between the academic tradition and the search for a more personal art, more rooted in the reality of the subject. 

His signature

Not all Henri Regnault's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of its signature:

Appraising your property

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