Emile Auguste Hublin

Emile Auguste Hublin was born on 2 July 1830 in Angers, in France's Anjou region. Biographical sources place his move from Angers to Paris in the late 1840s or early 1850s, ahead of his formal entry into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on 6 April 1855, at age twenty-four, where he studied in the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot, an academic painter and former pupil of Jacques-Louis David.

Hublin made his Salon debut in 1861 and continued to exhibit at the Salon de Paris through at least 1880, including a documented entry, Le Chemin du Marche, Finistere, at the 1878 Salon. His paintings, typically genre scenes of peasant children with baskets, market goods, or fruit, found a ready market among British and French collectors during his lifetime.

Hublin is treated as deceased in every art historical and market source consulted, but the exact date and place of his death are not documented. Gallery and reference sources uniformly hedge with "circa 1891," and Rehs Galleries states explicitly that "information about the exact date of his death is uncertain." No obituary, civil record, or contemporaneous press notice establishing a precise date or location has been located. Readers should treat 1891 as the best supported approximation, not a confirmed fact.

No verbatim critical review of Hublin's work from a named critic in a major outlet has been located in the available sources, so none is reproduced here. What can be said with confidence is that his genre subjects, peasant children, market scenes, and still life elements such as baskets of apples, were popular with British and French buyers in his own era, and that auction house cataloguing consistently situates him within the academic tradition associated with his teacher, Francois-Edouard Picot. Beyond that market-facing description, no scholarly or press assessment of his standing has been documented.

Hublin's auction footprint is that of a working, moderately collected Salon painter rather than a blue chip name. The most fully documented sale in the available record is A Beautiful Gift, sold through Bonhams, which realized USD 56,250 including premium; the exact sale date and location are not shown in the available lot record. A comparably sized result, Le Chemin du Marche, Finistere, realized EUR 56,700 at Christie's in 2022; without a confirmed exchange rate or sale date, it is not possible to say with certainty which of the two is higher.

Other confirmed results include a Bishop and Miller sale of Peasant Girl with Basket for 25,148 British pounds, and a 2025 Sotheby's sale of The Basket of Apples (Le Panier de Pommes) for USD 14,400. A separate Sotheby's lot catalogued under the artist's name, Le Gouter, carries no documented price in the sources reviewed.

Market aggregator databases report higher, less corroborated top sale figures for Hublin, ranging from about USD 212,500 up to an unsourced USD 317,000. One research pass attributed a title and house to the 212,500 figure, but a separate verification pass could not confirm any title, auction house, or exact date behind these numbers, so none can be treated as his confirmed auction record. Collectors should rely on the documented, titled sales above as the benchmark until a fully sourced higher result surfaces.

Hublin has no catalogue raisonne and no formal authentication body; attribution rests on signatures, provenance, and the research compiled by dealers such as Rehs Galleries. No gallery or estate currently represents him in the way a living artist's market would be managed; his work reaches buyers through auction houses including Bonhams, Sotheby's, Christie's, and regional UK salerooms. Museum holdings are limited to two identified UK institutions, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry and New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester, so museum validation is thin compared with better documented Salon contemporaries. Because his death date itself is unresolved in the public record, collectors should expect gaps in the documentary chain for individual works and should weight provenance and condition heavily when evaluating a purchase.