Eugène Secrétan

Pierre-Eugène Secrétan (1836, Saulx – 1899, Paris) was a French industrialist and art collector.

He timed the sale to coincide with the peak of the Exposition Universelle (1889), exhibiting the Eiffel Tower, which attracted many wealthy Americans.

A French-American bidding war during the auction on L'Angélus, a work by the popular French painter Jean-François Millet of the Barbizon school, forced the price up to a record-breaking amount of 553,000 francs by Antonin Proust, who was bidding for the Louvre.

[3] The provenance of the work reflects that Secretan owned the painting from the time it was first shown in 1865, and the American Art Association from 1889.

[6][7] With the proceeds from this sale, Secretan, an expert in metallurgy, paid his creditors and restarted his work in copper by making a deal with an English company and founded a factory in Dives-sur-Mer called "Elmore's French Patent Copper Depositing Company".