THIS intriguing full-plate daguerreotype by the photographer Camille Dolard (1810-84) was the toast of the photographic section of Baron Ribeyre/Millon’s sale of the Gerard Lévy collection at Drouot on December 20. The 6½ x 8½in (16.5 x 21cm) self-portrait of the photographer smoking from a hookah in an oriental interior (right), created c.1845, eclipsed its €40,000-60,000 estimate to sell for €152,000 (£126,670) plus 24% inc VAT buyer’s premium. It was bought by an American collector.
Dolard, who was born in Lons-le-Saulnier in 1810, was an early adopter of the photographic medium but from the late 1850s gradually abandoned it to devote himself to painting. The smoking self-portrait was one of a series of three, the others being a study as a Malade Imaginaire and a third as an Artist Painter, the latter now forming part of the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Fine Art.
Gérard Lévy, a Parisian art dealer and expert who died last year, was born in Casablanca and opened an Asian art gallery in Paris in the mid-1960s on the rue de Beaune. Known as ‘the man with the carnation’, a reference to the flower he sported in his buttonhole, Lévy counted many institutions among his customers and he advised both Jacques Chirac and André Malraux.