Ten works depicting landscapes, seascapes and scenes of Paris

Jean Hugo (1894-1984) was a close personal friend of The Countess of Avon. Born a great-grandson of writer Victor Hugo he was engrossed in a highly artistic environment from an early age highlighted by a childhood portrait by Boldini in 1898. A celebrated painter, often executed in small formats, many of his paintings are on permanent display at The Barnes Collection in Philadelphia and the Musée Fabre in Montpelier.

Lady Avon first met him in Paris before the Second World War and remembered him fondly, “A highly rated painter, inevitably he had done sets for the Russian Ballet and was part of the lively raffish group. I have a number of his tiny landscape watercolours and a charcoal drawing he did of me, which I kept in a drawer until long after, when my husband found it and liked it enough to get it framed and hung” (C. Eden, From Churchill to Eden, London, 2007, p. 69), presumably referring to lot 45, the evocative portrait of Clarissa at her most beautiful in pre-war Paris.