Art Palace Regained Portrait Called Fair Reflection Taken Decades Ago

The Palace of Arts, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, purchased a painting offered by the British company Artsonline from the collection of Count Oldenburg. This is a portrait called A Fair Reflection. The information is spread by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth of Georgia.

"With this purchase, Georgia regained the work, which was taken out of the country several decades ago. The precious canvas was brought by the Dadiani from Paris in his time and it was kept in the collection of Andria Dadiani in the Palace of Art (Andria Dadiani lived in the building of the current Palace of Art in 1903).

After the Soviet occupation, Georgian nobles took many things out of the country or sold them abroad for their livelihood. This is how the painting traveled from Tbilisi to Kiev and then to London. The work appeared at Christie's auction in 2005, but then the Georgian side could not buy it. From today, the portrait will be placed in the Palace of Arts.

The work is special and original. The oil portrait was painted by a 19th-century master, the French artist Charles-Louis Müller (1815-1892). Mueller was a famous portrait painter and decorator, nicknamed Mueller de Paris. He first studied at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, in the class of Baron Gross, and then moved on with Leon Cognie. The artist began exhibiting his own work at the Salon de France in 1834 and did not betray tradition until 1892. Especially noteworthy are the decorations on the ceiling and louvre of the Salon des Etats. "Mueller later worked with architect Hector Lefuel to create a new Louvre for Napoleon III," the agency said in a statement.