A RARE SANDSTONE FIGURE OF GUANYIN

Provenance: collection of Walter Bondy. Walter Bondy (1880 - 1940), a Czech-German painter, literary critic and collector, came from the wealthy Bondy-Cassier family of industrialists. From 1898 to 1903 he studied at the Vienna, Berlin and Munich Academies of Art. After graduation he went to Paris, where he attended the Académie Colarossi and was an important member of Matisse School in the Café du Dôme. During this period, he clung to the painting style of Renoir and Manet, but later he painted mainly portraits in the style of the avant-garde German "New Objectivity". He is represented in galleries in Kassel and Nuremberg, and two paintings were also part of the Modern Gallery in Prague. Because of Bondy’s background, he also was a collector - his interests lay primarily in African masks, votive objects and Chinese porcelain. In 1923 he published a book on Kangxi porcelain, and from 1927 to 1930 he was editor-in-chief of the magazine The Art Auction, which he himself founded. As an adult Bondy lived mainly in Paris and Berlin, but Prague was briefly his home in the mid-1930s when he was forced to leave ahead of approaching Nazism from Germany.