DALLAS, TX.- Seven paintings by Lê Phô trace a remarkable artistic journey, from intimate flowers painted on silk to exuberant blooms rendered in richly worked oil. Together with Vu Cao Dam’s dreamlike image of a musician, they form the heart of an eight-work offering of Vietnamese modernism in Heritage’s Nov. 19 European Art Signature® Auction. The group joins works by Paul Gauguin, Camille Claudel, Albrecht Dürer, Bartolomeo Passerotti and John Constable in a sale that rewards close looking across five centuries of art.

“This group offers collectors a wonderful opportunity to follow Lê Phô’s development across several decades and to see his work in conversation with Vu Cao Dam’s,” says Marianne Berardi, Heritage’s Co-Director of European Art. “Both artists created deeply personal visual languages from their Vietnamese heritage and their experience of France.”

Trained at Hanoi’s École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, Lê Phô and Vu Cao Dam belonged to a generation whose work brought Vietnamese traditions into a sustained dialogue with European modernism. Both eventually settled in France, where their subjects continued to evoke the culture of their homeland.

The seven Lê Phô paintings span the late 1950s through the mid-1980s. Bouquet de fleurs, an oil on silk laid on board from his Romanet Gallery period, offers an intimate starting point. Later works reflect the brighter palette and expansive brushwork that developed following Lê Phô’s association with Wally Findlay Galleries, which began in 1963. Hollyhocks in a White Vase, Les amaryllis and Les iris reveal the expressive possibilities he found in a recurring subject, while Nature morte à l’anthurium dans un vase bleu et blanc makes a patterned vessel part of the interplay of color and light.

Vu Cao Dam’s Joueuse de lune, dated 1978, provides a lyrical counterpoint. A musician wearing a stylized áo dài holds a traditional moon lute against an expansive blue ground, accompanied by ethereal figures. Its dreamlike space reflects the artist’s admiration for Marc Chagall, later his neighbor in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, while its subject remains rooted in Vietnamese cultural traditions.

Another highlight arrives from nearly six decades in a New Orleans family collection: Gauguin’s Paysage en Bretagne, circa 1889. Acquired from Hammer Galleries in 1968 by Sunny and Roussel Norman and descending through their family, the drawing comes from the Collection of Linda Norman Friedman and Richard S. Friedman. Charcoal, watercolor and pen and ink turn the Breton countryside into interlocking fields, rounded trees and emphatic contours — a visual vocabulary closely related to Gauguin’s The Yellow Christ of 1889. Exhibited twice at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the sheet will be included in the forthcoming digital catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute.

Claudel’s Rêve au coin du feu brings an intimate sculptural encounter to the auction. Conceived between 1899 and 1905 and executed by 1937, the bronze and onyx work depicts a woman seated before a hearth, absorbed in quiet reflection. Numbered 24 from an edition of 65, it is fitted with an electric light to illuminate the fireplace. The composition belongs to the small-scale scenes through which Claudel asserted her independent artistic identity. Claudel’s sculpture is a highlight of the auction’s strong representation of women artists, which also includes works by Louise Abbéma, Yvonne Canu and Frida Rusti-Hoeck.

“There is a special excitement in encountering a familiar artist through a work that feels intensely personal,” says Seth Armitage, Heritage’s Co-Director of European Art. “Gauguin’s Breton drawing, Claudel’s contemplative figure and Constable’s freely brushed cattle study each bring us close to the artist’s thinking. Alongside Passerotti’s commanding portrait and Dürer’s extraordinary woodcuts, they offer collectors compelling examples of invention across very different periods and media.”

Passerotti’s Portrait of a gentleman with a letter presents the authority and psychological presence that made the artist one of Bologna’s leading portraitists. Recently recognized by Daniele Benati as a work by Passerotti from the mid-1570, the portrait conveys an animated sitter whose gesturing hand and refined black costume give him a striking immediacy.

Dürer’s The Life of the Virgin brings together 20 lifetime woodcuts in remarkable condition. Published as a complete sequence in 1511, the cycle translates sacred history into richly observed interiors and landscapes, combining domestic intimacy with the technical ambition that helped establish the woodcut as a major artistic medium.

Constable’s previously unpublished Study of standing cattle, circa 1810–15, captures a herd with broad, economical strokes of brown, cream, black and white. The oil sketch is painted on a portable millboard support, which connects it to the artist’s practice of painting directly from nature.

Further highlights range from the French countryside to Victorian gardens and postwar France. Julien Dupré’s In the meadow brings luminous color and richly varied brushwork to a pastoral scene, continuing the rural realist tradition of Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton. Arthur Herbert Buckland’s life-size Spring, an exuberant scene of young women surrounded by blossoming apple trees, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1896 when the artist was just 26.

Hubert Vos’s Still life with irises and Qing dynasty porcelain, dated 1909, reflects the artist’s encounters with China, where he painted Empress Dowager Cixi. Jean-Pierre Cassigneul’s Au bois of 1967 brings fashionable elegance to a racetrack scene, while Peter Vilhelm Ilsted’s The artist’s daughters in an interior, Liselund offers the quiet concentration of two girls reading. Raoul Dufy’s Mexican variations, painted in 1951, closes the group on a buoyant note, translating his encounters with musicians in the American Southwest and Mexico into animated line and color.