GUI Rochat - Professional Career in The Fine Arts

Professional Career in The Fine Arts

After completing a training program at Sotheby’s New York, he was sent as the director for the South-East to Houston, Texas in 1970/71, where he ran it’s gallery in the Galleria Post Oak. He was instrumental in selling several Post-Impressionist paintings which now form part of the Beck and Law Collections in the Houston Museum. Thereafter he was trained in the Old Master and 19th Century painting departments at Sotheby’s, London after which he entered their Old Master painting department in New York till 1974. He joined Philips, Son & Neale in 1979 as the Fine Art consultant and became president in 1981 at their New York location, the Rhinelander mansion on Madison Avenue, during which he catalogued the fine art from the estate of Elizabeth Fuller Chapman. He was given a one-man exhibition of his private collection of European art glass in the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1986 and was invited to write an article on a recently acquired large portrait of Louis XVI, an autograph version of the Versailles portrait by the painter Antoine-Francois Callet Antoine-François Callet. In 1989 he was appointed director of Fine Arts at Butterfield & Butterfield in San Francisco and became a vice-president in 1990. There he considerably increased the volume of sales and appraised the very important fine art in the Elise S. Haas estate, now in the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, which included the famous portrait of his wife in a blue hat by Matisse from 1905, Matisse’s portraits of Leo and Sarah Stein and the sculpture La Négresse Blanche by Brancusi. And he also catalogued the fine art in the estate of composer Edgard Varèse and Louise Varèse. He discovered works by such artists as Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy, Pierre Soulages and Amadeo Modigliani, hidden theretofore in Western collections. In 2005/6 he became Fine Arts consultant at DoyleNewYork, where again he made discoveries such as a rare drawing by Egon Schiele, now in the Neue Galerie museum in New York and an important small panel by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida circa 1900 of the beach at San Sébastian with the image of his wife in the foreground.