Charles Angrand

Charles Theophile Angrand was born on 19 April 1854 in Criquetot-sur-Ouville, in Normandy, France. Documented details of his early training are thin. Sources describe study at an art academy in Rouen and an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before he settled in Paris in 1882. No specific date for that attempt and no degree for Angrand is documented in the available record.

Angrand worked within the circle of painters, including Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who developed Neo-Impressionism, or Divisionism, in the 1880s, building landscapes and figure paintings from small, systematic strokes of pure color. He was a founding member of the Societe des Artistes Independants and its Salon des Independants, the exhibition that became the primary showcase for Neo-Impressionist painting. The National Gallery, London notes that he continued contributing to the Salon des Independants up to his death in 1926.

He later settled in Rouen, where he remained for the rest of his life. Charles Angrand died there on 1 April 1926.

Angrand has not attracted the kind of sustained critical literature built up around Seurat or Signac, and no verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. His standing rests chiefly on his role as a founding member of the Salon des Independants and his sustained participation in the Neo-Impressionist project, plus the presence of his work in institutional collections including the Musee d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago. One secondary source states plainly that no national or international honors are documented for him, consistent with a relatively quiet institutional profile compared with his better known Neo-Impressionist peers.

Angrand's market is thin relative to the core Neo-Impressionist names such as Seurat and Signac, with a comparatively small number of paintings and works on paper reaching public sale in any given year. His current auction record is La Moisson, an 1888 oil on canvas, which sold for USD 780,000 at Sotheby's New York on 19 November 2024. The same painting had also come to auction at Sotheby's New York in 2021, with one dealer database citing a price of about EUR 485,970 for that sale, though the exact realized price for the earlier sale is not independently confirmed from public auction-house records.

A market profile from HENI reports cumulative auction sales for the artist in the low millions of dollars, but the specific figures vary between different HENI-cited summaries and should be read as broad context rather than an audited series. One dealer summary places the broader trading range for his paintings and drawings from about EUR 60 to just under EUR 680,000.

No published catalogue raisonne for Charles Angrand has been identified in current research, and there is no evidence of a formally organized estate representing his work today. Paintings and drawings attributed to him circulate mainly through the secondary market, including specialist dealers such as Jill Newhouse Gallery in New York and the major auction houses. Because there is no catalogue raisonne, collectors should lean on exhibition history, in particular Salon des Independants records, along with museum publications and dealer expertise, to support provenance and attribution. Given the thin sales volume, any single auction result, including the current record for La Moisson, should be read as one data point rather than a stable trend line.