Clemente Pujol de Gustavino

Clemente Pujol de Gustavino, whose name also appears in the record as Climent Pujol de Gustavino, Clement Pujol de Guastavino, and Clemente Pujol de Guastavino, was a Spanish painter and printmaker born around 1850. Standard reference sources, including the Frick Art Reference Library's Spanish Artists index, the Art Renewal Center, and Wikipedia, converge on a life span of circa 1850 to circa 1905, but none give an exact birth or death date, and none document a specific place of birth or death.

He is described in reference sources as a painter, disciple of the School of Barcelona, and began his artistic training at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Barcelona, though the exact years of that study are not documented. In 1876 he moved to Paris, where he continued his training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Louis Nicolas Cabat and then under Jean-Leon Gerome, and where he is reported to have met the Orientalist painter Leon Bonnat. He took part in the Paris annual exhibitions, the Salon, from 1876 through at least 1905, showing works including El desden, La jugadora de manos, and Un amateur de Fayence. Later Salon appearances include Priere a Mosquee in 1888 and Depart pour la chasse in 1889. In 1889 he also showed Danse mauresque and other Orientalist paintings at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where sources report he received an official distinction, described in some accounts as an honourable mention and in others as a medal of honour.

Every source consulted treats him as a painter of the Orientalist current fashionable in late nineteenth-century Paris, working in subjects such as fortune tellers, mosque interiors, and Mediterranean coastal scenes, and signing his paintings C. Pujol. No source located gives a confirmed date, place, or cause of death; he is uniformly treated as deceased by around 1905.

No substantive critical essays or named-critic reviews in major art press outlets were located for this artist. Available commentary is limited to entries in standard biographical dictionaries and reference databases, such as the Frick Art Reference Library's Spanish Artists index, and to specialist writing on nineteenth-century Orientalist painting. The one point of documented recognition from his own period, the 1889 Exposition Universelle distinction for Danse mauresque, is itself recorded inconsistently, with sources disagreeing on whether it was an honourable mention or a medal of honour.

The documented auction record for Clemente Pujol de Gustavino is thin and inconsistent across houses and databases. The most fully documented sale, with title, price, house, and estimate confirmed against a primary lot page, is Village dans le sud, an oil that sold for EUR 875 against an estimate of EUR 400 to 600 at Osenat; the exact sale date is not confirmed in the sources reviewed. A secondary-market aggregator, Art.Salon, separately reports substantially higher results at Sotheby's, GBP 50,000 each for The Messenger and The Sultan and the Messenger in London in April 2020, and USD 27,500 for The Fortune Teller in New York in May 2019, but none of these carry a confirmed exact sale date, and a Sotheby's lot page for The Fortune Teller, with an estimate of USD 30,000 to 40,000, is marked as a closed auction with no published result, a discrepancy that cannot be reconciled with the aggregator's reported price. Separately, a Doyle auction catalog listing attributes a sale of USD 35,200 against an estimate of USD 20,000 to 30,000 to the artist, also a materially higher figure, but the source does not state the work's title or the exact sale date, so that result cannot be fully reconciled with the Osenat figure either. Retail dealer asking prices, such as a USD 48,000 listing for an unrelated Orientalist subject, reflect a dealer's ask rather than a market-clearing price and should not be read as auction results. Given these inconsistencies, no single figure can be confirmed as the artist's definitive auction record.

Research into this artist should begin by accounting for name variance: the same painter is catalogued across sources as Clemente Pujol de Gustavino, Climent Pujol de Gustavino, Clement Pujol de Guastavino, and Clemente Pujol de Guastavino, and as Pujol Gustavino, Climent (or Clemente) in the Frick's authority record. There is no catalogue raisonne and no certificate of authenticity program, so attribution depends on the signature C. Pujol, period exhibition records, and the judgment of the auction house or dealer handling a given work. The auction record itself is sparse and inconsistent between houses and databases, with several higher, aggregator-reported figures that could not be independently confirmed, so a single result, high or low, should not be read as establishing a reliable price level for the artist. No gallery or estate currently represents the artist; all documented market activity is secondary-market and dealer-driven.