R.Green -European Old Master Paintings at

EUROPEAN OLD MASTER PAINTINGS

All paintings in this catalogue are for sale 147 New Bond Street, London W1S 2TS Telephone: +44 (0)20 7493 3939 Email: paintings@richard-green.com Contact information: page 153

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Cover detail: Aelbert Cuyp, Milking scene along a river, cat. no.9

EUROPEAN OLD MASTER PAINTINGS

FOREWORD

This catalogue celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of The European Fine Art Fair Maastricht, of which Richard Green Gallery was a founder member in 1988. Maastricht, the handsome city at the confluence of Holland, Belgium and Germany, has become the venue for the most highly regarded art fair in the world, with an unrivalled range of Old Master paintings on view. TEFAF draws together collectors, museum professionals, academics and dealers for a visual feast and lively discussion of the latest research and discoveries.

TEFAF was founded on the Dutch passion for seventeenth-century Golden Age paintings, an enthusiasm that has broadened over the years to embrace collectors from America and many other parts of the globe. The largest section of our catalogue is devoted to the genius of Dutch and Flemish masters, from a still life by Willem Heda, to a poetic landscape by Aelbert Cuyp, an exquisite portrait by the fijnschilder Caspar Netscher and a Guardroom scene by the Flemish Court painter David Teniers. National frontiers were no bar to talent, however, and among the Italian, French and British paintings in the catalogue is a portrait by a Dutchman, Corneille de Lyon, who worked for the French Court, and a splendid pair of views of Florence by an Englishman domiciled there, Thomas Patch. Francesco Guardi casts a mist of magic over his native city of Venice, while Jean-Baptiste Pater evokes an Arcadian, aristocratic France that never was, nor ever could be. The men who owned many of these paintings were equally international, equally pivotal figures in their day. The Teniers was once part of the legendary art collection owned by the Hope family of Anglo-Dutch bankers. The pair of paintings by Pater was treasured by John Pierpont Morgan, a financier who single-handedly saved the US economy on more than one occasion.

We owe a great debt, naturally, to the international group of scholars whose knowledge enriches this catalogue. I would like to thank Dr Hugh Belsey, Peter Bower, Dr Alan Chong, Sarah Cove, Dr Lloyd DeWitt, Sabine Craft-Giepmans, David Dallas, Sam Davidson, Dr Margret Klinge, Brian Lavery, Dr David Marshall, Pippa Mason, Fred Meijer, Jet Pijzel-Dommisse, Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg, Professor Nicola Spinosa, Peter Sutton, Mary Webster, Richard Wenger and Prof. Dr Ernst van der Wetering.

Richard Green

1

CONTENTS

Cat. No.

Artist / Title

DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

1

JACOB VAN HULSDONCK A still life of a basket of grapes and peaches

11

CASPAR NETSCHER Portrait of a lady

2

WILLEM CLAESZ. HEDA A still life of a blackberry pie

12

JACOB VAN WALSCAPELLE A still life of a melon, a peach, grapes

3

JAN VAN GOYEN A winter landscape with skaters

13

ADRIAEN VAN DER SALM The merchantman De Anna, a staten jacht

4

AERT VAN DER NEER A river landscape at sunset

14

5

JAN LIEVENS Portrait of a young man

JACOB BOGDANI A peacock, a cockatoo and other birds in a park A great curassow, a chough and other birds in a forest landscape

15

EDWAERT COLLIER A trompe l’oeil still life of documents

16

TOBIAS STRANOVER A great curassow, a silver pheasant and other birds in a landscape

17

JAN VAN OS Calm seas with fishing boats and a three-master

18

JACOBUS LINTHORST A still life of roses, peonies

19

JAN FRANS VAN DAEL A still life of a Fritillaria imperialis, roses, tulips

6

7

GERARD DONCK Portrait of Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy and Marritgen Pieters DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER A guardroom scene with tric-trac players

8

PIETER DE RING A still life of oranges, grapes

9

AELBERT CUYP Milking scene along a river

10

2

JACOB ISAACKSZ. VAN RUISDAEL A ruined castle gateway

Cat. No.

Artist / Title

Cat. No.

Artist / Title

ITALIAN PAINTINGS

BRITISH PAINTINGS

20

FRANCESCO SOLIMENA The Madonna and Child

26

ALLAN RAMSAY RA Portrait of Cecilia Craigie

21

GIOVANNI PAOLO PANINI Capriccio of Roman monuments with the Colosseum

27

ALLAN RAMSAY RA Portrait of Sir William Guise, 5th Bt.

28

THOMAS PATCH View of the Piazza della Signoria, Florence View of the Arno with the Ponte Santa Trinità, Florence

29

FRANCIS COTES RA Portrait of Mary Anne Layard

30

JOHAN ZOFFANY RA Portrait of Claud Alexander and his brother Boyd with an Indian servant

31

ROBERT SALMON An outward-bound, eighteen-gun merchantman at the ‘Tail of the Bank’

32

JOHN CONSTABLE RA A study of clouds, Hampstead Heath

33

CHINESE SCHOOL c.1870 – 1875 View of Shamian Island, Canton

22

FRANCESCO GUARDI Venice, the Piazza San Marco

23

PIETRO FABRIS View of the Bay of Naples from Posillipo

FRENCH PAINTINGS

24

25

CORNEILLE DE LYON Portrait of a young man JEAN-BAPTISTE PATER Fête champêtre with bathers before a fountain Fête champêtre with a musician and a statue of Venus

3

DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

B JACOB VAN HULSDONCK Antwerp 1582 – 1647

A still life of a basket of grapes and peaches on a wooden table, with an orange, plums, a maybug, a bluebottle and a Red Admiral butterfly (Vanessa Atalanta)

Signed lower right: IVHVLSDONCK.FE. (IVH in ligature) Oil on panel: 17 B⁄e x 23 B⁄c in / 43.8 x 59.7 cm Frame size: 24 B⁄c x 31 in / 62.2 x 78.7 cm Painted circa 1638–48 PROVENANCE:

The Earls of Mount Edgcumbe (label on the reverse: Oct 8th 1715 Lord Mt Edgcumbe gave / this to Jane Birch) Private collection, UK

Not many details about the life of Jacob van Hulsdonck are known. He was born in Antwerp in 1582, and is reported to have received at least part of his training in Middelburg. By 1608 he was a master-painter in Antwerp, where he lived in the same house from the time of his marriage in the following year until his death, thirty-eight years later.

Despite his long career, not many still lifes – as far as we know his only subject – by van Hulsdonck are known to us, far fewer than a hundred, but unrecorded examples such as the one discussed here turn up every now and then. More than half of van Hulsdonck’s known paintings are signed with his characteristic full signature in capitals, the I linked to the obliquely placed left leg of the H to make up the V and usually situated to the left or right on the table’s edge.

Some examples are signed with a monogram only, and only one dated painting is known thus far, an example of his earliest type of still life, painted in 1614: a banquet-piece, now in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. In such early works, the table is partly covered with a white cloth; all of his later still lifes are set on plain wooden tables of which the grain of the wood is rendered with a high degree of detail.

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Occasionally these tables are partly covered with a dark (greyish- or greenish-black) cloth.

Although, owing to the of the lack of dated works, it is di≠icult to establish a firm artistic chronology, in general it appears that those still lifes by van Hulsdonck in which the edge of the table is close to the lower end of the picture plane and in which the tabletop is shown from a fairly high viewpoint belong to his earlier production.

The side of the table is not shown in these still lifes. In what must be van Hulsdonck’s later works, some space is left under the table, usually one side of the table is shown, and the still life is viewed more frontally and in a slightly less rigid composition. Also, in the course of time the artist’s colouring appears to have become less subdued and his backgrounds became less dark. Meticulous attention to detail is found throughout van Hulsdonck’s oeuvre and this may in part account for the restricted number of pictures he appears to have produced.

With its low viewpoint, light background and part of the table’s legs showing, the still life discussed here can be assigned to the artist’s later period of activity, roughly the late 1630s or the 1640s. Several closely related examples can be pointed at, among them one in the Metropolitan Museum in New York1 .

Van Hulsdonck’s choice of subjects was restricted: usually one basket or one bowl of fruit dominates his composition, occasionally with a small vase of flowers to one side. Some paintings of single vases of flowers by him are known. Van Hulsdonck appears to have relished rendering similar combinations of grapes, plums, apricots, cherries and lemons and sometimes pieces of a pomegranate time and time again. His mastery in rendering the softness and delicacy of the skins

7

A still life of a basket of grapes and peaches on a wooden table, with an orange, plums, a maybug, a bluebottle and a Red Admiral butterfly (Vanessa Atalanta) of the fruit and the di≠erence of texture and colouring of the various types of fruit and their foliage has only rarely been surpassed by other artists. In one of his publications, the art historian Laurens J Bol christened Ambrosius Bosschaert the Younger ‘the Master with the Flies’ since in the majority of that artist’s still lifes a bluebottle is emphatically present. Van Hulsdonck could justly be bestowed with the same epithet. In his still lifes, too, a bluebottle is often an eyecatching motif. The maybug is a frequent guest on his tables as well, as are several species of butterflies. Dew-drops, like the ones on the leaf lying in front of the basket, are also found in virtually all of his works, as another testimony of his mastery of textures.

Often, early seventeenth-century still lifes contain a certain ‘message’, but the iconography of van Hulsdonck’s works – if any – is certainly not a vital element. The presence of insects, associated with decay, like blemishes on some pieces of fruit and holes gnawed in some leaves, remind us of their temporary state. With such details, the artist expressed a vanitas notion, but particularly in this late example he has reduced those features to a minimum, very much secondary to his relishing representing this earthly abundance for the viewer to enjoy.

Fred G Meijer, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague

1

Metropolitan Museum, New York, inv. no. 64.294, oil on panel, 19 B⁄c x 25 B⁄c in / 49.8 x 64.8 cm, signed. Other examples include a painting o≠ered at Sotheby’s London, 12th December 2002, lot 13, colour illus. (see on-line database RKDimages record no. 108518) and one o≠ered at Sotheby’s London, 11th April 1990, lot 25, colour illus. All three are slightly larger than the still life discussed here.

8 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

9

C WILLEM CLAESZ. HEDA Haarlem c.1596 – 1680 Haarlem

A still life of a blackberry pie, a nautilus cup, a salt cellar, a façon-de-Venise flute, a silver ewer and pewter plates on a partly-draped table

Oil on panel: 28 x 36 in / 71.1 x 91.4 cm Frame size: 34 F⁄i x 44 D⁄e in / 87.9 x 113.7 cm Painted circa 1645–49 PROVENANCE:

G Arnot, 1926 Ten Cate collection, Dieren Nathan Katz, Dieren; from whom purchased on 8th August 1940 by Dr Hans Posse for the planned Führermuseum, Linz, inv. no.1312 Transferred to the Munich Central Collecting Point by Allied Forces (Mü. 4064) on 13th July 1945 Transferred to the Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezirk (SNK) on 15th April 1946 Restituted to Nathan Katz on 13th November 1947 Schae≠er Galleries, New York, circa 1948; from whom acquired by the parents of the Count and Countess van Limburg Stirum-Luden EXHIBITED:

Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum, The Painters of Still Life, January– February 1938, no.16 New York, Julian Levy Gallery, Trompe l’Oeil, March 1938 LITERATURE:

Birgit Schwarz, Hitlers Museum: Die Fotoalben Gemäldegalerie Linz, Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2004, p.117, no.V/4; illus. p.249.

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Willem Claesz. Heda was born in Haarlem, son of the Haarlem town architect Claes Pietersz. The family was well o≠. The painter adopted the name Heda from his mother’s side of the family. His uncle was the painter Cornelis Claesz. Heda (c.1566–1619). Nothing is known about Willem Heda’s artistic training, but this uncle may have been his first teacher. From 1631 his name can be found in the Haarlem guild records, but already in 1620, in a Haarlem document, Willem Claesz.

Heda is referred to as a painter. In 1628, the town chronicler Samuel Ampzing, in his description of Haarlem, praised Heda’s still lifes with victuals (‘banketten’) in one breath with those of Pieter Claesz. No examples that can be dated before 1629 are known, however. There is evidence that Heda did draw and paint religious subjects about 1626–28 – a tryptych from 1626 is known. He was also active as a portraitist; with a group portrait of a family from 1647. Between 1637 and 1652 the artist served repeatedly on the committee of the painters’ guild. He trained several pupils, among them his son Gerret Heda (1622/24–1649). As well as being a painter, Heda owned a brewery later in life.

Willem Claesz. Heda’s earliest known still life is a vanitas piece from 1628 (Museum Bredius, The Hague). Heda often dated his still lifes, which provides us with a clear notion of his artistic development.

From 1629, he produced many ‘monochrome banquet’ pieces of a very high quality. His work from the 1630s, and especially that from the first half of that decade, is the most refined. During the 1640s, routine seems to have taken over to some degree, but his work still is of a very high quality. As far as we know, Willem Claesz. Heda painted still lifes until some ten years before his death, but from the mid 1650s his advanced age clearly a≠ected the quality of his work, which declined considerably, as did his production. He died in Haarlem in 1680.

11

A still life of a blackberry pie, a nautilus cup, a salt cellar, a façon-de-Venise flute, a silver ewer and pewter plates on a partly-draped table

Heda most often produced still lifes on mid-sized panels, up to about 19 x 31 in / 50 x 80 cm, but occasionally, perhaps upon commission, he reverted to larger formats, such as the panel presented here. During the period in which this still life must have originated, the second half of the 1640s, Heda’s lighting is rather even, and the background is quite bright, usually with a concentration of light falling behind the most dense part of the still life, which makes the objects stand out against the background. The artist relished rendering sparkling highlights on the shiny surfaces of metal and glass. Here, that e≠ect is the strongest on the spouted ewer and on the silver salt in the centre, as well as on the nautilus cup, lying half-hidden on the wrinkled napkin.

Heda also took pride in rendering various textures within his still lifes: the hard metal and glass (but di≠ering in texture from each other), the soft pie crust, the creased, bleached linen.

Willem Claesz. Heda appears to have kept several objects as studio props, since they recur in a number of his still lifes in various positions.

This is true for all of the objects in this composition. The spouted ewer is one of Heda’s feature eye-catching props. It turns up for the first time in a large still life from 1638 and it is still present in one of Heda’s last dated still lifes, painted in 16651 . The fact that this ewer was a studio prop is further borne out by the fact that it also features in still lifes by Gerret Heda and Maerten Boelema de Stomme from the 1640s2 . The nautilus cup lying in the centre of the composition is also a favoured object in Heda’s still lifes. It had made its first appearance in 1640 and features prominently very regularly until the last years of Heda’s painting days3. Silver salts such as the one shown here are also among Heda’s favourites. This particular model – with a straight edge – appears rarely in Heda’s own still lifes from the 1640s, but regularly with Gerret Heda and Maerten Boelema, who first painted it in 1644 4 .

It reappears in several of Heda’s still lifes from the 1650s, however.

The present undated work may well be the first in which Heda painted it himself. The ‘flute’ wineglass, the silver spoon with a handle in the shape of a hoof, and the knife with the chequered handle, too, are recurring motifs during most of Heda’s career, while fruit pies such as this one can be found in numerous of his still-life paintings from the early 1630s into the 1660s.

12 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Often, particularly for his smaller works, Heda ‘zoomed in’ on his still lifes, thus creating a rather intimate atmosphere, which gives the viewer the impression that he has the laid table all to himself. For larger compositions, Heda often stepped back somewhat, allowing more room around the still life, and a more spatial e≠ect. This is also the case with the still life discussed here. The intimacy – which is certainly not lost – is combined with a certain elegance, not least as a result of the fact that the artist shows the white napkins entirely.

Their whiteness enhances the careful way in which they have been draped over and on top of the table. Interestingly, the creased one in the centre gives a prominence to the sheath it supports, which enhances the angle under which that object has been placed, thus rendering extra depth to the composition.

It seems likely that, with this still life and others like it, Heda intended to o≠er an intriguing image of objects that do not only look deceivingly real, but that make us pause and notice them, appreciate them and consider them, where in daily life they might have gone unnoticed. Additionally, despite the abundance of the display, contemporary viewers may well have recognised allusions to moderation: the tall wine glass has been filled moderately and a modest piece has been cut from the pie for consumption.

Fred G Meijer

1

The first: NRA Vroom, A Modest Message as Intimated by the Painters of the ‘monochrome banketje’, 2 vols., Schiedam, 1980, vol. 2, no. 359, the second Vroom 1980, vol. 2, no. 391.

2 Such as Vroom 1980, vol. 2, nos. 292, 315, and 321 (Gerret Heda) and 15 (Boelema). Several of the other pictures showing this ewer that Vroom included as by Gerret are in fact by Willem Claesz. Heda, or are copies, however.

3 Its first appearance is in a dated still life from 1640, sold at Christie’s Amsterdam, 12th June 1990, lot 238, colour illus. (not in Vroom 1980).

4 It first appears in a still life from 1644 by Maerten Boelema de Stomme, who worked in Heda’s studio, now in the Royal Museums for Fine Arts, Brussels, inv. no. 190 (Vroom 1980, vol. 2, no.

23).

D JAN VAN GOYEN Leiden 1596 – 1656 The Hague

A winter landscape with skaters on a frozen river outside the walls of a town

Signed with monogram lower right: vG (in ligature) Oil on panel, circular: diameter 5 B⁄e in / 13.2 cm Frame size: 8 B⁄e x 8 B⁄c in / 21 x 21.6 cm PROVENANCE:

Possibly Baron Léopold Roslin d’Ivry (1839–1883), Château Hénonville; his estate sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 7 th May 1884 (1,550 francs to Malinet) Private collection, Europe LITERATURE:

Possibly Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. VIII, London 1927, p.298, no.1178a Possibly Hans-Ulrich Beck, Jan van Goyen 1596–1656, vol. II, Amsterdam 1972–3, p.9, no.15a, illus.

The period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century can be termed a ‘Little Ice Age’ in northern Europe, with especially hard winters in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The Dutch made a virtue of necessity by becoming expert skaters, playing colf (the forerunner of golf) on the ice, transporting goods by sled, holding frost fairs and fishing through the ice on their many waterways.

Scenes of winter entertainment became a popular genre, pioneered by painters such as Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634) in the first decade of the seventeenth century and developed by artists like Aert van der Neer (1603/4–1677).

Jan van Goyen painted winter scenes throughout his career, beginning in the 1620s with views densely packed with crisply-painted, brightlycoloured skaters, influenced by the work of his Haarlem teacher Esaias

14 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

van de Velde (1557–1630). These are very often roundels, paired with a roundel of a ‘Summer’ subject in the Flemish tradition of making sets of paintings of the seasons or months. The use of roundels becomes less frequent later in van Goyen’s career. The present work, because of its exquisite fluency of figure style and more silvery tonality, seems to date from the late 1630s or early 1640s. With a delicate flick of the brush tip and restrained local colour, van Goyen can conjure up the stance, physical characteristics and even the personality of the people on the ice, whether they embrace winter cheerfully, like the skater in the foreground, or with grim resignation, like the old woman hawking her wares on the left.

The painting can be compared to the Winter scene with Huys te Merwede, dated 1638, in the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden1 which has a similar, prominent skater in the foreground with a pole in his arms. It also might be compared to the Winter scene dated 1642 on loan to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague2 , which appears to show the same city wall with the round tower, but seen from the opposite direction. The spacing of the figures is also more typical of van Goyen’s mature work, with a gap at the centre of the composition which leads the eye along a diagonal into the far, misty distance.

Van Goyen was a restless artist, travelling all over the Dutch Republic and into the Spanish Netherlands and Germany, recording churches, towns, manor houses and fortifications in rapid annotations of black chalk. With these aides-mémoires he would construct, as here, a composition that combines a precisely observed topographical feature in an imaginary setting that evokes so perfectly the pleasures, labours and atmosphere of winter.

1

Leiden, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Jan van Goyen, 1996–97, pp.104–5, no.20, illus. in colour; detail illus. in colour on the cover.

2 From the collection of the Dienst voor ‘s Rijks Verspreide Kunstvoorwerpen im Haag, inv. no.NK2512; see Beck op. cit., vol. II, p.30, no.60, illus.

Actual size

15

E AERT VAN DER NEER 1603/4 – Amsterdam – 1677

A river landscape at sunset with a willow stump, fishermen drawing in their nets and windmills beyond

Signed with double monogram AV DN Canvas: 21 x 28 in / 53.5 x 71 cm Frame size: 28 B⁄e x 35 in / 71.8 x 88.9 cm Painted circa 1650

Nothing is known of his artistic training. He practised as a landscape painter, but it was not until the mid-1640s that he found his personal style in extraordinarily poetic landscapes of sunrise and sunset. Van der Neer is unrivalled as a painter of moonlight in Dutch art, while his winter scenes, often set at dusk, rank in critical estimation with those of Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634).

ENGRAVED:

By Thomas Major (1714–1799), London, 1751 (Soleil levant, 13 B⁄c x 18 in) PROVENANCE:

Probably JW van Arp; his sale Amsterdam, 19th June 1800, lot 120 (110 florins to van der Schley) Van der Schley, Amsterdam JHT Jervoise; sale Stockholm, 7 th March 1911, lot 183, illus.

Leonard Koetser, London; by whom sold to the late John A Viccars, London EXHIBITED:

London, Leonard Koetser, Autumn Exhibition, 1965, pp.16–17, no.8, illus.

LITERATURE:

Probably C Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, London 1927 (English edn.), vol. VII, p.409, no.338 W Schulz, Aert van der Neer, Doornspijk 2002, p.276, no.605

Aert van der Neer was born in 1604 at Gorinchem, a town on the river Waal east of Dordrecht; he had settled in Amsterdam by 1628.

16 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

The present painting, probably made around 1650, shows van der Neer’s exquisite sensitivity to nuances of light and composition. The scene is a spring dusk on a river flanked by windmills and houses. The setting sun casts its final intense rays on the water, while the pink afterglow warms the underbelly of the clouds. In the left middleground, a pair of fishermen in a boat takes in their net; further up the bank sits a solitary fisherman with a line, tranquilly waiting for a bite.

The eye is led into the landscape by a pleasurably complex alternation of light and dark elements. Van der Neer is a master of the telling silhouette. The pollarded willow in the centre foreground provides a filigree of dark branches through which we enjoy the focal point of the composition, the clouds broiling up along the distant riverbank, edged with light, and reflecting in the glassy river. The cottages and forest on the right hand side of the painting are swiftly losing substance as the sun sets and the cows are only defined by the merest traces of light around their contours.

Aert van der Neer’s poetry of dusk, the light ‘entre le chien et le loup’, was much admired in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where his work was avidly collected. The present painting was engraved by Thomas Major in London in 1751. His work was particularly emulated by painters of the East Anglian school, influencing the sunset oil sketches of John Constable (1776–1837) and John Crome’s (1768–1821) picturesque use of willows silhouetted against brightness.

17

F JAN LIEVENS Leiden 1607 – 1674 Amsterdam

Portrait of a young man with a white falling ruff and a black coat and cloak, possibly Prince Rupert of the Palatine (1619-1682)

Oil on canvas: 26 x 20 in / 66.2 x 51.6 cm Frame size: 35 B⁄c x 30 in / 90.2 x 76.2 cm Painted circa 1631–32

Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau 1983, vol.

VI, no.2329, illus. (as Isaac de Joudreville) J Bruyn et. al., Stichting Foundation Research Project: a Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Volume II 1631–1634, Dordrecht 1986, pp.784–7, no.C 74, illus. (as possibly by Jan Lievens)

PROVENANCE:

Mrs Whatman, Vinters, near Maidstone, Kent; her sale, Christie’s London, 16th June 1900, lot 65 (as Rembrandt; £620 gns (£651) to Parker) P & D Colnaghi, London (as Rembrandt) N Steinmeyer, Cologne (as Rembrandt) Frederic Theodore Fleitman (d.1975), New York Minusio, Switzerland Private collection, Switzerland LITERATURE:

Wilhelm Bode, Hofstede de Groot, no.559, illus. (as Rembrandt) Wilhelm R Valentiner, Klassiker der Kunst: Rembrandt, Stuttgart 1908, p.67, illus. (as Rembrandt) (see also Supplements of 1921, 1923 and 1931) Abraham Bredius, Werksverzeichnis von Rembrandt, 1935 (English edn.

1937), p.154 (as Rembrandt) Bauch, Rembrandt, no.350 (as Rembrandt) Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Gesamtkatalog des beschreibenden und kritischen Verzeichnisses der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. VI, Esslingen 1915, p.319, no.762 (as Rembrandt) Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. VI, London 1916, p.357, no.762 Wilhelm Bode, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Werke Rembrandts (as Rembrandt) Jakob Rosenberg, Rembrandt, London 1964 (as Rembrandt)

18 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

This sensitive Portrait of a young man has been confirmed as a painting by Jan Lievens independently by three leading scholars of his work: Prof. Dr Ernst van der Wetering of the Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project; Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg, former Director of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel1; and Dr Lloyd DeWitt, Curator of European Art, Art Gallery of Ontario. Long in the shadow of Rembrandt, to whom this portrait was attributed for much of its history, Lievens has recently emerged as a highly various and talented artist in his own right, through exhibitions such as the National Gallery, Washington DC’s Jan Lievens: a Dutch Master Rediscovered, 20082 .

Jan Lievens was born in Leiden in 1607 and at the age of eight became the pupil of the Leiden painter Joris van Schooten (c.1587–c.1653). From circa 1617–20 he studied in Amsterdam with the history painter Pieter Lastman. Lievens returned to Leiden as an independent master and from 1625 to 1632 worked closely with fellow townsman Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), although there is no evidence that they shared a studio. Constantijn Huygens, a Renaissance man and Secretary to the Prince of Orange, noted the genius of both precocious young men, which owed ‘nothing to their teachers but everything to their own aptitude’3.

The three scholars referred to above place this Portrait of a young man towards the end of Lievens’s years in Leiden, before he departed

19

Portrait of a young man with a white falling ruff and a black coat and cloak, possibly Prince Rupert of the Palatine (1619-1682)

for London in 1632. Prof. Dr Ernst van de Wetering writes: ‘the painting (which I had the opportunity to study closely in the restoration workshop of Mr Bijl in Alkmaar) gave me strong associations with the Portrait of Constantijn Huygens by the young Jan Lievens (1628–29) (Sumowski Vol. III no. 1286). The delicate dealing with details in the face and the characteristic, as it were floating, fleshtones in the face, the tendency to a slightly greyish tonality, this all reminds me of Jan Lievens. Although I am aware of the fact that Jan Lievens’ style was constantly changing and that we do not know who may have worked in his most direct environments I believe that the execution (especially of the nose and the mouth) is so superb, that the painting can only be attributed to a painter as gifted as Jan Lievens’4 .

Louis. DeWitt notes of the present portrait: ‘The likeness is as finely rendered as in those three other portraits, and exhibits Lievens’s typical use of red in the corner of the eye, the touches of grey along the nose and eyebrow, and the use of scratch marks in the hair that run against its flow, all seen in those three works and in others by Lievens. The alternation of fat and thin paint in the details of the ru≠ is typical of Lievens’s work, as is the virtuoso handling of the blackon-black pattern in the sleeve, where the vertical stripes are laid over horizontal bands of shading or reflection, which appears again in his portrait of Huygens that was executed slightly earlier (c.1628–29) than the present work and which still betrays Lievens’s earlier, more energetic application of paint’.

The painting’s qualities were long obscured beneath a thick veil of discoloured varnish. Restoration by Martin Bijl has revealed the beautifully gradated tones of the flesh, the tactile quality of the falling ru≠ and the intelligent, rather soulful quality of the sitter: a subtle understanding of character which is also apparent in Lievens’s Portrait of Constantijn Huygens (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

Constantijn Huygens, who was delighted with his portrait, was probably influential in securing for Lievens the commissions to paint the exiled Bohemian princes, who were being tutored in Leiden.

DeWitt adds: ‘the importance of this portrait, if it does show Prince Rupert, is considerable. It bears the peculiar facial features of the prince seen in the Rembrandt-workshop double-portrait of Rupert and a tutor posing as Eli and Samuel now at the Getty Museum, and in Lievens’s portrait of his brother Charles Louis (also in the Getty) in the pendant. These matching features, specifically the similar structure of eyelids, the long narrow nose, full bottom lip and substantial chin, and especially the brown eyes (his brother Charles Louis seems to have had blue eyes, according to the Van Dyck portrait of 1637 in the Musée du Louvre), indicate that the sitter is Prince Rupert. The style of the present portrait points to a date of around 1631’ which could well match Rupert’s age of twelve.

Dr Lloyd DeWitt suggests that the portrait may depict Prince Rupert of the Palatine (1619–1682), third son of Frederick V, Elector Palatine and his charming ‘Queen of Hearts’ Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England. Elected to the throne of Bohemia, Frederick had disastrously lost his country at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, becoming known as the ‘Winter King’ for the brevity of his reign. His family went into exile in The Hague, reliant on handouts from their Dutch and English relatives. The angelic-looking but unruly Rupert, nicknamed by his family Robert le Diable, grew up to be a brave, complex, clever man, a hero of his English uncle’s Civil War, a talented artist and scientist.

Lloyd DeWitt comments that the present work is one of the few portraits done by Lievens in Leiden, besides those of Constantijn Huygens and Rupert’s elder brother Prince Charles Louis of the Palatine (1617–1680) with his tutor Wolrad von Plessen, signed and dated 1631 (J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). Lievens’s Boy in a turban, c.1631 (private collection, New York), also probably shows Charles

20 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg dates this portrait to 1632, Lievens’s last year in Leiden. He writes: ‘the sensitive modelling of the face and the regular rounded execution of the eyes, eyebrows and lids can be studied for the first time in his smaller and very di≠erently conceived portrait of Constantijn Huygens from 1628–29. Later Lievens developed this manner in life-size figures, especially in 1631. Comparable is the double portrait of Prince Charles Louis of the Palatine with his tutor Wolrad von Plessen. These paintings with their restrained colourism do not represent the end of Lievens’s production in Leiden.

A more mature period characterized by a richer colourism followed.

The Boy in a turban in a New York private collection reflects this and the present portrait, with its rich and differentiated flesh tones, also belongs to this phase’.

Schnackenburg adds: ‘another argument speaks also for a dating at the very end of Lievens’s beginnings in Leiden. The portrait scheme is taken from Rembrandt’s early portrait painting. Very close are Rembrandt’s oval-shaped bust portraits without hands from 1632, especially his Portrait of a young man with a white falling ruff in the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, dated 16325. It seems that Jan Lievens with this formal portrait sought competition with Rembrandt for the last time in his career’.

This painting was until 1900 in the collection of the Whatman family at Vinters, their estate near Maidstone in Kent. The Whatman fortune was built on paper. James Whatman I (1702–1759) had invented wove or vellum paper, which gave a much smoother surface than laid paper, and which was to become the paper of choice for aristocratic correspondents, watercolourists such as Thomas Girtin and JMW Turner, fine engraved books (including William Blake’s Songs of Innocence) and government papers in Britain and America. It is not certain at what point the Lievens portrait (then thought to be by Rembrandt) entered the Whatman collection, but James Whatman II (1741–1798), who greatly developed his father’s business, was also a keen patron of the arts.

Information based on separate reports by Prof. Dr Ernst van de Wetering, Dr Lloyd DeWitt and Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg

1 2 3 4 5

The painting will be included in the catalogue of Dr Schnackenburg’s forthcoming monograph, Jan Lievens, Freund und Rivale des jungen Rembrandt.

Travelling to Milwaukee Art Museum and the Rembrandhuis, Amsterdam 2009; exh. cat. by Arthur Wheelock et. al.

Quoted by Arthur K Wheelock, Jr. in ‘Jan Lievens: Bringing New Light to an Old Master’ in exh. cat. National Gallery, Washington 2008, p.10.

Letter of 15th February 2005.

(Bredius/Gerson 1969, p.561, no.155; Corpus II, 1986, no. A 60; Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, Bestandskatalog der Gemäldegalerie, Niederländer von 1550 bis 1800, Aachen/München 2006, pp. 210, 211.

G GERARD DONCK (Active 1630 – 1640)

Portrait of Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy (c.1604–1664), city organist of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and his wife Marritgen Pieters

Signed and dated on the virginals: GDonck Ao 163[3] Oil on panel: 18 D⁄e x 24 D⁄e in / 47.7 x 62.9 cm Frame size: 26 x 33 in / 66 x 83.8 cm PROVENANCE:

Wayne Charfield-Taylor (1883–1967), who served as Under Secretary of Commerce and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D Roosevelt; thence by inheritance in a private collection, USA EXHIBITED:

On long-term loan to the Indianapolis Museum of Art until 2010 LITERATURE:

Ruud van der Neut, ‘Ontdekkingen op TEFAF’, Tableau, Feb–March 2011, pp.72–74, illus. in colour Sabine Craft-Giepmans, ‘De Amsterdamse organist Nicolaes Willemsz.

Lossy (ca. 1604–1664), door Gerrit Donck geportretteerd’, Amstelodamum, 98-3, 2011, pp.122–129; illus. in colour p.122

The sitters in this portrait have recently been identified by Sabine Craft-Giepmans of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie as Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy (c.1604–1664), from 1639 city organist of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and his wife Marritgen Pieters.

Lossy came from a musical dynasty that held posts as city musicians over several generations; like many such families, they were Catholic.

His grandfather Jan Willemsz. Lossy (Dordrecht c.1545–Haarlem c.1629) was a well-known Haarlem musician, the teacher of the famous organist and composer Jan Pietersz. Sweelinck (1562–1621). Nicolaes’s father, Willem Jansz. Lossy (Haarlem c.1580–Amsterdam 1639), was an organist and composer for the flute. On 25th May 1604 Willem

22 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

married Haesgen Willems, daughter of Willem Aertsz., city organist of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. On Willem Aertsz.’s death in 1607 he inherited his father-in-law’s post, as his son Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy was to do on his own death in 1639.

Nicolaes married Marritgen Pieters on 24th November 1626 in the Nieuwe Kerk, where his father was organist. The elegant clothing that the couple wears suggests a date for the portrait in the early 1630s, a few years earlier than Nicolaes’s promotion to city organist in 1639.

It perhaps was painted to mark Nicolaes’s attainment of a post as organist of the Nieuwezijds Chapel. At his father’s death,

23

Portrait of Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy (c.1604–1664), city organist of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and his wife Marritgen Pieters

Nicolaes succeeded to his job at the Nieuwe Kerk at the handsome salary of 450 guilders a year. He also earned money as a merchant and iron trader, enabling him in 1638 to buy a garden near the Amstel outside the Regulierspoort. In 1650 Nicolaes bought a garden on the Oetgensdwarspad and in 1662 a parcel of land south of the Spiegelpad. On 11th January 1645 the great organ of the Nieuwe Kerk was destroyed in a fire. Nicolaes supervised its rebuilding, which took ten years. The new organ was approved by Lossy and the remarkable blind composer and carillon player from Utrecht, Jacob van Eyck (c.1590– 1657). He described Lossy as ‘a clever, fast and very good organist’ and paid homage to him in a composition named ‘Lossy’.

Nicolaes Lossy and his wife are seated in an interior with a black and white tiled floor. He rests his hand on a muselar virginal, while Marritgen is seated beside a table covered with an oriental carpet on which is a shawm, song books and sheet music. The virginal resembles early seventeenth century instruments by the famous Ruckers family in Antwerp; compare, for example, the Muselar Virginal dated 1622 by Johannes Ruckers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. no. 11.176.1. The instrument is supported by an unusual stand and has yellow-paper decorations derived from Balthasar Silvius’s Variorum protractionum … (Antwerp and Paris, 1554). The manuscript leaf visible on the table contains an anonymous canon for two voices, tenor and soprano, with the tenor leading. A canon is a strict and learned musical form, in which the two parts use the same material as in a traditional round. The musical instruments, song books and sheet music underscore the pervasive theme of music1 . Since the form of the canon depicted in the present work is perpetual, it could also signify stability, unity and constancy in marriage. Prof. Davitt Maroney has even proposed a transcription of the canon in the painting. The lid of the virginal is decorated with the coat of arms of the Lossy family between grisaille images of a couple making a sacrifice – possibly to Hymen, the god of marriage – and a soldier.

Very little is known about the artist Gerard Donck, who signs his paintings either as GDONCK or with the monogram GD. No documents have been discovered about his life and the only evidence of his work is his signed paintings and prints. He is sometimes called

24 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Gerard van Donck, but on insu≠icient evidence. His earliest dated work is of 1630 and latest 1640. He painted market scenes and street vendors (see for example, The vegetable seller, Sotheby’s New York, 12th January 1995, lot 104; and Peasant selling eggs, Christie’s London, 9th July 1993, lot 164); high life genre scenes (see sale Koller, 13th November 2000, lot 1049) and small scale portraits (see for example The portrait of Jan van Hensbeeck and his wife, Maria Koeck, with an infant in a landscape, National Gallery, London, inv. no.1305). The style of Donck’s portraits resembles that of Thomas de Keyser, Hendrick Pot and Pieter Codde (see especially Portrait of a family in an interior, Sotheby’s New York, 17 th October 1997, lot 78), so that it has been assumed he worked in Amsterdam and possibly Haarlem. He was also active as a printmaker and illustrator. Donck engraved or provided the designs for most or all of the illustrations in the Amsterdam playwright and composer JH Krul’s songbook Eerlycke Tytkorting (The Honest Pastime) (Haarlem 1634), one of which is inscribed: G Donck in Venter [sic].

These engravings were reprinted in JH Krul’s De Pampiere Wereld (Amsterdam 1644). The connection with songbooks, as well as the instruments that appear in Donck’s portraits, suggest that he delighted in music and the company of musicians.

Information based on the article by Sabine Craft-Giepmans of the RKD and an essay

by Peter C Sutton, Executive Director of the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut

1

On the theme of music in Dutch painting and portraiture, see P Fischer, Music in Painting of the Low Countries in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Sonorum Speculum, nos. 50- 1, Amsterdam 1972; and exh. cat. The Hague, Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder Galleries and Antwerp, Herrenhuis Museum, Music & Painting in the Golden Age, cat. by Edwin Buijsen et al. 1994.

H DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER Antwerp 1610 – 1690 Brussels

A guardroom scene with tric-trac players

Signed lower left: D.TENIERS.FE /AN (in ligature) 1647 Oil on copper: 15 D⁄e x 20 B⁄i in / 40 x 51 cm Frame size: 22 F⁄i x 27 in / 57.5 x 68.6 cm PROVENANCE:

Jan Bisschop (1680–1771), Rotterdam; Kabinet Bisschop, Rotterdam, 1768, no.227 in JW Niemeijer’s 1981 catalogue; Purchased 1771 with the Bisschop Collection by Adrian Hope (1709– 1781) and his nephew John Hope (1737–1784), Amsterdam and London; his youngest son Henry Philip Hope (1774–1839); by whom loaned to his brother Thomas Hope (1769–1831) for the Flemish Picture Gallery, Duchess Street, London in 1819; bequeathed in 1839 by Henry Philip Hope to his nephew Henry Thomas Hope (1808–1862), London and Deepdene, Surrey; by descent to his widow Adèle Hope-Bichat (d.1884), London and Deepdene; bequeathed to her grandson Lord Francis Hope Pelham-Clinton-Hope, later 8th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne (1866–1941), Deepdene and Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire; sale of eighty-three pictures to Mr Asher Wertheimer, New Bond Street, London for £121,550 on 26th July 1898 Ludwig Neumann, 11 Grosvenor Square, London; his sale, Christie’s London, 4th July 1919 (£1,522.10 to Sulley & Co.); by inheritance in a UK private collection

26 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

EXHIBITED:

London, British Institution, 1818, no.69 (lent by Henry Philip Hope) London, British Institution, 1855, no.75 London, South Kensington Museum, 1868 London, Royal Academy, 1881, no.61 (lent by Mrs Hope) London, South Kensington Museum, 1891, no.61 LITERATURE:

J Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch and Flemish Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. III, London 1831, pp.428–9, no.636 GF Waagen, Kunstwerke und Künstler in England, vol. II, Berlin 1838, p.135 GF Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, vol. II, London 1854, p.119 RS Gower, Great Historic Galleries of England, vol. IV, London 1884, no.20 The Hope Collection of Pictures of the Dutch and Flemish Schools with a Description Reprinted from the Catalogue Published in 1891 by the Science and Art Department of the South Kensington Museum, privately printed, Chiswick Press (Folio), London 1898, pl.LXI A Graves, A Century of Loan Exhibitions 1813–1912, vol. III, London 1914, pp.1289 and 1297 JW Niemeijer, ‘De kunstverzameling van John Hope (1737–1784)’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 1981, vol. 32, p.127 ≠.

M Klinge, ‘David Teniers der Jüngere als Zeichner. Die Antwerpener Scha≠enszeit (1633–1651)’, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen Jaarboek, 1997, pp.150–152 D Watkin and P Hewat Jaboor, eds., Thomas Hope: Regency Designer, New Haven and London 2008, appendix, p.504

27

A guardroom scene with tric-trac players

In the summer months of 1835 the Director of the Art Gallery of the Royal Museum in Berlin, Gustav F Waagen, was visiting the most important art collections held by museums, the nobility and private citizens in England, among them the famous Hope Collection. Filled with admiration he wrote: ‘I find constantly fresh causes for astonishment at the abundance of works of art in this country, thus I have lately become acquainted with a real museum of art in the house of Henry Thomas Hope, Esq.’. He lamented that he no longer had the opportunity to meet John Hope (1737–1784), the real founder of the outstanding collection, who lived as a wealthy business man in Amsterdam and The Hague: ‘a gentleman distinguished for his acquirements and for his enthusiasm for the arts1 . During his visit, on seeing Teniers’s painting A guardroom scene with tric-trac players with the pendant Soldiers smoking, Waagen recognised the great artistic quality of the painter’s work and showed his appreciation with the following words: ‘The pictures, of the best time of Teniers, have all the charm of that cool, harmonious union of colours, and that light and spirited touch, in which he has no equal’2 .

David Teniers the Younger, one of the most important and successful genre painters of the seventeenth century, came from an Antwerp family of artists. After an apprenticeship with his father, the history painter David Teniers the Elder (1582–1649), which left no noticeable influence on his son, he was accepted in 1632/33 into the Antwerp Guild of St Luke. From this year Teniers signed and dated his paintings and in the 1630s, initially under the influence of Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6–1638), emerged with a very original conception of the genre theme, which in the 1640s he developed to its artistic peak. In 1637 Teniers married Anna, the wealthy daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), thereby coming into closer contact with Rubens and the Brueghel family, and in 1642 at the latest was able to move with his family into the magnificent house De Meireminne near St Jacob’s Church. From 1645/46 he bore the honourable o≠ice of Deacon of the St Luke’s Guild.

1647, the year in which A guardroom scene with tric-trac players was painted, denotes a unique turning-point in Teniers’s life and the high esteem in which he was held as an artist, owing to his meeting

28 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

with the newly appointed Spanish Governor of the Southern Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614–1662), the brother of Emperor Ferdinand III. It was in the house of the Archbishop of Ghent, Antoine Triest (1576–1657), an eminent collector and art connoisseur, that Leopold Wilhelm saw for the first time paintings by David Teniers3.

The Archduke was so enthralled by the ‘pauern histori’ for the most part painted from life, with many figures both delightful and gallant, that he took the painter into his service, immediately commissioned paintings for himself and his Imperial brother and in 1650 appointed Teniers as his Court Painter in Brussels and later as Ayuda da Camera (Gentleman of the Bedchamber). With the relocation of home and workshop in 1650/51 from Antwerp to the Court capital of Brussels, where the painter would work and live with his family until his death in 1690, the great phase of Teniers’s artistic creativity began as Court Painter in the service of the Spanish Governors Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and later Don Juan of Austria.

From the beginning of his artistic activity in Antwerp, Teniers repeatedly painted amusing scenes of dice-, tric-trac- or card players deeply concentrating on the game. He achieves in this way a clarity of composition, an intensity of expression in face, gesture and bearing and a coolness in the beauty of colour rendering in the chiaroscuro of the merely implied dusky space. As Waagen had already remarked during his visit to the Hope Collection, A guardroom scene with tric-trac players of 1647 already shows all these qualities in a masterful fashion.

Teniers paints the main scene on a large scale in the foreground, while in a space to the rear further figures are playing cards near a fireside.

The tric-trac board lies on a round table, at which the two adversaries, an older man seated and an elegant soldier standing, both watching the other closely, start the last game, with an eye for an eye so to speak. It is the moment of decision. A tense silence prevails – also in the faces of the two watching the game of chance transfixed, not knowing whom Fortune will favour. The few still life objects placed about the room, such as the tankard or the discarded pieces of armour very delicately reflecting the light, even intensify this calm.

In complete contrast to Brouwer, who relies on a satirical interpretation and the impact of blatant emotion, Teniers captures a human

dimension in gesture and play of facial expression which illustrates the diverse characters of the players and the bystanders.

As early as the beginning of the 1630s and above all during the entire period of his creative activity in Antwerp, an abundance of sketches was made which documents Tenier’s intensive study of nature. He sketched people at their activities, in their behaviour, movements and ways of expression in order to arrive at this naturalness or, as expressed by Roger de Piles, verité in the representation. In 1647, the year our painting was created, the last before the peace agreement that ended the Thirty Years’ War, Teniers painted several pictures with scenes of soldiers, in 1648 too on commission for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. Studies of figures were made for these paintings also, of which two sketches are preserved in the British Museum in London4 .

Dr Margret Klinge

1

Waagen 1838, vol.II, p.135; Waagen 1854, vol.II, p.112. The most detailed examination, appraisal and appreciation of the far in excess of 100 years’ existence of the Hope Collection is by JW Niemeijer, 1981, pp.127–232.

2 Waagen 1838, vol. II, p. 145. ‘These, originating from the best period of Tenier’s paintings have captured the complete charm of those cool, harmonious combinations of colours, that delicate, inventive brushstroke, so much his own’; Waagen 1854, vol. II, p.119.

3 M Klinge, David Teniers d. J. – Alltag und Vergnügen in Flandern “es seint lauter pauern histori”, exhibition catalogue David Teniers der Jüngere 1610–1690 – Alltag und Vergnügen in Flandern, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, 2005, p.30 ≠.

4 Klinge 1997, p.148 ≠. illus. 35 and 36.

I PIETER DE RING Leiden or Ypres c.1615 – 1660 Leiden

A still life of oranges, grapes, a rummer of wine, a kometenglas of ale, a crab and an oyster on a pewter dish set on a tabletop covered with a blue cloth

Signed lower right with a ring Oil on panel: 17 F⁄i x 13 F⁄i in / 44.8 x 34.6 cm Frame size: 23 B⁄e x 19 B⁄c in / 59 x 49.5 cm

the Latinised form of his name P. Ab Annulo. Also, he repeatedly used a gold ring by way of signature, occasionally in combination with a written signature. This ring, usually tucked onto the flank of the displayed still life, is a simple model, inset with a small stone.

Painted circa 1655–59 PROVENANCE:

Private collection, UK Phillips, Son & Neale, London, 23rd February 1976, lot 63 Richard Green, London, 1976 Kurt J Mullenmeister

Pieter de Ring was born in Leiden, or possibly at Ypres, where his parents came from and where his older brother was born. Reputedly, he started his career as a mason. Houbraken reported from hearsay that an employer paid for the lessons that he took from Jan Davidsz. de Heem1 . If this is true, de Ring would have had to go to Antwerp for his training, where de Heem had settled by 1636, but he has not been traced in any record there. Whatever the case, de Ring was clearly influenced by de Heem’s still lifes from the late 1640s and early 1650s. Pieter de Ring was one of the founding members of the Leiden painters’ guild in 1648 and worked there until his death. His burial in the Pieterskerk was recorded in September 1660. His earliest known dated work (indistinct, 1645 or 1647) combines a Haarlem (Heda) idiom with Leiden (Dou) lighting2 . Some younger Leiden still-life painters, notably Harmen Loeding, Johannes Hannot and Nicolaes van Gelder, were clearly influenced by de Ring and were perhaps his pupils. In the past, the works of these artists have often been confused.

Pieter de Ring signed many of his works in the ordinary way (in full or with a monogram) and signed his last known work in 1660 with

30 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

If Pieter de Ring did not go to Antwerp to receive tuition from de Heem, it is uncertain how precisely he could have come into contact with that artist’s works. However, the latter’s fame had certainly spread outside of Antwerp and there is some evidence that de Heem was selling works to collectors in Holland by 1650. Consequently, de Ring could also very well have seen work by de Heem in his own surroundings. Unfortunately very few dated works by de Ring have come down to us, so it is di≠icult to analyse the development of his oeuvre in detail. In any case he had fully developed his style and technique by the mid-1650s and it must be said that although he was already active during the late 1640s, this mature style cannot be seen independently from de Heem’s work from the first few years of the following decade. In view of de Ring’s early death in 1660, this also means that the greater part of his oeuvre, as we now know it, was produced within less than ten or even seven or eight years. In view of the artist’s meticulous technique, it is not surprising that his total extant oeuvre comprises no more than a few dozen paintings at most.

Notwithstanding de Heem’s substantial influence, Pieter de Ring must have been a great talent and his work possesses a strong degree of individuality. While de Heem preferred horizontal compositions for his smaller still lifes most of the time, de Ring appears to have opted mainly for vertical arrangements and it would appear that he tried to overrule de Heem in terms of opulence. De Ring’s still lifes, like the one discussed here, often appear to be filled to the brim, without, however, giving an impression of being overcrowded. This, de Ring attained by his subtle use of light. His chiaroscuro is usually

31

A still life of oranges, grapes, a rummer of wine, a kometenglas of ale, a crab and an oyster on a pewter dish set on a tabletop covered with a blue cloth stronger than de Heem’s and while the latter already during the late 1640s often chose lighter backgrounds, those of de Ring are mostly kept fairly dark. Like his great example, de Ring had clearly mastered the subtle rendering of various textures, as is also evident from this still life. Apparently e≠ortlessly, he combined the hardness of the glass, of the pewter dish, and of the oyster’s shell (each a di≠erent kind of hardness, however) with the soft textures of the fruit and the foliage, while the translucence of the white grapes plays an important role. And underneath there is the slick fabric of the table cloth, perhaps a heavy silk. It might have made de Ring’s still lifes, most of which include a well-rendered table cloth, the more appealing to the wealthy Leiden cloth merchants who were among his prospective customers.

Although this still life is probably not filled with any deep-digging admonitions, it may not be entirely without intrinsic meaning. The victuals shown here were certainly not part of Holland’s everyday menu at the time, so the association with luxury and wealth is obvious. The rummer was a very common type of wine glass, and it has been filled modestly and the lemon has been inserted to temper the somewhat bitter taste of the wine. The beer glass – a so-called kometenglas – too, has not been filled to the brim3. But while de Ring seems to have referred to temperance, he will not have critised his viewers for enjoying the luxury of a painting like this, which to its first owners as well as to present-day viewers provides an intriguing illusion of an imagined reality in paint.

Fred G Meijer

1

A Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., The Hague, 1753.

2 Christie’s Amsterdam, 18th May 1988, lot 163, colour illus.

3 The kometenglas owes its name to the decorations in the shape of (or recognized as) comets.

Such glasses were not uncommon in Dutch households, in view of the fact that fragments regularly appear among household waste in excavations.

32 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

J AELBERT CUYP 1620 – Dordrecht – 1691

Milking scene along a river

Signed lower right: A. cuijp Oil on canvas: 36 D⁄e x 47 in / 93.3 x 119.4 cm Frame size: 48 x 58 in / 121.9 x 147.3 cm Painted circa 1650–55 ENGRAVED:

By W Unger, 1912 (for the Lepke sale) PROVENANCE:

Charles, 15th Earl of Shrewsbury (1753–1827), Alton Towers, purchased with the advice of the art dealer Michael Bryan; by inheritance to Bertram, 17 th Earl of Shrewsbury (1832–1856); his Executors’ sale of the contents of Alton Towers, Christie’s London, 6th July 1857, lot 204 (Morning, 565 guineas to Emery; described as having a pendant, Evening, lot 2051); Charles Scarisbrick; his sale, Christie’s London, 10th May 1861, lot 228 (£420 to Ripp); CJ Nieuwenhuys; his sale, Christie’s London, 17 th July 1886, lot 62 (£525 to Meyer, Berlin); Eduard Weber, Hamburg, by 1887; his sale, Lepke, Berlin, 20th February 1912, lot 276, accompanied by a print by W Unger (36,000 marks to Sedelmeyer, Paris); K Halberstock, Berlin, by 1929; D Katz, Dieren, by 1936; Schae≠er Galleries, New York (according to the 1942 exhibition); returned to Nathan Katz, Dieren; his sale, Paris 7 th December 1950, lot 17 (2,100,000 francs to Paul-Louis Weiller) Paul-Louis Weiller (1893–1993), France; by descent

34 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

EXHIBITED:

Hamburg, Kunsthalle, 1887, cat. no.28 Amsterdam, Muller, 1912, cat. no.6 Amsterdam, Arti et Amicitiae, 1938, cat. no.23 Providence, RI, Rhode Island Museum, Dutch Painting in the 17 th Century, cat. by Wolfgang Stechow, no.9, illus.

San Francisco, Golden Gate International 1939–1940, Masterpieces of Five Centuries, cat. no.73 Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts, Masterpieces of Painting, 1942, cat. no.12 New York, Schae≠er Galleries, 1942 LITERATURE:

Charles Blanc, Le trésor de la curiosité, Paris 1858, vol. 2, pp.129, 191 Gemälde alter Meister der Sammlung Weber Hamburg, Lübeck 1887, no.28 Karl Woermann, Wissenschaftl. Verzeichnis der älteren Gemälde der Galerie Weber in Hamburg, Dresden 1907, no.276 Aelbert Cuyp: Originalabbildungen nach seinen vorzüglichsten Gemälden und Handzeichnungen, Haarlem 1904, pl.17 C Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, London 1909, vol.

2, no.367 (with incorrect provenance) Sedelmeyer Gallery, Paris, Illustrated Catalogue of the Twelfth Series of 100 Paintings by Old Masters, 1913, pl.2 Art News, vol. 35, 14th August 1937, p.15, illus.

HP Bremmer, ‘Melktijd door Aelbert Cuyp’ in Elsevier’s geillustrated maandschaft, Hbl. Beeld Kunsten, vol. 24, 1948, pp.263–266, illus.

Stephen Reiss, Aelbert Cuyp, London 1975, pp.207, 212 (as on the market in 1956; wrongly identified as from the Slingeland sale) Alan Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meanings of Landscape, dissertation, New York University, 1992, pp.472–73, no.C75

35

Milking scene along a river

Aelbert Cuyp found special artistic inspiration in scenes of young women milking cows in verdant pastures. All aspects of milking fascinated Cuyp, not just the smooth coats of the cows, but the dress and glance of the milkmaid, and details such as the brass vessels. The artist frequently returned to certain subjects over the course of his career, constructing images in very di≠erent styles, lighting schemes and settings. But paintings of cattle and of milking in particular mark important points in his career. As a young artist, Cuyp borrowed the thickly brushed monochromatic palette of Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), but often took up subjects that did not interest the older artist, for example, quiet scenes of a woman milking a cow. This motif appears as early as a painting dated 1639 in Besançon2 . In the mid-1640s, Cuyp

The landscape background supports the central theme. Two men tend cattle. Various boats sail by on the calm river that stretches across the composition. These details remind us that a city is not far away, although we cannot actually see a town along the horizon. A seventeenth-century viewer might have recalled that Holland’s dairy industry was the world’s best. Land reclaimed from the sea provided fertile grazing: milk was easily transported to urban dwellers, while cheese could be exported to countries throughout Europe. This in itself was a triumph of modern technology: land drainage created polders while a system of waterways brought the necessary fresh water for animals and irrigation.

discovered the warm, orange-tinted glow of Italianate landscapes painted by Jan Both (c.1618–1652) and Claes Berchem (1620–1683), and adapted scenes of animal husbandry to this style. All are evident in the present painting.

The issue was especially important in Aelbert Cuyp’s native town of Dordrecht, which had been inundated by a catastrophic flood in 1421, the Saint Elizabeth’s Day Flood. It took centuries to reclaim the surrounding land, and Dordrecht residents were especially proud of the fact that their region had come back to life. A painting completed by Cuyp just before the present example shows a cow and a milkmaid with Dordrecht just behind (The large Dort in the National Gallery, London).

Reproductions cannot indicate the wide variation of scale in Aelbert Cuyp’s oeuvre, which ranges from diminutive pictures on oak to extremely large paintings on canvas. One early work which focuses on a cow and a milkmaid (John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota) is impressive in size and demonstrates the artist’s ambition to create monumental images. The present painting is an expansion of these aims.

The Milking scene along a river is ambitious in size and composition.

The surface of the painting is dominated by a large cow being milked by a maid wearing a straw hat. Nearby are two brass milk jugs (one equipped with a funnel) and a yoke to help her carry the vessels. The cow fills the pictorial space in a way rarely encountered in Cuyp’s oeuvre – or in seventeenth-century Dutch painting as a whole. The hide, horns, and eyes of the beast are rendered with convincing precision through a network of broadly brushed translucent strokes. At the same time, the artist does not add distracting details (as for example Paulus Potter did). Rather, the surface of the animal has a pleasing consistency of texture even as the colour and light shifts subtly.

Indeed the surface of the cow becomes a landscape in itself.

36 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

One of the most direct comparisons to this painting, already alluded to, is Paulus Potter’s even larger painting of a young bull of around 1647 (Mauritshuis, The Hague). As in Cuyp’s painting, the bull nearly fills the pictorial space, compelling the viewer’s undivided attention and banishing the landscape to a supporting role. Otherwise the paintings are utterly di≠erent: Potter’s bull is virile and aggressively male, while Cuyp’s cow is docile and complacent. Potter calls attention to flies and dung in his painting, but Cuyp’s painting is serenely and calmly beautiful.

The audacious composition and large scale of Milking scene along a river suggest that it was intended as a grand gesture. Not only experimental in layout, the painting elevates what had been a common theme in Dutch art and a favoured subject of Cuyp. Now monumental, overwhelming, and almost abstract, the Dutch milk cow is celebrated in paint3.

Milking scene along a river

There are few signposts in Cuyp’s chronological development, as he only dated paintings early in his career, from 1639 to 1645. This painting was probably made around 1650 to 1655, as it shares stylistic similarities to a double equestrian portrait of Cornelis and Michiel Pompe van Meerdervoort (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) which can be dated on topographical and genealogical evidence to around 16534 . The signature on the New York painting is very close to that on the present painting.

A drawing in black chalk with touches of grey wash (J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, inv. 86.GG.672) is close in composition to the milkmaid. However, there are subtle di≠erences, for example, in the shape of the hat, the gaze of the woman, and the position of the cow’s legs. One explanation for this is that the drawing is a sketch from nature upon which the present painting is based; variations crept in as the painting developed. However, while the drawing seems to be by Aelbert Cuyp, its exact function is unclear, and it is possible that it is based on another drawing made from nature, or in fact on Cuyp’s own paintings. For example, the same milkmaid occurs in paintings clearly earlier than the present work (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; and State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg). Another painting with the same milkmaid is by a follower of Cuyp (Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam); and yet another by a later imitator is in the Detroit Institute of Arts5. The varying details among the paintings and the drawings do not point to a clear chronological development. If nothing else, this group demonstrates how Aelbert Cuyp used a particular motif over many years and also encouraged his students to take it up.

Dr Alan Chong, Director of the Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore

Aelbert Cuyp, The large Dort, c.1650.

The National Gallery, London.

1

2 3

4

Aelbert Cuyp, A milkmaid, c.1642-46, black chalk, graphite and grey wash, 4 D⁄e x 5 BD⁄bg in / 12.1 x 14.8 cm.

J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

5

In the 1857 auction catalogue, this painting was described as having a pendant, a painting of a bull with herders (Limburgs Museum, Venlo), but this is unlikely since that work is smaller (77 x 106.5 cm), on panel rather than canvas, and significantly earlier in date. In his catalogue of Cuyp’s work, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot confused the provenance of this painting with another milking scene along a river, in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

And other examples in private collections. See Reiss 1975, nos. 1, 2 and 43.

The author catalogued this painting, based on an old photograph, in 1992 as a workshop production (Chong 1992). Close inspection of the work in 2009 revealed that it was an authentic work by Aelbert Cuyp from about 1650.

The artist made a journey up the Rhine to Elten and Nijmegen in 1652. One of the boys portrayed in the equestrian portrait died in November 1653, which provides an approximate date for the painting.

All illustrated in Reiss 1975, nos. 55 to 57. Stephen Reiss (p. 90) correctly noticed a discrepancy in the dates of the Dublin painting and the Getty drawing (which does seem to be later than the Dublin painting); this led him incorrectly to de-attribute the painting in Dublin.

39

BA JACOB ISAACKSZ. VAN RUISDAEL Haarlem 1628/9 – 1682 Amsterdam

A ruined castle gateway, probably the archway of Huis ter Kleef near Haarlem

Signed in monogram lower right: JR Panel: 10 H⁄i x 14 D⁄e in / 27.6 x 37.5 cm Frame size: 16 B⁄c x 20 B⁄c in / 41.9 x 52.1 cm Painted circa 1650–1655 PROVENANCE:

LITERATURE: st

Sir Francis Cook, 1 Bt., Visconde de Monserrate (1817–1901), Doughty House, Richmond, Surrey, by 1901; Sir Frederick Cook, 2nd Bt. (1844–1920), Richmond; Sir Herbert Cook, 3rd Bt. (1868–1939), Richmond; Sir Francis Cook, 4th Bt. (1907–1978), Richmond; from whom acquired by Nathan Katz, Dieren, summer 1939; sold through Walter Andreas Hofer to Herman Goering, 1940; by whom sold through Hofer for RM 250,000, along with eight other paintings, to Philipp Reemtsma, Hamburg, in September 1940; recovered by Allied Forces in November 1946 from Haus Neuerburg, Munich and sent to the Munich Central Collecting Point (no.40520); given over to the Nederlands Kunstbezit, The Hague, 1947; by whose authority sold at Frederik Muller & Cie., Amsterdam, 11th–18th March 1951, lot 746; Pieter de Boer, Amsterdam; from whom acquired in 1952 by Herr Hans Gompertz, Rio de Janeiro; by inheritance to his wife Olga Gompertz Gevert, Rio de Janeiro; from whom acquired by a South American private collector in 1968 EXHIBITED:

Kunsthandel Pieter de Boer, Amsterdam, Summer Exhibition of Old Master Paintings, 4th July–24th August 1952, no.47

40 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

An Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at Doughty House, Richmond, belonging to Sir Frederick Cook Bart., Visconde de Monserrate, London 1907 and 1914, p.24, no.117, in the Long Gallery C Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. IV, London 1912, p.242, no.767 JO Kronig, A Catalogue of the Paintings at Doughty House, Richmond, and Elsewhere in the Collection of Sir Frederick Cook Bt., vol. II, Dutch and Flemish Schools, London 1914, p.95, no.353, illus.

J Rosenberg, Jacob Ruisdael, Berlin 1928, no.480 KE Simon, Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin 1930, p.36 (updated and revised version of 1927 doctoral dissertation) [MW Brockwell], Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at Doughty House, Richmond, Surrey, in the Collection of Sir Herbert Cook Bt., London 1932, p.43, no.353, in the Long Gallery N MacLaren, revised and expanded by C Brown, National Gallery Catalogues: the Dutch School 1600–1900, London 1991, vol. I, pp.393–394, note 7, under no.2562 S Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, New Haven and London 2001, p.96, no.72, illus.

S Reuther, Die Kunstsammlung Philipp F Reemtsma, Berlin 2006, pp.41, 43, 150 NH Yeide, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection, Dallas 2009, pp.208, 419, no.A1533, illus.

41

A ruined castle gateway, probably the archway of Huis ter Kleef near Haarlem

Jacob van Ruisdael, the nephew of Salomon van Ruysdael (after 1603–1670), was perhaps the most brilliant and versatile of Dutch landscape painters. He portrayed the gentle countryside round his home town of Haarlem, German hills, Norwegian waterfalls and haunting snowscapes, each work exquisitely attuned to the e≠ects of climate and light.

The present painting was made in the first half of the 1650s, when Ruisdael was still living in his birthplace of Haarlem. Seymour Slive considers that it depicts the ruined gateway of the Huis ter Kleef, a castle north of Haarlem, by comparison with a drawing by Jan van de Velde of circa 1618–20 (Teyler Museum, Haarlem) which shows the gate from the opposite direction1 . Huis ter Kleef was the headquarters of Don Fadrique de Toledo, son of the infamous Duke of Alva, instrument of Spanish repression in the Eighty Years’ War. Don Fadrique captured Haarlem after a fierce seven-month siege in 1572–3. The castle was destroyed in 1573 and only partly rebuilt in 1634. Ruisdael painted a superb panoramic view of the ruin with Haarlem beyond in the second half of the 1670s (Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris)2 .

Even when working on a comparatively small scale, as here, there is a monumentality and poetry to Ruisdael’s paintings. The ruined gateway is haloed by shadowed trees, which in turn are haloed by brisk white cumulus clouds, tearing o≠ to reveal patches of blue sky. Ruisdael worked from the background forwards, with successive applications of paint from dark to light, leaving the highlights and sta≠age until last. The shapes and shifting colours of the trees, particularly the light filtering through the group of trees to the right, are described with extraordinary sensitivity and realism. A solitary figure is framed in the arch, walking with his dog along the lonely track. The ruin seems to be a poignant reminder of the Dutch struggle for independence, finally achieved only a few years before this picture was painted, by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. It may also serve as a comment on the futility of all human ambition, as the severe lines of the gateway soften and crumble back gently into the embrace of the natural world which surrounds it.

42 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Jacob van Ruisdael, A ruined castle gateway, c.1650.

The National Gallery, London.

Ruisdael made a larger version of this view (18 B⁄e x 25 B⁄e in / 46.7 x 64.5 cm), which is in the National Gallery, London3. Slive dates it like the present work, circa 1650, but states that ‘it is arguable that [the present picture] precedes the larger version’4 . The National Gallery picture has a looser arrangement of trees and a more di≠used cloudscape.

1 2 3 4

Slive, op. cit., pp.95–6.

Ibid., pp.83–84, no.59, illus. in colour.

Slive pp.95–6, no.71, illus. in colour.

Slive p.96, under no.72.

The Cook Collection The collection formed by Sir Francis Cook, 1st Bt., Visconde de Monserrate (1817–1901) was one of the finest of the nineteenth century.

Francis Cook entered the textile firm founded by his father after travelling in the Near East and Europe. In 1849 he bought Doughty House on Richmond Hill and in 1855 the quinta of Monserrate near Cintra, where he built a Moorish-style palace. From 1869 Francis was head of Cook, Son, & Co. which traded finished silk, linen, wool and cotton all over Britain and the colonies. Reputed to be one of the three richest men in England, Cook was created a Baronet in 1886, a year after he married (as his second wife) Tennessee Claflin, former clairvoyant, stockbroker and firebrand American feminist.

In the late 1850s Cook began collecting classical sculpture, but owned no significant pictures until 1868, when he began to be advised by Sir John Charles Robinson (1824–1913), ex-curator of the South Kensington Museum. By 1876 Cook owned 510 major works. His collection grew to include, among many other masterpieces, van Eyck’s Three Marys at the Sepulchre (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam); Velásquez’s Old woman cooking eggs (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh); Antonello da Messina’s Christ at the Column (Musée du Louvre, Paris), Clouet’s Portrait of a lady (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) and Metsu’s Woman at her toilet (Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, CA). In 1885 a 125ft Long Gallery was added to Doughty House to display the burgeoning collection, which Cook generously made available to scholars.

Further important paintings were added by Sir Francis Cook’s grandson, Sir Herbert Cook, 3rd Bt. (1868–1939), notably Rembrandt’s Portrait of a boy (Norton Simon Foundation) and Titian’s Portrait of a lady (‘La Schiavona’) (National Gallery, London). The fortunes of Cook, Son, & Co. declined in the 1930s and forty Dutch pictures were bought by Katz of Dieren in 1939. More paintings were sold after Doughty House su≠ered bomb damage in 1944. Sir Francis Cook’s great-grandson, also Francis, the 4th Baronet (1907–1978) moved to Jersey around 1950 taking the nucleus of thirty paintings from the collection which had been reserved for him. Among them was Nicolas Maes’s Group portrait, the masterpiece of his later career (with Richard Green in 2005; private collection).

BB CASPAR NETSCHER Heidelberg c.1636 – 1684 The Hague

Portrait of a lady at her toilet

Signed and dated lower left: C. Netscher/1669 Oil on panel: 18 D⁄e x 14 B⁄c in / 47.5 x 36.9 cm Frame size: 28 B⁄c x 24 in / 72.4 x 61 cm PROVENANCE:

J Kleinenbergh, Leiden; his deceased sale, Leiden, 19th July 1841, lot 176, 6,600 florins to Christianus Nieuwenhuys Baron Lionel de Rothschild (1808–1879), his inventory and supplement pp.79, 1r Alfred de Rothschild (1842–1918), his deceased inventory, 1919, p.45 Lionel de Rothschild (1882–1942), his deceased inventory, 1942, p.27 Edmund de Rothschild (1916–2009) Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd., London, 1946; from whom acquired by a UK private collector; by descent to his stepchild LITERATURE:

J Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, Supplement, Edinburgh 1842, p.538, no.3 Division of the property of the late Baron Lionel de Rothschild between Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild, Leopold de Rothschild, Esq. and Alfred de Rothschild, Esq., 1882, p.70 C Davis, A Description of the works of art forming the collection of Alfred de Rothschild, London 1884, no.20, illus.

C Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. V, London 1913, p.180, no.93 EK Waterhouse, Notebooks and research files, vol. 24, p.42

44 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

A young lady is portrayed full length, standing beside a carpetcovered table, in a well-appointed interior. She fixes the viewer with a steady gaze, while delicately fingering a pearl bracelet. She is clad in a lustrous, white satin dress that falls in heavy folds over a blue underskirt: the narrow pointed bodice, wide pu≠ed sleeves and décolletage, draped with gauzy fabric, set o≠ to great e≠ect her shapely neck and shoulders. Her elaborate hairstyle, with its wide chignon and dangling ringlets – known as à la Sevigné – was all the rage in 1669, the year in which this portrait was painted. A pearl necklace and earrings complete her sumptuous attire. Another string of pearls is strewn carelessly on the table, beside a pin dish and a silver-framed lookingglass. A curtain drawn to one side reveals a landscape painting in a richly carved and gilded Lutma frame1 hanging at the back of the room. Although the sitter’s identity is now lost, she was most likely a member of fashionable society in The Hague. Her wealth and status is underscored here by the presence of a young black page, who enters from the right, bearing a silver-gilt dish of peaches.

After training with Gerard Terborch in Deventer and residing in France for two or three years, Caspar Netscher settled in The Hague in 1662.

At first, he mainly painted elegant genre scenes in the manner of his master, but from about 1666, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the more lucrative art of portraiture – according to Houbraken, principally to support his fast-growing family. As the seat of government and courtly centre of the Netherlands, The Hague o≠ered rich

45

Portrait of a lady at her toilet

pickings for a talented young artist and Netscher’s career flourished.

Soon he was patronised by the elite of Hague society and also attracted clients from elsewhere. The death of his two major rivals – Jan Mijtens in 1670 and Adriaen Hanneman the following year – left the way clear for Netscher to become the city’s favourite portrait painter.

In 1699, de Piles noted that ‘there was no-one of consequence in Holland who did not have a portrait by his hand’2 .

This beguiling image of a young lady in her boudoir, surrounded by the accoutrements of everyday life, exemplifies the small-scale, genre-like portraits that Caspar Netscher brought to perfection in the later 1660s. The intimate setting, with the sitter captured in a private moment, putting the finishing touches to her toilet, achieves an appealing informality. Scrupulous attention has been lavished not only on her dazzling costume, but also on the luxurious interior. Especially impressive is the artist’s ability to recreate the appearance of fine fabrics, in particular, the yards of shimmering, silvery-white silk of the sitter’s gown. In such works the artist purposely blurs the boundaries between portraiture and genre painting; indeed, it is sometimes hard to ascertain whether a genre subject or portrait was intended.

Nevertheless, in this case, the young lady’s gaze, directly engaging the beholder, leaves little doubt that this was conceived as the likeness of a real person.

Similar pieces of silver to those in the painting can be found in the collection of the Gemeentemusuem in The Hague3. The design of the silver-gilt basket carried by the boy is very like one made in 1643

by Dirk or Nicolaas Loockemans4 , while the pin dish and mirror can be compared with examples that formed part of a toilet set made between 1653 and 1659 by Gerrit Vuystinck for Veronica van Aerssen van Sommelsdijk5. Pin dishes were designed as receptacles for holding the many pins that ladies used for fixing in place such articles of clothing as lace collars and were typically Dutch: in England and France pin cushions were usually employed instead. Few examples of such dishes have survived today.

46 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Although recorded by Smith6 and Hofstede de Groot, this signed and dated panel was not known to Dr Marjorie Wieseman when she compiled her monograph on Caspar Netscher in 2002. She has since confirmed its authenticity. Last recorded on the auction market in the mid-nineteenth century, the painting entered the collection of Baron Lionel de Rothschild and remained in the family collection until 1946, when it was acquired from Agnew’s by an English private collector.

The reappearance of this fine painting is a welcome addition to the oeuvre of Caspar Netscher.

Pippa Mason

1 2

3 4 5 6

A type of frame decorated with auricular ornament that takes its name from the Amsterdam silversmith Johannes Lutma the Elder (1584–1669).

‘Er [waren] geen luiden van aanzien in Holland … die niet een Counterfeitzel van zyn hand hadden’. R de Piles, edited by J Verhoek, Beknopt verhaal van het Leven der vermaardste Schilders, Amsterdam 1725, p.413.

We are extremely grateful to Jet Pijzel-Dommisse, Curator of Decorative Arts, Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, for this information.

Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, inv. no. OME-1951-0002.

Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, the whole set: obj. no. 1011457; no. 18k, inv. no. OME-1968-0023.

Smith described the picture as ‘exquisitely finished’; J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, Supplement 1842, p.583, no.3.

BC JACOB VAN WALSCAPELLE Dordrecht 1644 – 1727 Amsterdam

A still life of a melon, a peach, grapes, nuts, a façon de Vénise glass and a rummer on a stone ledge before a niche

Signed lower right: Jacob: Walscappelle /Fecit.

Panel: 17 D⁄i x 13 D⁄i in / 44 x 34 cm Frame size: 16 D⁄i x 13 D⁄i / 44.1 x 34 cm Painted circa 1675 PROVENANCE:

TRC Blofeld, Hoveton House, Wroxham, Norfolk, by 1955 Johnny van Haeften, London, 1987 Private collection, Europe EXHIBITED:

Norwich, Castle Museum, Still-life, Bird and Flower Paintings, 1955, no.37

Jacob van Walscapelle was born in Dordrecht as Jacobus Cruydenier.

The surname van Walscapelle he adopted from his maternal greatgrandfather. He probably received his first training in Dordrecht and the mention of an architectural painting by Walscapelle in a 1729 Dordrecht inventory suggests that he did not start out as a still-life painter, even though today we know no paintings of other subjects by him. Around the mid-1660s, he is known to have been a pupil of the still-life painter Cornelis Kick (1631/34–1681) in Amsterdam and indeed his early flower paintings can barely be discerned from his teacher’s.

In 1673, Jacob van Walscapelle entered the service of the Amsterdam drapers’ hall and Arnold Houbraken, writing in the early eighteenth century, claimed that he soon gave up painting in favour of his municipal job. Known dated works ranging from 1667 up to 1685 seemed to confirm this statement, but a recently surfaced, rather elaborate example of his work dated 1699 provides evidence to the contrary1 .

48 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Jacob van Walscapelle’s main still-life subjects were flowers and fruit.

Until c. 1670, flower paintings in the style of Cornelis Kick dominate his oeuvre, but subsequently he seems to have been inspired to some degree by still lifes that were being produced in Utrecht by Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606–1682/84) and Abraham Mignon (1640–1679).

His meticulously rendered, strongly lit and sharply defined fruit and flowers, in any case, are strongly reminiscent of the works de Heem and particularly Mignon painted during the second half of the 1660s.

Among Walscapelle’s most impressive works is a pair of garlands of fruit and flowers he painted in 1672–74, now in the collection of the Municipal Museum in Arnhem2 . These paintings include many of the motifs Walscapelle repeated in his still lifes from the 1670s. In e≠ect, most of the fruit and nuts seen in the painting discussed here can be found similarly in the Arnhem garlands: the brightly lit, soft, round peach, the hazelnuts, the chestnuts and the elegantly curving stalk of

49

A still life of a melon, a peach, grapes, nuts, a façon de Vénise glass and a rummer on a stone ledge before a niche

wheat – the latter most definitely a motif borrowed from de Heem.

Comparing the present painting with dated works by Jacob van Walscapelle, similarities are particularly apparent with examples from around 1675. For instance, in a still life with wine glasses, fruit, oysters and a lobster, the general construction of the composition is similar, as well as the rather sharp lighting, while the position of the stone ledge is the same, and the glasses have been painted in a highly similar manner3. The same detailed rendering of the hazelnuts and the grapes can be seen in a still life with a façon-de-Vénise wine glass and a pomegranate from 16754 . The grapes, again, and similar peaches as well as foliage with similarly highlighted veins occur in yet another still life of fruit from the same year5. Moreover, the calligraphy of the signatures on those paintings is close to that of the signature of the painting under discussion. In all, these similarities suggest that Jacob van Walscapelle painted the still life discussed here in 1675 or close in time to that year.

This display of fruit, nuts and wine, like most of Walscapelle’s other still lifes, does not appear to carry any veiled symbolism, although some might want to suggest that the stalk of wheat (the basic material for bread) and the wine could represent the Eucharist. It is a good example of the artist’s mastery of light and textures and the meticulous rendering of stone, dew, reflections, leaves and ripe fruit keeps drawing the viewer back to examine yet another fine detail.

Fred G Meijer

1 2 3 4 5

Still life of flowers and fruit, oil on canvas, 25 B⁄c x 30 D⁄e in / 65 x 78 cm, signed and dated 1699, sale Sotheby’s, London, 10th July 2003, lot 27 with colour illus.

Both oil on canvas, 42 B⁄c x 33 B⁄c in / 108 x 85.5 cm, both signed in full, one dated 1672, the other 1674.

Oil on canvas, 24 B⁄c x 19 B⁄c in / 62 x 50 cm, signed and dated 1675, with X. Scheidwimmer, Munich, 1996 (illus. in colour in the Handbook of the TEFAF fair, Maastricht, March 1996).

Oil on panel, 14 D⁄e x 13 B⁄e in / 37.5 x 34 cm, signed and dated 1675, sale New York, Sotheby’s, 25th January 2001, lot 219, colour illus.

Oil on canvas, 21 B⁄e x 18 B⁄e in / 54 x 46 B⁄c cm, signed and dated 1675, sale Cologne, Lempertz, 29th November 1968, lot 173, illus.

50 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

51

BD ADRIAEN CORNELISZ. VAN DER SALM 1657 – Delfshaven – 1720

The merchantman De Anna, a staten jacht and other ships in a calm, with Den Briel in the distance

Signed lower right: A V SALM Oil on panel: 14 B⁄c x 19 B⁄c in / 37.2 x 49.5 cm Frame size: 22 x 27 in / 55.9 x 68.6 cm PROVENANCE:

Private collection, Belgium, since circa 1900

Like many seventeenth century Dutch artists, Adriaen van der Salm pursued several careers in his lifetime. For many years a schoolmaster, he ended his days as a prosperous textile merchant in Delfshaven, a whaling port then belonging to Delft, but now a suburb of Rotterdam. Van der Salm specialised in penschilderijen, ‘pen paintings’ in ink on panel prepared with a white ground. Originally invented in the sixteenth century to emulate engravings, pen painting had been practised with great brilliance by Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611–1693), who recorded contemporary Dutch naval battles. Van der Salm’s expertise in pen painting, like Ludolf Backhuysen’s (1630–1708), may have grown out of his skills as a calligrapher: he painted the Ten Commandments (still in situ) for the Oude Kerk in Delfshaven, the church from which the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed.

This painting shows van der Salm’s subtlety in evoking the radiance and airiness of a coastal scene within his grisaille format. He prepared the panel with a light ground, then washed in the composition with brush largely in grey. Details, such as the intricacies of the shipping and the ru≠led waves, were hatched over this with a pen, achieving a work that is both highly detailed and atmospheric. Bands of sunlight and shadow on the sea create the sense of recession, with a bar of radiance on the horizon drawing the eye into the far distance. The cloudscape, with takes up two-thirds of the composition, is softly put in with grey wash alone, conveying a sense of movement.

52 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

The scene is probably Den Briel on the Nieuwe Maas, with its magnificent fifteenth century Sint-Catharijnekerk and its star-shaped fortifications in the distance. Prominent at the left is a three-masted merchantman with a lavishly carved stern, including the figure of an angel and the words ‘De Anna’ (belonging to Anna). She has a typical Dutch transom stern under a row of windows; the structure above the counter is quite wide. The sterns of Dutch ships tended to become wider throughout the seventeenth century, suggesting that this vessel dates from the very late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The form of Salm’s signature on this painting, A V SALM, is one that he used later in his career.

Like all the ships in the picture, the merchantman is flying the Dutch ensign, with pendants from the mastheads which lift slightly in the light breeze. She is heavily armed for a merchant ship, with at least seven guns per side, suggesting that she traded in dangerous waters, such as the Mediterranean or Caribbean, where piracy was rife. She appears to be moving very slowly, with only the hint of a wake. The main course has been partly raised by hauling on the clews. This might mean that the ship is slowing down to approach an anchorage, or in the process of setting sail after raising the anchor; or it might just be raised to avoid masking the fore course in front of it, as the wind is almost directly behind. The anchor is hanging vertical, indicating that the merchantman has either just raised her anchor, or is

53

The merchantman De Anna, a staten jacht and other ships in a calm, with Den Briel in the distance

about to lower it. The latter seems more probable, as a captain would not normally set o≠ in such a light wind. Since a ship would normally anchor facing into the current, it is likely that she is about to turn left and anchor o≠ the town.

In the left middleground is a typical Dutch fluyt with a round stern and narrow above, almost unarmed. They were designed to carry a large cargo with a small crew, mostly in the North Sea and the Baltic.

To the right, in port broadside view, is a staten jacht, well armed and highly decorated, for carrying members of the States-General and provincial parliaments. As befitted an o≠icial vessel, she has a large and highly carved cabin in the stern. She is ga≠ rigged, with the ga≠ supporting the top of the main sail. The sails are flapping in the wind from the after edge, which shows that the wind is very light. The windward lee board is up, which is natural as the one on the other, leeward, side would normally be down to prevent the ship being driven sideways.

Behind the merchantman is a sprit rigged vessel, perhaps a tjalk from Overijssel, with the boom going diagonally across the sail – a more old-fashioned and vernacular rig than the staten jacht, but still serviceable with a smaller crew. In the left foreground is a boat with a helmsman, four oarsmen and a bowman with a boathook, probably belonging to the merchantman. The boathook is at the ready, suggesting that the boat is about to rejoin the parent ship, or perhaps to play some role in anchoring. The composition is balanced in the right foreground by another small boat, this time an inshore boat laying out lobster pots. In the right distance is a North Sea fishing boat, possibly a herring buss.

Information on the shipping based on a report by Brian Lavery, Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

54 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

55

BE JACOB BOGDANI Eperjes 1658 – 1724 London

A peacock, a cockatoo, ducks and other birds in a park landscape

56 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

A male and a female great curassow, a guinea fowl, a stone curlew and other birds in a forest landscape

57

A peacock, a cockatoo, ducks and other birds in a park landscape A male and a female great curassow, a guinea fowl, a stone curlew and other birds in a forest landscape A pair, the former signed lower right: J. Bogdani Canvas: 73 B⁄e x 61 in / 187.5 x 154.9 cm Frame size: 83 B⁄c x 69 B⁄c in / 212.1 x 176.5 cm PROVENANCE:

Private collection, Europe Maurice Segoura, Paris, 1988 The Lily and Edmond J Safra Collection

Born in Eperjes, northern Hungary (the present-day Presov, Slovakia), Jacob Bogdani brought an element of Mitteleuropean baroque grandeur to English painting. He spent two years, 1684–86, in Amsterdam, arriving in London by 1688, the year that put ‘Dutch William’ on the English throne. Bogdani established himself as a painter of flowers and fruit, but in the first decade of the eighteenth century began to produce bird paintings, perhaps inspired by the magnificent Windsor aviary belonging to Admiral George Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough’s brother. Churchill was one of his most important patrons; he also worked for William III and Mary II, and Queen Anne.

Bogdani was influenced by the work of the Amsterdam bird painter Melchior de Hondecoeter (1636–1695), who also worked for William III. However, his paintings eschew the fierceness of some of Hondecoeter’s pictures, the sense of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’.

Bogdani, who came from a Protestant gentry family, was said to be a ‘mild gentle temper’d man, courteous & civil’; in the words of Miklos Rajnai, he re-educated Hondecoeter’s style ‘in the manners of the drawing room’1.

The present pair of paintings is a superb example of Bogdani’s talent for making a decorative and convincing assemblage of birds. Although their stance and plumage are exquisitely observed, few of these birds would occur together in nature. They are a mixture of British and European birds and exotics that could only have been observed in aviaries such as the one owned by Admiral George Churchill.

58 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

A peacock, a cockatoo, ducks and other birds in a park landscape A male and a female great curassow, a guinea fowl, a stone curlew and other birds in a forest landscape They reflect seventeenth and eighteenth century fascination with the natural world and the desire to record it faithfully, as well as trading and the expansion of empires which had brought exotic birds like macaws and parakeets to the shores of England. Although no sketches survive, Bogdani no doubt studied his birds from life, possibly in oil sketches like the ones which survive by Hondecoeter.

The birds grouped around the Italianate fountain include, from top left to right: a peacock (a favourite motif of Bogdani), an Amazonian parakeet, turtle dove, collared dove, pheasant, wagtail and cockatoo.

Below are domestic crested ducks, a guinea fowl, a ru≠, a tufted duck, a Muscovy duck and a shelduck. The forest painting is dominated top left and bottom right by a female great curassow (Crax rubra, rufous morph) and her black mate, showy birds related to the turkey found in the rainforests of Mexico and Central America. Next to the female curassow is a chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax), a combination of birds also found in cat. no.16, a painting by Bogdani’s son-in-law Tobias Stranover, who worked in his studio. In the foreground, left to right, are a stone curlew, a guinea fowl and her young, a gadwall and a Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata, actually a native of Mexico). Many of the birds are shown in profile, the best way to appreciate their characteristics and to achieve clarity of composition, for Bogdani’s paintings were intended to be hung high in large rooms, often as overmantels or overdoors. The same birds reappear across a number of paintings: the ru≠, for example, in a work in the British Royal Collection. In the present pair of works Bogdani presents a graceful ballet of birds designed to complement the exuberant, naturalistic woodcarving of craftsmen like Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721) and the glowing mahogany and rich velvets of baroque interiors.

We are grateful to David Dallas for the identification of the birds here and in the painting by Stranover, cat. no. 16.

1

Introduction to London, Richard Green, Jacob Bogdani, 1989, unnumbered.

60 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

61

BF EDWAERT COLLIER Breda, active before 1663 – 1708 London

A trompe l’oeil still life of documents and objects stuck behind ribbons upon wooden boards

Signed and dated centre left: Edwart Collier/1695.

Canvas: 24 H⁄i x 20 in / 63.2 x 50.8 cm Frame size: 29 F⁄i x 24 D⁄i in / 75.2 x 62.9 cm PROVENANCE:

Ronald A Lee Esq., by 1954 The Lily and Edmond J Safra Collection EXHIBITED:

She≠ield, Graves Art Gallery, The Eye Deceived (Trompe l’oeil), October–November 1954 (lent by Ronald A Lee) LITERATURE:

F Davis, ‘A page for collectors: The Eye Deceived’, The Illustrated London News, 30th October 1954, illus.

Edwaert Collier was born in Breda in the province of Brabant. He may well have received his training as a painter in Haarlem, where he was a guild member, according to the list of members drawn up

by Vincent van der Vinne in the eighteenth century on the basis of seventeenth-century records now lost. Collier probably painted his earliest work in Haarlem where, already in 1669, three of his paintings were recorded in an inventory. In or before 1667, he must have moved to Leiden, where his residence is substantially documented from that year until 1693. Subsequently he left for London, where he appears to have remained until c.1702, judging from inscriptions (on letters) in his paintings. In 1702 he appears to have returned to Leiden, staying there until 1706, but a last known work dated 1707 is signed with the addition fecit London. His burial in St James’s church, Piccadilly was recorded on 9th September 1708.

62 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Edwaert Collier’s substantial oeuvre consists of three types of still lifes, in addition to a small number of genre paintings and portraits, as well as the occasional history scene. Among his still lifes, his compositions with a vanitas connotation, of which the painting discussed here is an example, are the most frequent. Less frequently do his ‘traditional’ still lifes of smoking utensils or victuals occur. Third – from a chronological point of view, since Collier appears to have taken up the subject only after 1690 – are the trompe l’oeil paintings of letter racks and of prints displayed on wooden boards.

Collier’s earliest paintings of this type have a horizontal format and are strongly reminiscent of examples by the Dordrecht painter Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678) from the 1660s, which may well have been his initial source of inspiration. Very few other painters took on the subject and Collier seems to have coined it as his own1 . Judging from the large number of examples still in existence, they must have been extremely popular, not least in England, where Collier appears to have produced the majority of this type of his still lifes. Their deceiving illusionism must have appealed strongly to Collier’s public – as they still do – and they may well occasionally have been placed among real o≠ice paraphernalia for greater e≠ect.

Letter boards by Edwaert Collier are known with inscribed dates of 1692 and later. On a painting of this kind, the date on a document portrayed in it is not always necessarily the date of execution of the painting. The artist quite often included documents signed or printed at an earlier date. However, those dates can at least be read as an indication of the date of execution and in any case they can be regarded as a date post quem. In the case of the still life discussed here, the date 1695 on the letter can most probably safely be taken for the date of its execution. The booklet displayed next to it, the Apollo

63

A trompe l’oeil still life of documents and objects stuck behind ribbons upon wooden boards

Anglicanus or English Apollo, is dated 1694. This seventeen-page booklet was a popular edition on astronomy and astrology by the ‘student in the physical and mathematical sciences’ Richard Saunders, first published as early as 1654 and reprinted annually2 . It discusses the positions of the stars throughout the year, the tides and other related phenomena. It is a similar kind of booklet to the almanacs Collier often included in such compositions. The painter has followed the layout of the title page quite closely, but has changed the size of the font in some places, probably in order to keep the text in his painting legible. Collier included the booklet in at least two other still lifes of letter boards; one copy is dated 1676, the other 17013. The first also includes other motifs from this painting: the sealed letter with a number 26, the quill, the magnifying glass, the stick of sealing wax and the wax seal stamp4 . A similar vertical letter board from the same year as the one discussed here (signed and dated on the letter Edwart Collier/Anno 1695) also includes the numbered letter (this time NO 25), the quill, the sealing wax and stamp, as well as the comb and the ‘Memorie’ note5. While Collier often included the same objects in his still lifes, he seems to have relished arranging them in a di≠erent but equally attractive manner time and time again, maintaining their natural and spontaneous haphazard impression.

Fred G Meijer

1

2 3

4 5

Other painters, such as Cornelis Brisé (1622–1665/70) and Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts (active 1657–1675 or later) who produced substanially larger and more complicated letter boards, do not appear to have inspired Collier directly.

Copies can be found on the internet as e-books, among them one printed in 1694.

Both horizontal compositions, the first in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, the second with Richard Green in 1997. While the Apollo in the Glasgow painting is dated 1676, in view of the strong similarities to the present painting and other work from the mid-1690s, it was probably excuted around 1695 as well.

The tall bronze object at lower left is probably a seal stamp used to model such seals as the round one on the letter bearing Collier’s name.

Oil on canvas, 23 B⁄c x 18 B⁄c in / 59.7 x 47 cm, o≠ered at Sotheby’s New York, 14th October 1998, lot 169, colour illus.

64 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

BG TOBIAS STRANOVER Szeben (Hermannstadt), Transylvania 1684 – 1756 Bath

A great curassow (Crax rubra), silver pheasant (Lophura nycthemera), golden pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus) and other birds in a landscape

Signed and dated lower left: T. Stranover / 1728 Oil on canvas: 57 D⁄e x 74 in / 146.7 x 188 cm Frame size: 68 x 84 in / 172 x 213 cm PROVENANCE:

Private collection, UK Lane Fine Art, London, circa 1980 Private collection, USA

Tobias Stranover was the nephew of the still life and bird painter Jacob Bogdani (c.1660–1724) and came to London circa 1703. Around 1720 he married Bogdani’s daughter Elizabeth and at his uncle’s death inherited his considerable fortune and studio contents. Stranover worked initially in Bogdani’s studio, specialising in fruitpieces and decorative assemblages of birds in landscape. In his mature work his style is more crisp and his palette lighter than that of his uncle, as befits the transition from baroque to early eighteenth century taste.

Like Bogdani’s, many of Stranover’s bird pieces are set in park landscape with classical buildings and garden features. This painting of 1728 is unusual in showing a rural landscape with ploughed fields and a farmhouse that takes its inspiration from the work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564/5–1637/8). In the background is a church that seems like a medieval English parish church, framed in mountains which owe more to Stranover’s native Transylvania than either the Netherlands or Britain. The landscape is particularly delicate and pleasing, leading the eye through a tunnel of light into the far distance.

66 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Stranover characteristically groups both exotic and native species and large, showy birds with smaller ones to create a lively assemblage of avian colours, shapes and behaviour. Trading and empire-building in the seventeenth century, especially by the Dutch to the East Indies and Americas, had resulted in the discovery of many new bird species, and specimens were brought back to adorn gentlemen’s parks and aviaries.

Bogdani studied in the superb aviary of Admiral George Churchill at Windsor.

The centrepiece of Stranover’s painting is a female great curassow (Crax rubra), a large bird of the turkey family found in the rainforests of Mexico and Central America. The aesthetic attraction is its black and white, curly crest and barred tail o≠set by a reddish body. Equally dramatic are the male silver pheasant (Lophura nycthemera) and golden pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus) to the left, both natives of China but brought to Europe for their spectacular plumage. Tucked at the feet of the curassow are two resident British species, the red-legged partridge (Alectoris graeca, originally from southern Europe) and oystercatcher (Haematopus ostralegus), attacking its favourite food, a shellfish. Behind the curassow is a common pheasant (Phasianus colchicus), introduced into Europe from Asia in the eleventh century.

To the right is a guinea fowl, related to pheasants and originally from Africa, but long domesticated for its meat. Behind is another oystercatcher, an adult with the white ‘chinstrap’ of winter plumage. Across the top of the painting are a pigeon in flight, a chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) and a male goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis).

67

BH JAN VAN OS Middelharnis 1744 – 1808 The Hague

Calm seas with fishing boats and a three-master

Signed lower right: JVan Os fec Oil on panel: 12 x 17 B⁄c in / 30.5 x 44.5 cm Frame size: 19 x 24 in / 48.3 x 61 cm Painted in the 1770s PROVENANCE:

HF Richardson, London Private collection, New York Sotheby’s Parke Bernet, New York, 6th December 1988, lot 90 Richard Green, London, 1988 Private collection, UK

Although he spent his career in The Hague, Jan van Os was born in Middelharnis in the south-western province of Zeeland, which as its name suggests, straddles the Scheldt delta and was largely reclaimed from the sea. Scenes like the one portrayed here would have been familiar from van Os’s childhood. Van Os, with Jan van Huysum, was the leading eighteenth century painter of flowerpieces, much in demand in the aristocratic city of The Hague, seat of the Court.

He also produced a number of superb shipping scenes which were popular in England, where he exhibited with the Society of Artists from 1773.

The boats here are mostly fishing and transport craft seen in a flat calm, their curved hulls and white sails reflecting in the mirror-like water. The radiant morning sky is piled high with cumulus clouds. The moisture in the atmosphere casts a pearly veil over the ships in the right middle distance, perhaps presaging a change in the weather. The foreground left boats fly the Dutch colours, the vanes barely lifting

68 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

in the almost non-existent breeze. They have leeboards for manoeuvring in shallow waters. At far right is a three-masted merchantman.

Van Os is working in the tradition of calm seascapes practiced so brilliantly in the previous century by Jan van de Cappelle (1626–1679) and Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707).

As would be expected of a work made in the last third of the eighteenth century, the painting is in a higher key than those of van Os’s seventeenth century precursors. The presence of women and children, their blue, red and white costumes providing colour highlights amid the browns and ochres of the shipping, underlines the peaceful, domestic nature of the scene. Although the Dutch Republic faced wars in the eighteenth century – it was invaded by the French in 1795 – the struggles (and the political dominance) of the previous century were past and the taste in paintings was more soothing and classical.

69

BI JACOBUS LINTHORST 1754 – Amsterdam – 1815

A still life of roses, peonies, irises, poppies and other flowers, with fruit on a carved stone ledge and a cascade beyond

Signed and dated lower left: J. Linthorst 1786 Oil on canvas: 41 B⁄e x 34 H⁄i in / 104.8 x 88.6 cm Frame size: 52 B⁄c x 46 in / 133.4 x 116.8 cm PROVENANCE: th

Probably collection of Jan Pekstok, Amsterdam, 17 December 1792, lot 64 (52 guilders to J Reyers)1 Probably collection of Joseph Valette; his sale, Van der Schley, Amsterdam, 26th August 1807, lot 115 (101 guilders to T van Iperen)2 Knoedler Gallery, London, before 1948 Sotheby’s London, 7 th July 1976, lot 67 Richard Green, London, 1976 Sotheby’s New York, 24th May 1984, lot 3; where purchased by Steve and Linda Horn, USA

Jacobus Linthorst was born in Amsterdam and spent all his life in his native town, where he died in 1815. In June 1789, he was registered as a citizen and painter and during the same month he joined the Amsterdam guild of St Luke. Nothing is known about Linthorst’s artistic training. He may have chosen a career as a painter somewhat later in life, since his earliest known works stem from 1780, when he was already thirty-five years old. Like most still-life painters of his day, he was inspired by the work of Jan van Huijsum (1682–1749) and his style is clearly related to that of his contemporaries Jan van Os (1744–1808) and Paul Theodoor van Brussel (1754–1795). Linthorst himself was the teacher of the still-life painter Jan Evert Morel (1769–1808).

This painting of fruit and flowers is an excellent example of Linthorst’s lavish still lifes of this type. It is among his largest works; most of his still lifes are about 29 B⁄c to 31 B⁄c in (75 to 80 cm) high. His

70 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

compositions tend to be denser and more lavish than those of van Os and van Brussel, while his palette is less variegated than that of those artists. Strongly built-up whites, blues and grey-greens usually set the tone, strengthened by strategically placed accents of red (here, the poppy anemone and peony), blue (the grapes and the irises) and yellow (the narcissi). Linthorst’s technique was not as meticulous as that of his predecessor Jan van Huijsum and is also slightly more painterly than that of Jan van Os and Paul Theodoor van Brussel. He built up his fruit and flowers with a well-loaded brush, rather than glazing thin, transparent layers, thus attaining a rather luminous e≠ect. The sumptuousness of Linthorst’s handling of white and pastel flowers is evident throughout this painting. Jan van Huijsum was the first to introduce a bright landscape view into the background of his still lifes of fruit and flowers, and others, including Linthorst, followed suit.

Mostly, the background views of his contemporaries do not exceed a vague indication of trees or other park growths. Linthorst in this painting, however, presents a rather clearly defined mountainous landscape with a waterfall and a cascade, a motif to which he would return at least once more, in 18103. The marble pedestal upon which the fruit and flowers are displayed is also more elaborate than usual, both with Linthorst himself and with his contemporaries, which seems to testify to this painting’s importance.

Signed and dated 1786, the present painting is a relatively early work

by Linthorst, rooted firmly in the eighteenth-century tradition of stilllife painting. Its provenance can be traced back as early as six years after the artist painted it. It appears to have come up in auctions in 1792 and in 1807. The first owner may have been the Amsterdam

71

A still life of roses, peonies, irises, poppies and other flowers, with fruit on a carved stone ledge and a cascade beyond

collector Jan Pekstok, who died in December 1791. The catalogue of the sale of his collection in 1792 provides a detailed description, which, other than that it mentions apricots (perhaps mistaking the lighter plums for apricots) and peaches (plural rather than singular), fits the present painting seamlessly. Moreover, it is unlikely that Linthorst painted a virtually identical still life. While he often played around with the same motifs, he is not known to have repeated his compositions almost verbatim. Pekstok’s collection included another, smaller still life by Linthorst, sold for 48 guilders, and two still lifes by Paul Theodoor van Brussel. Whether or not the still life discussed here belonged to Pekstok, as a cataloguer in 1807 put it, most probably commenting on the present painting, this is ‘een der beste stukken van J Linthorst’, one of the best pieces by the artist.

Fred G Meijer

1

‘Dit Capitale stuk verbeeld een cierlyk gewerkt voetstuk, waarop geplaatst verscheyde soorten van smakelijke Vrugten, en een menigte van keurige bloemen; men ziet ‘er Druiven, Cantaloup, Persieken, Pruymen, Grannat-appel, Abrikoozen en Nooten. Verders roode en witte Roosen, Hyacinthen, Tulpen, Yriasse, Auriculaas en andere, waar op verscheiden Insecten aazen, het verschiet vertoont een bergagtig Land met een Waterval; alles is zeer bevallig meesterlyk en te≠ens uitvoerig gepenceeld. hoog 41, breed 34 duim doek’ (This capital piece represents an ornately decorated pedestal upon which have been placed several types of tasty fruit, and a mass of choice flowers, one sees grapes, melon, peaches, plums, pomegranate, apricots and nuts, as well as red and white roses, hyacinths, tulips, irises, auriculas and other flowers, on which several insects are preying; the background shows a mountainous country with a waterfall; everything has been painted masterfully and elaborately, high 41, wide 34 inches). The buyer, Reyers, was most probably an art dealer or -broker, since he bought regularly, mainly from Amsterdam sales, between 1777 and 1813.

2 Described as: ‘Dit fraai kunstwerk steld voor een rijke ordonnantie van Bloemen en Vrugten welke op een Marmeren Tafel geplaatst zyn; de Vrugten zyn transparand en de Bloemen van een dunne Penceelsbehandeling en is een der beste stukken van J. Linthorst, Hoog 41, Breed 35 duim’ (This beautiful work of art represents a rich arrangement of flowers and fruit, which have been placed upon a marble table; the fruit is transparent and the flowers of a thin treatment of the brush, and [it] is one of the best pieces by J. Linthorst, high 41, wide 35 inches).

3 The waterfall was probably not Linthorst’s own invention; it can be found in the work of other still-life painters as well, albeit not often. Linthorst included another waterfall behind a still life of flowers he painted in 1810: Christie’s London, 7th July 2000, lot 39, one of a pair.

72 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

73

BJ JAN FRANS VAN DAEL Antwerp 1764 – 1840 Paris

A still life of a Fritillaria imperialis, roses, tulips, morning glory, an anemone, auriculas, irises and a passion flower in a stone vase on a red marble ledge, with poppies and butterflies

Signed and dated lower right: Van dael/ an 3 ème [1794–95] Oil on canvas: 29 B⁄i x 23 D⁄e in / 74 x 60.5 cm Frame size: 36 x 31 in / 91.4 x 78.7 cm PROVENANCE:

Baron Eugène Fould-Springer (d.1929), Palais Abbatial de Royaumont, Asnières-sur-Oise, France; by descent

Jan Frans van Dael was one of the most highly regarded painters of still lifes of flowers and fruit in Paris during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Van Dael had moved to Paris from his city of birth, Antwerp, at the age of twenty-two, after having successfully completed his studies in architecture at the Antwerp academy. In the French capital, however, he established himself as an artist and soon received important commissions for decorative paintings, among others in the castles of Saint Cloud, Bellevue and Chantilly. Beginning in the 1790s, he began to establish himself as a painter of still lifes of flowers and fruit, supported and encouraged by the leading painter of this genre of the time, Gerard van Spaendonck (1746–1822).

In 1793 van Dael received the privilege to work in an apartment in the Louvre. He exhibited many paintings at the annual Paris Salons and received various medals and distinctions over the years, in France and in Belgium, as well as in Holland. He also presided over a studio at the Sorbonne university, where he trained several pupils. Christiaan van Pol, Elise Bruyère and Adèle Riché were among them. After his death in March 1840, van Dael was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery, next to van Spaendonck.

74 DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS

Jan Frans van Dael’s still lifes of flowers and fruit are highly refined paintings. The artist was a great master in rendering the substance and texture of his motifs meticulously. He bathed his still-life compositions in a bright but rather soft, even light that allowed him to expose every intricate detail. In his early works, however, the background is fairly dark, as it is in this example from 1794/951 . Through a subtle rendition of shadows and reflections he attained a fully convincing impression of depth in his compositions. While van Dael’s palette and lighting are somewhat more forceful that those of van Spaendonck, the younger artist clearly was inspired by him for his compositions and motifs. Van Dael’s oblique and dense arrangement of the flowers – which in essence goes back to seventeenth century masters such as Willem van Aelst – is certainly indebted to van Spaendonck. Both masters chose the same types of flowers, such as lavish anemones, densely filled hyacinths, heavy pink roses, garden auriculas, and the Fritillaria imperialis, but this is probably due to the general popularity of these blooms, rather than to artistic dependence. Van Spaendonck often chose to juxtapose two or three eyecatching motifs in his compositions (for instance a basket of flowers next to a stone vase), but van Dael’s solution of placing an (apparently growing) poppy plant in the right-hand corner of this composition, overlapping the ledge, appears to be unique. Such a highly individual approach shows that to present van Dael as a mere follower of Gerard van Spaendonck does not do him justice.

Apart from the fact that van Dael’s backgrounds tend to become lighter over time, his style and handling were very consistent. He obviously aimed for a very high standard and appears to have made every e≠ort to keep it. Probably as a result, his oeuvre is not very

75

A still life of a Fritillaria imperialis, roses, tulips, morning glory, an anemone, auriculas, irises and a passion flower in a stone vase on a red marble ledge, with poppies and butterflies

substantial, as far as we can tell from the number of extant works.

Although some of his compositions, like that of the still life presented here, make a lavish impression, it is quite clear that for the painter Jan Frans van Dael quality must have come well before quantity.

Fred G Meijer

NOTE ON PROVENANCE

This painting was part of the collection of the banker Baron Eugène Fould-Springer (d.1929) and his wife Marie-Cecile (d.1978), daughter of the industrialist Baron Gustav Springer. In 1923 they bought the Palais Abbatial de Royaumont at Asnières-sur-Oise, near Chantilly. The Cistercian abbey at Royaumont was founded by Louis IX (St Louis of France) in 1228 and was much favoured by royalty. In 1784 HenriEléonore-François le Cornut de Ballivières, friend of Marie-Antoinette and exquisite abbé de cour, commissioned the fashionable architect Louis Le Masson to replace the old Palais Abbatial with the present neoclassical building. (When the Abbé fled in 1789, he left a debt of 169,657 livres of unpaid building costs for a religious house whose annual income was 22,571 livres. One cannot imagine why the French wanted a Revolution).

The Palais Abbatial and its collection were protected from the Nazis in World War II by Baronne Fould-Springer’s son-in-law, the Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón, who declared it to be his main residence and thus gave it diplomatic immunity. (He also saved thousands of French Jews by issuing visas which allowed them to reach the safety of Portugal). The family lived in the house until the late 1980s, since when it has been largely uninhabited. The turning of the Palais into a venue for high-level training prompted the sale of the art collection.

1

The painting is dated an 3 ème, the third year of the French Revolutionary calendar, which ran from 22nd September 1794 to 22nd September 1795.

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ITALIAN PAINTINGS

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CA FRANCESCO SOLIMENA Canale di Serino 1657 – 1747 Barra

The Madonna and Child

Oil on canvas: 39 F⁄i x 30 B⁄i in / 100.6 x 76.5 cm Frame size: 47 B⁄c x 38 in / 120.6 x 96.5 cm Painted circa 1728-32 PROVENANCE:

Private collection, UK

In the context of Neapolitan art devoted to sacred subjects and intended for private clients, one of the subjects most often depicted, from the early seventeenth century (Massimo Stanzione, Bernardo Cavallino, Pacecco De Rosa and others) and well into the eighteenth century, was that of the Madonna and Child, to which there was sometimes added the young St John. Among the major exponents of the Late Baroque in Naples there was also Francesco Solimena, working there from 1675 to 1745, two years before his death, in a style that at times oscillated between work influenced by Luca Giordano and Pietro da Cortona, classical leanings in the manner of Carlo Maratta, and the results of accentuated and rigorous formal ‘purism’.

In the latter years of his work, moving towards the new Baroque and the Neo-Preti style, he produced various compositions using this subject, intended for the most part as decoration of chapels and private oratories or bedrooms. Solimena worked for illustrious collectors, both in Naples and throughout Europe, in particular clients in Germany, Austria and Bohemia, for whom he also painted portraits and compositions of mythological, allegorical and commemorative subjects during the years when Naples was the capital of the southern Viceroyalty under the Imperial Crown of the Hapsburgs of Vienna, between 1707 and 1734.

During the thirty years of Austrian rule the painter, at the peak of his

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international fame, produced various canvases for the Viceroys who succeeded each other in Naples, from Althan to Daun and Harrach.

For Count Alois Thomas Raimund, who was Viceroy in Naples from 1728 to 1732, Solimena painted numerous canvases, the subjects being mainly Biblical or the Evangelists, but also sundry portraits of the Viceroys and their consorts. These, together with other seventeenth century Neapolitan paintings collected by Father Ferdinand Bonaventura, as well as early eighteenth century works, were long kept in the Harrach palace in Vienna and then were displayed at Schloss Rohrau, the family castle a few kilometres from the Austrian capital.

Among these paintings much attention has been paid, by both modern and contemporary art critics, to Solimena’s sumptuous image of the Madonna and Child (39 x 30 in / 99 x 76 cm.); he had painted the subject previously in other compositions, as is recorded in eighteenth century sources. The Harrach painting having been commissioned by the council of Cava dei Tirreni, as recorded by the biographer Bernardo De Dominici (Vite (1742-5), 2008 edition, p. 1152), it was donated to the Viceroy (and therefore it can be dated between 1728 and 1732; see the catalogue of the Harrach Collection when it was still in Vienna, ed. Heinz 1960, p.71, no.82). This Madonna can certainly be attributed to Solimena himself, because of its pictorial, compositional, formal and expressive qualities, as well as the perceptive

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The Madonna and Child

study of light and shade and the knowledgeable arrangement of rare and precious chromatic materials. It can be dated to those years in which Solimena executed such commissions as the present painting, hitherto unpublished, which comes from a private English collection and which is in the finest state of preservation.

A number of stylistic features confirm this attribution to Solimena: for one thing, the painter appears to have used the same models for the two Madonnas and for the children, but arranged them di≠erently.

In the Harrach version the Madonna is positioned almost facing the artist, in a space with a stone pillar on one side, with the Child resting on His mother’s left arm and lying on a white cloth that covers a rich cushion. In the painting under consideration, the Madonna, wearing clothing of elegant simplicity and colour identical to that in the other version, is represented in profile, against a dark background containing no structural elements; the Child is on His feet, supported by the mother’s right arm and resting on a cushion that is almost identical to the one in the Harrach version. In addition He is wrapped in a white cloth, held in the Madonna’s hands. In both versions the Child is facing the viewer. In both the composition is identical, as is the emotional reaction: both the Child and the Madonna are smiling, displaying a sweet, intense gaze, but at the same time they are marked by a somewhat melancholy mood (an obvious portent of the future destiny of the Son).

There is another feature displayed by the two compositions, documenting clearly the cultural inclinations and stylistic choices that characterise the work of Solimena in the years to which the two versions belong: the courtly tone, supported by refined sensitivity and cultivated elegance in the clothes and manners, with which the artist has transferred on to canvas this very human episode of maternal a≠ection and family intimacy. In point of fact the two pictures portray, with researched and studied pictorial representation (perhaps because of the subject in a better way than in other compositions with more figures painted in those years, but with complex and more ‘artificial’ articulation), the conception of the real and practical art of painting that had been worked out and experimented with by the master in this advanced phase, even if not the final one, of his

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career. Already as far back as 1700, as shown in the paintings of ‘the stories of Mary’ in Santa Maria Donnalbina, Naples (in particular the smaller ones, with two figures), but especially from the beginning of the second decade of the eighteenth century, Solimena had exceeded his youthful propensity for painting in the baroque style in the manner of Luca Giordano and Pietro da Cortona. After a phase spent reworking the ‘shadowy’, severe aspects of the baroque as practised

by Mattia Preti in Naples, with ever increasing conviction Solimena approached the temperate classicism that developed around the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, especially in painting, after the Roman models of Carlo Maratta.

Coinciding with the spread of this particular aspect of classicism in Rome, patterned on that of the sixteenth century, but also with evidence of moderately rationalist leanings (hence running counter to the use of imagery and the visionary trends of contemporary baroque tradition), was the birth of what came to be called the Arcadian literary and poetic movement, which centred upon Rome and Naples for its development, spread and production. It is significant that Francesco Solimena was among the most active adherents of the Colonia Sebethia, the Neapolitan branch of Roman Arcadia, both for the choices he made in art and because he became a celebrated composer of sonnets that were noted for their elegant form.

This happened precisely around 1700, and from this date, apart from brief reversals (in particular, between 1705 and 1708), Solimena moved towards a development of a pictorial method that became more refined, more studied, of courtly elegance, both through the clarity of composition and the form it displayed. Especially in ‘o≠icial’ portraiture, these were the signs of forward movement, to the extent of becoming virtually Imperial, even if the subjects portrayed derived from the need to have allegorical and commemorative themes.

However, this is not the case with the present Madonna and Child and the one in the Harrach Collection. Although the artist was not unaware of pictures from the early sixteenth century Renaissance, avoiding expressive stylistic attacks and reactions upon what may have appeared to some as devotion, as evidenced to a great extent by the ‘distant images’ of saints and Madonnas painted in Naples in

Francesco Solimena, The Madonna and Child, c.1728–1732.

Graf Harrach Collection, Schlossmuseum Rohrau.

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (a prime example being Francesco De Mura, who was a prominent pupil of Solimena, but in the latter twenties of that century reworked them with solutions that seemed only to be distantly related, the subjects being predominately religious), Solimena went back to ‘true’ images, with simplicity and knowledge of the use of pictorial art, but avoiding formal abstractions and leanings towards the melodramatic. He returned to what was ‘natural’, making things brighter and warmly communicative. This was obviously related to long-term reflection on his youthful beginnings, in a moderately naturalistic style, acquired from his father Angelo and his teachers, especially Francesco Guarino, but now filtered through a mutated and increased sensitivity, and matured also by recent examples, both in culture and taste, of the European society of the early eighteenth century.

Professor Nicola Spinosa, former Director of the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Napoletano

CB GIOVANNI PAOLO PANINI Piacenza 1691 – 1765 Rome

Capriccio of Roman monuments with the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine

Signed and dated lower right: I.P.PANINI / ROMAE . 1743 Oil on canvas: 29 x 38 B⁄c in / 73.7 x 97.8 cm Frame size: 38 x 47 in / 96.5 x 119.4 cm PROVENANCE:

Arthur Munro-Ferguson, Esq, Novar, Ross, Scotland; by whom sold at Christie’s London, 4th July 1986, lot 64; acquired by the late Jan Mitchell, USA

This newly-rediscovered painting represents a fresh approach to one of Panini’s favourite subjects, a capriccio view of the Colosseum and Arch of Constantine with other famous Roman monuments. The buildings depicted here epitomise ancient Rome; bathed in sparkling light, they would have made a delightful souvenir for a Grand Tourist on his return to chilly northern Europe1 . This painting, with its panoramic array of classical structures beneath a blue, cloud-flecked sky, is among the most pleasing and spontaneous of Panini’s twenty-odd compositions which feature the Colosseum and Arch of Constantine2 .

The humble, yet graceful modern Romans who people the work are depicted with a dancing dexterity of brushwork. Particularly beautiful are the three women at the basin on the left, the one in shadow striking the elegant pose of a classical statue, while the girl in red provides a dazzling focus of colour. The poses of Panini’s figures were carefully studied from life: the girl on the left is a variant of a drawing on folio 77 of the Panini sketchbook in the British Museum.

The painting was made in 1743, at a point when Panini was exploring his ‘compilation’ mode but while he was still observing the site afresh. This kind of composition, with the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, goes back to prototypes by Gaspar van Wittel (circa 1652/4–1736), such as the painting of 1711 in the Galleria Sabauda,

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Turin3. Panini seems to have started with this model in works that appear from as early as 1734, that is, from about the time that he began to work for Grand Tour patrons, such as the painting signed and dated I.P.P.1734 (formerly in the collection of the Earl of Dunraven; Arisi no.224), which has echoes of Van Wittel in the way the sta≠age figures are disposed4 .

At about the same time, Panini began to use the Van Wittel prototype as the basis for ‘compilation’ capricci, adding famous statues and monuments from other locations in the foreground (such as the three columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux from the Forum, or Trajan’s Column) and invented pieces of fallen masonry, such as the Pyramid of Cestius, in the background. In every one of these examples, as with Van Wittel, the view is from the north, taken from a point on the slopes of the Esquiline or near the road leading up behind the Tor de’ Conti and the Imperial Fora (now absorbed into the beginning of the Via dei Fori Imperiali). From this viewpoint the intact side of the Colosseum is mostly seen, with perhaps a glimpse of the ruined side, with the Arch of Constantine seen from a little to the right of front.

Here, however, the Colosseum is seen from a view west of the building, close to the point where the Sacra Via, coming from the Arch of Titus, emerges beside the platform of the Temple of Venus and Rome5. This makes this composition unique in Panini’s oeuvre and was probably the result of revisiting the site afresh. The Arch of Constantine, however, retains the orientation of the earlier pictures; topographically speaking, we should see it from a point more to the right.

An intriguing detail is the glimpse of the campanile of San Clemente seen between the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine. This

85

Capriccio of Roman monuments with the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine

cannot be seen today because of intervening buildings, but if one draws sight lines on the Nolli map it is evident that it was not then visible between the monuments, although it comes close: the viewpoint needs to be a little further to the right, towards the Palatine.

This freshly-observed detail draws the eye into the painting and skilfully interweaves the influence of Rome’s classical heritage down the ages. Built on a Roman nobleman’s house and serving as a church since the 1st century AD, San Clemente had been given its eighteenth century classical form by Carlo Stefano Fontana in 1719, as a commission from Pope Clement XI. Although Panini’s painting is dominated by the monuments of pagan Rome, he carefully introduces a building from the Christian present.

Beyond the Arch of Constantine are the substructures of the Temple of Claudius, little changed today, and at the far right is a glimpse of cypresses on the Palatine. Another interesting detail is the way that the Meta Sudans, the antique fountain in front of the Arch of Constantine, is placed almost exactly on the central line of the picture. This is almost certainly deliberate, serving to emphasize the symmetry of the features on either side. There is now little left of the van Wittel compositional prototype.

paw raised, commissioned by the Medici from Flaminio Vacca in 1594, is a mirror image of the classical lion owned by them. Both lions stood in the Villa Medici until 1787, when they were taken to Florence and placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi6 . The ‘modern’ Medici lion is unique in Panini’s capricci, but appears in the three versions of Panini’s Roma Moderna composition, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Arisi no.471), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (no.475) and the Musée du Louvre, Paris (no.500). Vacca’s statue was much admired and considered to be better than the antique original7.

With its mixture of precision and freedom, its exquisitely controlled light and harmonious placing of figures, this painting represents a high point in Panini’s oeuvre of the 1740s, when the production of capricci was still fresh and exciting. Stylistically, it can be compared to the painting of Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore, circa 1743–44, in the Co≠ee House of the Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome (Arisi no.322) and The Lottery in Piazza di Montecitorio, circa 1743–44 (National Gallery, London).

Information based on a report by Dr David Marshall, University of Melbourne

To the left of the composition is the Medici Vase, located at the Villa Medici until 1780. This seems to be the first version of The Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine to incorporate the Vase, as none of the earlier versions include it, while later ones do (Arisi no.375, 377 (1747)).

In the shadow of the Vase is an ancient granite basin which was discovered in the Forum and installed there as a fountain by Giacomo della Porta in 1593.

Closing the composition at the right are the iconic three Corinthian columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux (c.430 BC) (much copied as Grand Tourist souvenirs in bronze, lapis lazuli and precious wood), which are actually located in the Forum near the fountain. The temple is frequently combined by Panini with the Colosseum/Arch of Constantine motif, no doubt because it gave a strong vertical accent.

Below the temple stands one of the Medici Lions, forming a link between the Classical world and the Renaissance. The lion with left

86 ITALIAN PAINTINGS

Giovanni Paolo Panini, The Lottery in Piazza di Montecitorio, c.1743–44.

The National Gallery, London.

NOTE ON PROVENANCE

This painting was formerly in the collection of Arthur MunroFerguson of Novar House in the Highlands of Scotland. Novar House was built in 1720 but extended circa 1770 by General Sir Hector Munro (1726–1805), who had a distinguished career in the Army in India, with victories over the princes of Hindustan at Buxar (1764) and over the French at Pondicherry (1778). His son was killed by a tiger, an event commemorated by the General’s enemy Tipu, Sultan of Mysore, in the famous lifesize automaton of a tiger eating an Englishman known as ‘Tipu’s Tiger’ (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Arthur MunroFerguson’s contribution to Novar was the development of the beautiful gardens.

1

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2 48 248 8.

CC FRANCESCO GUARDI 1712 – Venice – 1793

Venice, the Piazza San Marco with the Basilica and the Campanile

Oil on panel: 9 D⁄i x 13 in / 23.8 x 33 cm Frame size: 15 x 18 in / 38.1 x 45.7 cm Painted circa 1775–85 PROVENANCE:

Etienne-Edmond Martin, Baron de Beurnonville (1825–1906), Paris; his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 9th–16th May 1881, lot 647 M Antoine Marmontel, Place St Marc, Paris; his sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 28th–29th March 1898, lot 2 M Carlo Broglio, Paris, until 1950 Mrs Berndt, Paris Anonymous sale, Musée Galliera, Paris, 20th–21st June 1966, lot 38 Schä≠er Collection, Zurich Newhouse Galleries, New York; from whom acquired by an American private collector in 1967 LITERATURE:

H Mireur, Dictionnaire des ventes d’art faites en France et à l’étranger pendant les XVIII et XIX siècles, vol. III, Paris 1911, p.375 The Burlington Magazine, vol. 108, no.758, May 1966, illus. p.XXXVIII Antonio Morassi, Guardi: I Dipinti, 2nd edn., Electa, Venice 1984, vol. I, p.373, no.333; vol. II, fig. 362

Francesco Guardi came to view painting in the late 1750s, when he was already in his forties. He proved the last of the great Venetian vedutisti, dissolving the exquisite architecture of the city in a shimmering haze of light. The wistful poetry of Guardi’s work is like a minor-key toccata of his almost exact contemporary Baldassare Galuppi (1706–1785), subject of Browning’s famous poem on the

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decline of Venice. Without knowing it, Guardi was recording the final decades of the thousand-year-old Venetian Republic: four years after Guardi’s death, Napoleon invaded.

The present view of Piazza San Marco is described by Antonio Morassi as ‘di qualità eccellente’ and dated by him circa 1775–17851 . Guardi produced some of his finest work in this middle period of his vedute career, when his brushwork was more fluid than in his earlier paintings and when he balanced delicate pastel tones with jewel-bright local colours in the figure groups. The coral red of the cloth in the basket of the bending foreground figure is picked up in another cloth carried by the figure to the left of him, and by the cloak of a man at background right, moving the eye around the painting. The elegant masqueraders at right are executed in dancing, rococo brushwork.

Their costumes and the handling of paint are similar to Guardi’s The Piazza San Marco during the Feast of the Ascension (Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon), which has been dated circa 17772 .

The Piazza San Marco is the quintessential view of Venice, portrayed many times by Canaletto and by Guardi. Described as the ‘drawing room of Europe’, the piazza was the spiritual and secular heart of the city, the place where every Grand Tourist must be seen to stroll, a panorama of Venice’s architectural heritage. The view is taken from in front of the now-demolished church of San Geminiano, now replaced by the Ala Napoleonica of the Palazzo Reale, which houses the Museo Correr. On the left, in deep shadow, are the Procuratie Vecchie, built

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Venice, the Piazza San Marco with the Basilica and the Campanile

as government o≠ices in the 1490s and faced by the more imposing, dazzlingly sunlit façade of Vincenzo Scamozzi’s Procuratie Nuove (completed by Longhena after 1640). Guardi’s glittering brushwork dances over the Byzantine façade of San Marco, built to house the relics of the patron saint of Venice and surmounted by the four classical, gilded bronze horses which adorned the hippodrome in Constantinople, looted by crusaders in 1204. Next to the Basilica is the warm pink and white, fourteenth-century façade of the Doge’s Palace. The Campanile, completed in 1173 and restored in 1514, provides a strong vertical accent to accentuate the grandeur of the square. The pearly radiance of the morning light overarches all.

This painting belonged to Etienne-Edmond Martin, Baron de Beurnonville (1825–1906), son of the Napoleonic hero Etienne Martin de Beurnonville (1789–1876). He formed a collection of over a thousand paintings, including works by Rembrandt, Chardin and a Drouais portrait of Madame de Pompadour. This Guardi was described as ‘d’une grande finesse d’exécution’ at the Beurnonville sale of 1881.

1 Op. cit., vol. I, p.373, no.333.

2 See National Gallery, London/National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals, 2010–2011, exh. cat. by Charles Beddington, p.142, illus. in colour.

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CD PIETRO FABRIS Fl. Naples 1756 – 1784

View of the Bay of Naples from Posillipo looking south, with the Palazzo Donn’Anna, the Castel dell’Ovo and Vesuvius beyond

Oil on canvas: 36 x 60 in / 91.4 x 152.4 cm Frame size: 44 x 68 B⁄c in / 111.8 x 174 cm PROVENANCE:

Probably acquired by Sir Henry Mainwaring, 4th Bt. (1726–1797) of Peover Hall, Over Peover, Cheshire, who was in Naples on the Grand Tour in 1760; by descent in a British private collection

This view is taken from the Scoglio di Frisio in Posillipo, on the northern side of the Bay of Naples, commanding a magnificent view of the city. The Court retired to Posillipo in the summer to escape the searing heat and the shore was lined with gracious villas, among them the ‘casino’ belonging to Fabris’s patron Sir William Hamilton (1731–1803), British envoy to Naples. The Scoglio di Frisio had a famous inn built out over the grotto which is visible at the left.

Fabris is celebrated for his figure groups, which are larger and more fully realized than those in the works of many contemporary Neapolitan view painters. He had a folkloric feel for the lives of the peasants, fishermen and lazzaroni (idlers) who comprised the vivid populace of the city. Naples’s heady mix of ‘miseria e nobiltà’ fascinated Grand Tourists and even held royalty in thrall: Ferdinand IV, King of Naples from 1759 to 1816, could speak the dialect of the lazzaroni and would go fishing and hawk his catch on the quayside, to his subjects’ delight.

In the foreground left of the painting, housewives buy fish; in the centre, a hunter and his family picnic. The brightly-lit group of revellers at the right reflects the grace of Neapolitan women of all classes and their love of showy clothes. One hands a coin to a mendicant friar; a man tackles a plate of spaghetti and another plays a lute.

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In the middle ground, a couple dances the tarantella, while on the terrace above them fine folk, silhouetted against the primrose sky, listen to a concert. Dolce far niente was raised to a high art in Naples.

As Goethe wrote: ‘Northerners think any man an idler if he does not spend his days anxiously working himself to death….I find in this people the liveliest and most inventive industry: not to get rich, but to live carelessly’1 . Foreigners like Sir William Hamilton and many Grand Tourists were beguiled by the sensual, pagan atmosphere of the South, where not only the physical relics, but the spirit of the Classical world survived. The little boy bathing in Fabris’s picture is an echo of a Roman amorino. The painter Tischbein describes the bathers below Hamilton’s house in Posillipo: ‘There were often little gatherings of boys under the windows who begged us to throw coins into the sea so they could show o≠ their skills in swimming and diving. We did, and they did. Or they would wrestle on the top of a high wall, to push one another o≠ into the sea. Often whole clusters of them hung together, falling. You saw wonderful postures and movements and the loveliest bodies2 .

Behind the frieze of figures is the bay, dotted with lateen-rigged fishing boats and pleasure craft. On the Posillipo shoreline, in full sunlight, is the ruined Palazzo Donn’Anna, built in the seventeenth century for Donna Anna Carafa, wife of the Duke of Medina, Viceroy of Naples. Beyond is the Riviera di Chiaia, a favourite promenade for the city’s inhabitants, and the sweep of the city as far as Castel dell’Ovo, the fifteenth century fortress in the bay. The slopes above are crowned by Castel Sant’Elmo and the dazzling white Certosa di San Martino. Behind Naples broods Vesuvius, belching smoke into the pristine day. Part of the frisson of visiting Naples was the very real danger of a serious eruption of the volcano, as happened in 1767 and 1794.

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View of the Bay of Naples from Posillipo looking south, with the Palazzo Donn’Anna, the Castel dell’Ovo and Vesuvius beyond

The painting was probably acquired by Sir Henry Mainwaring, 4th Bt. (1726–1797) of Peover Hall, Cheshire, in whose family it descended.

Sir Henry went on the Grand Tour with his friend and neighbour Lord George Grey, later 5th Earl of Stamford (1737–1819), arriving in Rome from Naples in February 1760. Both men were connoisseurs, patronising Anton Raphael Mengs, who painted a portrait of Grey, and Thomas Patch, whose Punch party and Antiquaries at Pola include the two men (all Dunham Massey, National Trust). Grey commissioned from Nathaniel Dance a double portrait of himself and Sir Henry in Rome in 1760, discussing an antique cameo ring (with Richard Green in 2005; Dunham Massey), while both men commissioned Dance to paint subjects from Virgil3. George Dance designed for Mainwaring two chimneypieces, executed in Florence, which were used in the neoclassical wing that he added to Peover Hall on his return. Fabris’s view of Naples is very much in keeping with these purchases, a superb souvenir of the seductive, sensuous South.

A second version of this view, signed and dated 1778, of similar dimensions but with minor di≠erences and of lesser quality, was formerly in the collection of Harry Primrose, 6th Earl of Rosebery, at Mentmore Towers, Buckinghamshire. It formed part of a series which included A view of Capri from the sea in a storm and A view of Santa Lucia (private collection)4 .

1 2 3 4

Quoted in David Constantine, Fields of Fire: a Life of Sir William Hamilton, London 2002, p.167.

Quoted Constantine op. cit., p.168.

Dance painted Aeneus and Venus for Mainwaring, completed in June 1762.

See Nicola Spinosa and Leonardo Di Mauro, Vedute napoletane del Settecento, 1989, p.201, cat.

165; illus. p.292, pl.143.

94 ITALIAN PAINTINGS

Nathaniel Dance, Portrait of Lord George Grey, later 5th Earl of Stamford, and Sir Henry Mainwaring, 1760. Dunham Massey, National Trust.

FRENCH PAINTINGS

CE CORNEILLE DE LA HAYE called CORNEILLE DE LYON The Hague c.1500/1510 – 1575 Lyon

Portrait of a young man

Oil on panel: 6 H⁄i x 5 B⁄e in / 17.5 x 13.3 cm Frame size: 14 x 10 B⁄e in / 35.6 x 26 cm Painted circa 1550 PROVENANCE:

Adolphe Schloss (1871–1911); part of the Schloss Collection seized by the Nazis in 1943; restituted to the Schloss heirs after the Second World War; third Schloss Collection sale, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 6th–8th December 1954, lot C, pl.II; Paul-Louis Weiller (1893–1993), Paris; by descent LITERATURE:

L’Oeil, no. 1, January 1955, illus. p.43 Anne Dubois de Groër, Corneille de La Haye dit Corneille de Lyon, Paris 1996, p.225, no.145

Corneille de La Haye was trained in his birthplace of The Hague, or perhaps in Antwerp. By 1533 he was in Lyon, a prosperous city with a thriving Netherlandish community. The royal progresses of François I and his Court frequently sojourned in Lyon, and around that time Corneille was appointed painter to François’s second wife, Eleanor of Austria. Despite his Protestant faith, which he was forced to recant, Corneille remained in royal service until his death in 1575, by which time he is known by the name of his adopted city.

Corneille specialised in small-scale bust- or half-length portraits, usually, as here, placed against a plain green background. He painted both royalty and aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie of Lyon. The

98 FRENCH PAINTINGS

absence of armour, jewellery or elaborate, embroidered clothing suggests that this attractive young man is a lawyer or merchant rather than a courtier. Remarkably, Corneille painted his portraits without any underdrawing. The sitter is characteristically lit from the left and a sense of the structure of the face achieved by a myriad of tiny brushstrokes blending from light to shadow. The exquisite detail of the beard, the shape of the heavy-lidded, handsome eyes and the eyelashes are achieved by outlining with the tip of a very fine brush. The soft shadows suggest a date in the middle of Corneille’s career, around 1550.

Corneille gives his sitter both dignity and humanity; even after four and a half centuries, he is to us intriguingly alive. The intensity and realism of the face is enhanced by the more generalised treatment of the young man’s black clothing. Although Corneille was influenced by the miniature portraiture of Jean Perréal (c.1450/60–after 1530), the realism of his Northern European roots gives him more in common with the vibrant portraits of Holbein than with the more iconic French approach to portraiture.

This outstanding painting was owned by Adolphe Schloss (1871–1911), who amassed what is regarded as the last great collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings made in France in the nineteenth century, including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Metsu and Jan Steen. Hidden by Schloss’s heirs at the Château de Chambon, the collection was seized by the Nazis in 1943, much of it destined for Hitler’s Museum at Linz.

Corneille’s portrait was restituted to Schloss’s heirs after the War and sold by them in the third Schloss sale at Galerie Charpentier in 1954. It was acquired by Paul-Louis Weiller (1893–1993), First World War flying ace, industrialist and patron of the arts. Weiller owned the company that became Air France and financed restoration at Versailles, as well as building up a superb personal collection of paintings, furniture and objets d’art, including Aelbert Cuyp’s Milkmaid by a river (cat. no.9).

Actual size

99

CF JEAN-BAPTISTE PATER Valenciennes 1695 – 1736 Paris

Fête champêtre with bathers before a fountain

100 FRENCH PAINTINGS

FĂŞte champĂŞtre with a musician and a statue of Venus

101

Fête champêtre with bathers before a fountain Fête champêtre with a musician and a statue of Venus

A pair Oil on canvas: 20 x 24 in / 50.8 x 61 cm Frame size: 29 x 33 B⁄c in / 73.7 x 85.1 cm Painted in the 1730s PROVENANCE:

Private collection, London; from whom bought by Martin Colnaghi, London, through an auctioneer in Langham Place; sold by Colnaghi to Rodolphe Kann, Paris; sold by Kann to Thomas Agnew & Sons, London; from whom purchased circa 1890 by John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) John Pierpont Morgan, Dover House, London Mildred Allen, New York; by descent to Mrs Charles Allen, Jr Private collection, USA LITERATURE:

Lady Dilke, French Painters of the Nineteenth Century, 1899, pp.98–99 W Roberts, Pictures in the Collection of J Pierpont Morgan at Princes Gate and Dover House, London: Dutch and Flemish, French, Italian, Spanish, 1907, unpaginated, both illus.

F Ingersoll-Smouse, Pater, 1928, p.63, no.323 and 325, figs. 95–6

Jean-Baptiste Pater, like Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), was born in Valenciennes, a Flemish town ceded to the French in 1678. He studied briefly with Watteau around 1711 and spent a month with the dying painter at Nogent-sur-Marne in 1721, a visit which proved to be the formative experience of his career. Pater specialized in fêtes galantes, a category of painting which Watteau had invented: beautiful young people disport themselves in a dreamlike landscape, hovering between the realities of modern rural life and the ease of the Classical Golden Age.

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Jean-Baptiste Pater, Baigneuses.

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Pater adopted from Watteau a pastel palette, serpentine composition and a way of building up figures in filaments of colour. However, his nymphs are softer and more round-faced than Watteau’s and a languorous eroticism replaces his master’s wistful romance. In the 1730s Pater developed his own theme of baigneuses; there are, by contrast, comparatively few nudes in Watteau’s oeuvre.

Fête champêtre with bathers before a fountain is one of a series of bathing paintings which features the same four central nymphs, including the luxuriant girl swathed in a white robe which is the focus of the present composition. The four young women appear in a painting of Baigneuses which is in other respects a mirror image of the present work, with a fountain curving to the right. This was acquired by Count Tessin circa 1743–52 for Frederick the Great’s sister, Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden (1720–1782) and is today in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm1 . Frederick himself owned more than forty of Pater’s works, many still at Charlottenburg and Sans-Souci.

Ingersoll-Smouse suggests that some of the baigneuses may have been commissioned by members of one of the cénacles gallants, free-and-easy gatherings of men and women from the highest ranks of society, dedicated to wit and dalliance in bucolic settings2 . One

Fête champêtre with a musician and a statue of Venus Fête champêtre with bathers before a fountain

such, l’Académie Galante, was set up by the libertine Comte de Caylus (1692–1765) in the early eighteenth century. Another, Les Aphrodites, possessed a park near Montmorency.

The second painting of this pair, Fête champêtre with a musician and a statue of Venus, depicts a lutenist in archaic dress derived from the Commedia dell’Arte, a favourite motif of Watteau in paintings such as The music party (les charmes de la vie), c.1717 (Wallace Collection)3. The naked statue of Venus, embowered in the garden’s shadows, lends her blessing to this evening of music and love. Pater’s depiction of rosy flesh, as well as his shimmering landscapes in this pair of paintings, owe a debt to Rubens. As Ingersoll-Smouse comments: ‘toute la volupté ra≠inée du XVIII siècle flotte dans ces scènes de la Fête galante’4 .

Antoine Watteau, The music party (les charmes de la vie), c.1717.

The Wallace Collection, London.

Adrian Lamb, John Pierpont Morgan. ©National Portrait Gallery Smithsonian Institution / Art resource / Scala, Florence.

NOTE ON PROVENANCE

This pair of paintings was in the celebrated collection of the banker John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), one of the financial pillars of nineteenth century New York. The son of Junius Morgan, Pierpont spent much of his youth in Europe and at the London branch of the family bank. The Morgans funded the expansion of the American railroads, partly with English investment. Their probity in an era of buccaneering finance led Wall Street to turn to Pierpont in more than one crisis, culminating in the Panic of 1907, when Morgan’s wisdom and courage single-handedly saved the American economy from meltdown.

Pierpont Morgan did not begin collecting art seriously until after his father’s death in 1890. He then proceeded at a characteristically determined pace, amassing thousands of works of art with an estimated value of £160 million, probably the finest collection in the world. His aim was to collect the supreme expressions of many cultures and eras, with the intention of leaving these treasures to the American people. His collection ranged over classical and medieval art, manuscripts and incunabulae, tapestries, Chinese porcelain and Italian maiolica, and Old Master drawings. Morgan owned works by Raphael, Rembrandt and Vermeer, but his painting collection focussed on eighteenth century French and English works, including Fragonard’s

104 FRENCH PAINTINGS

panels painted for Madame du Barry (Frick Collection, New York) and Gainsborough’s Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC).

Morgan had intended that his art collection should go after his death to the fledgling Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but he had spent so much on it that his heirs sold about half the collection to ensure the stability of the bank. About forty per cent of the objects, from paintings to jewellery, went to the Metropolitan Museum, while the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT gained his seventeenth century silver and eighteenth century porcelain. Morgan’s incomparable collection of manuscripts, rare books, Old Master drawings and prints remains at his Renaissance-style mansion on Madison Avenue, today the Pierpont Morgan Library.

1 See Ingersoll-Smouse, op. cit., p.62, no.321, illus. p.151, fig. 94.

2 Ibid., p.14.

3 J Ingamells, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures, vol. III, French before 1815, pp.361–64, no.P410, illus. p.362.

4 Ingersoll-Smouse, p.14.

105

BRITISH PAINTINGS

CG ALLAN RAMSAY RA Edinburgh 1713 – 1784 Dover

Portrait of Cecilia Craigie

Signed and dated lower right: A. Ramsay / 1754 Oil on canvas: 29 D⁄e x 25 in / 75.6 x 63.5 cm Frame size: 37 x 32 in / 94 x 81.3 cm

collection)1 . Anne is in ‘Vandyck’ costume and more crisply painted than Cecilia, as befits the earlier date; she is also set in a painted oval and the lower right hand signature is very similar to the one on Cecilia’s portrait.

PROVENANCE:

By descent in the Craigie or Douglas family, one of whom emigrated to Canada in the nineteenth century; by descent to Kay Gairdner, Toronto; her daughter Daphne Bell, Toronto; by inheritance in a Canadian private collection

This portrait was made just before Allan Ramsay’s second visit to Italy from 1754–7. Well-established in London, he was still moving in the Scottish intellectual and gentry circles of his Edinburgh upbringing as the son of a celebrated poet. Ramsay had trained in the Naples studio of Francesco Solimena in 1737, but by the mid-1750s his crystalline, Italianate baroque manner had given way to a softer, more naturalistic style, influenced by Hogarth and French painters such as MauriceQuentin de la Tour and Jean-Marc Nattier. This portrait balances a Caledonian grace and restraint in the personification of the sitter with a rococo love of luxurious, pastel fabrics reflecting sinuous streams of light. Cecilia Craigie’s face is painted with an exquisite delicacy that emulates the short, feathery strokes of a la Tour pastel; not only her features, but her lively intelligence and good nature are conveyed.

Hidden away in a Canadian private collection for at least 150 years, Cecilia Craigie was unknown to Alastair Smart when he compiled his catalogue raisonné of Allan Ramsay’s work. Smart does, however, list other Ramsay portraits of Cecilia’s family, including that of her father Robert Craigie (1685–1760), dated 1744 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh) and sister Anne Craigie, dated 1750 (private

108 BRITISH PAINTINGS

Robert Craigie was the younger son of Laurence Craigie of Kilgraston.

A successful career at the Bar allowed him to purchase the estate of Glendoick, Perthshire in 1726. From 1742–46, a period which spanned the Jacobite rebellion, he was Lord Advocate of Scotland. From 1754 he was Lord President of the Court of Session. George III described Craigie as ‘a very good lawyer, an honest man, and a good Whig’2 . He had four sons and three daughters with his wife Barbara, daughter and heiress of Charles Stewart of Carie. Ramsay knew the family personally, consulting Craigie over his marriage contract when he eloped in 1752 with his enchanting second wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay.

Cecilia Craigie married Colonel Robert Douglas (1716–1803) of Strathendry Castle, Fife, first cousin of the economist Adam Smith (1723– 1790). Like her father, the youngest of Cecilia’s five sons, David, had a distinguished legal career, becoming a Lord of Session in 1813 and a Lord of Justiciary as Lord Reston in 1816. David Douglas spent his later childhood with Adam Smith and inherited his superb library.

1

Alastair Smart, ed. John Ingamells, Allan Ramsay: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, p.96, no.110 and p.259, fig. 167; p.96, no.109 and p.307, fig.348 respectively.

2 Quoted by Smart, p.96.

109

CH ALLAN RAMSAY RA Edinburgh 1713 – 1784 Dover

Portrait of Sir William Guise, 5th Bt. (1737–1783) of Elmore Court and Rendcombe, Gloucestershire

Signed and dated lower left: A. Ramsay / 1761; inscribed lower right: Sir William Guise V Bt. MP /Obt. unmarried 1783 Oil on canvas: 50 x 40 in / 127 x 101.5 cm Frame size: 64 x 51 in / 162.5 x 129.5 cm PROVENANCE:

By descent from the sitter in the Guise family EXHIBITED:

Edinburgh, Scottish National Portrait Gallery and London, National Portrait Gallery, Allan Ramsay 1715–1784, 1992–93, exh. cat. by Alastair Smart, p.133, no.73, illus.

LITERATURE:

Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, London 1999, p.127, no.220; illus. fig. 526 and in colour pl.35

Alastair Smart has commented that ‘This is one of the most beautiful of Ramsay’s portraits of male sitters’1 . ‘The rococo elegance of the pose’2 , as well as the exquisite palette of dusky pink and soft greys, show the influence of French portraitists such as Maurice-Quentin de la Tour and Jean-Marc Nattier. The cosmopolitanism of Ramsay’s upbringing – born into a family of the Scottish Enlightenment, studying in Rome and Naples – is reflected in the e≠ortlessly genteel air with which he invests his sitter.

William Guise, twenty-four years old in 1761, was the only son of Sir John Guise, 4th Bt. (d.1769), of Elmore Court in Gloucestershire, and his wife Jane Saunders. Having completed his studies at Queen’s College Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn, he would shortly set o≠ on the Grand Tour:

110 BRITISH PAINTINGS

a suitable time to commission a portrait from Ramsay, who was fashionable and well established in the favour of the new King George III. Guise wears a formal suit of coat, waistcoat and knee-breeches in Italian silk cut velvet, probably his Court dress. The waistcoat is fringed with floss silk in decorative knots and he wears his powdered wig en solitaire (with the ribbon brought round the front and tucked into the lace ru≠le of his shirt). This rich yet understated attire gives Ramsay the perfect opportunity to show his skill in evoking the play of light on complex textures and his ability to suggest the translucency of lace. He took great care with the pose of his sitter and the fall of the fabrics, making a preparatory black chalk costume study (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT). Ramsay is perhaps supreme among eighteenth century British portraitists in portraying the easy, una≠ected manners of good breeding.

In October 1762 William Guise travelled to Lausanne on the first stage of his Grand Tour. There he became a close friend of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), the future historian and author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Both were intelligent and sensitive men, though not without the follies of youth. In letters home, Gibbon declared Guise to be ‘a very sensible well bred man’3, at that time mourning the loss of his mother. Gibbon kept for his private Journal, however, the tale of how a group of young English milordi, himself and Guise included, became riotously drunk and careered through the town, Guise sending a gunshot through a window4 . A few months later, Gibbon acted as peacemaker between Guise and Jacob van Berchem, both in love with a girl called Nanette de Illens. Guise was so rude to his rival that van Berchem challenged him to a duel.

Gibbon averted disaster by urging Guise to apologise, admitting to his Journal: ‘Guise is brave, true and sensible, but of an impetuosity which is all the more dangerous for being ordinarily suppressed’5.

111

Portrait of Sir William Guise, 5th Bt. (1737–1783) of Elmore Court and Rendcombe, Gloucestershire

In 1764 Gibbon and Guise set o≠ for Italy, travelling in ‘great harmony and good humour’6 . Unlike many Grand Tourists, ‘raw boys just escaped from Eaton’ [sic], Guise ‘has seen a good deal of the world, & without being a profound scholar is far from wanting either parts or knowledge’7. The pair braved Mont Cenis (Gibbon travelling by chair, Guise electing to ride a mule), reaching Florence via Turin. During their four-month stay in Florence they visited the U≠izi fourteen times, met the view painter and caricaturist Thomas Patch and enjoyed the conversazioni of the diplomat Horace Mann, a distant relative of Guise.

Arriving in Rome on 2nd October, Guise and Gibbon marvelled at the Classical ruins in the company of the famous antiquary James Byres.

There Gibbon received the revelation that was to guide his life’s work: ‘It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind’8 .

Allan Ramsay, Costume study for the portrait of Sir William Guise, black chalk.

Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.

The two young men journeyed on to Naples, Ferrara, Padua and Venice, parting at Lyon in the summer of 1765. Back in England, they maintained their friendship in London through the weekly meetings of Gibbon’s Roman Club and Gibbon stayed with Guise in Gloucestershire in 1773.

William Guise settled down to the life of a landed gentleman, inheriting in 1769 the Baronetcy and the estate which had belonged to his family since the thirteenth century. Elmore Court, beautifully situated on a bend of the Severn south of Gloucester, is a sixteenth century house with early Georgian additions. However, in the eighteenth century the family preferred to live in their house at Rendcombe near Circencester, built in 1670 9. Sir William Guise was MP for Gloucestershire from 1770 until his death: speaking rarely in the House, but ‘a very independent man’, in the words of the Public Ledger 10. He died unmarried on 6th April 1783 and was buried at Elmore. Rendcombe was sold in the nineteenth century and Ramsay’s handsome portrait descended in the Guise family at Elmore Court.

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1 Smart 1992, p.133.

2 Ibid.

3 Gibbon to his stepmother Dorothea Gibbon, 18th June 1763. The Letters of Edward Gibbon: Volume One 1750–1773, ed. JE Norton, London 1956, p.151, no.48.

4 Le Journal de Gibbon à Lausanne, ed. Georges Bonnard, Lausanne 1945, p.31, 14th September 1763.

5 Op. cit., p.259, 6th April 1764. Gibbon wrote his Journal in French; the original reads: ‘Guise est brave, vrai et sensé, mais d’une impetuosité qui n’est que plus dangereuse pour etre supprimée à l’ordinaire’.

6 Letters op. cit., p.179: no.59, Gibbon to his father Edward Gibbon Snr,, Genoa 4th June 1764.

7 Ibid., p.165, letter 53 to Dorothea Gibbon, Lausanne 7th December 1763.

8 David Wormersley, ‘Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford 2004–10.

9 ‘Elmore Court, Gloucestershire’, Country Life, vol. XXXVI, 26th December 1914, p.851.

10 Quoted in Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1754–1790, vol. II, Members A-J, London 1964, p.560, ‘Guise, Sir William’.

CI THOMAS PATCH Exeter 1725 – 1782 Florence

View of the Piazza della Signoria, Florence

114 BRITISH PAINTINGS

View of the Arno with the Ponte Santa TrinitĂ , Florence

115

View of the Piazza della Signoria, Florence View of the Arno with the Ponte Santa Trinità, Florence

A pair, the former signed lower left: Patch f Oil on canvas: 34 B⁄c x 68 B⁄c in / 88 x 174 cm Frame size: 40 x 75 in / 101.6 x 190.5 cm PROVENANCE:

Acquired by a Frankfurt collector in the 1920s; by descent to his grandchild

Thomas Patch had a stormy relationship with the Papal authorities.

On 22nd October 1755 they concluded in a Papal decree banishing him from Rome. A plethora of reasons were proposed but the most likely was ‘B…..y . . . [as] his Boy [died] of the Pox’1 . Patch quickly found solace in Florence where his independent spirit flourished in the likeminded company of Sir Horace Mann and Lord Tylney. Such amenable surroundings enabled Patch to pursue di≠erent interests, though sadly none were fully realised.

Patch prided himself on his understanding of physiognomy and it was reported that he was able to tell ‘at sig[ht] what a man’s profession was, in what Country he was born & in what situation . . . what his religion was & to what sect of that religion he belong’d’2 . Perhaps he went someway to illustrate his theories in two sets of etchings, some of which are in soft-ground. In 1770 twenty-eight caricature heads were hurriedly printed and a similar series of twenty-five engravings of full-length figures were also published3. The humorous side of his study is shown in a number of painted caricature groups that he painted for the Grand Tourist trade.

Amongst the first connoisseurs to develop an interest in early Florentine art, Patch produced four volumes of engravings – more were projected – reproducing work by Giotto, Masaccio, Ghiberti and Fra Bartolommeo. The volume dedicated to Giotto had a lasting value as it reproduced the frescoes, now attributed to Aretino Spinelli, which had been destroyed in the fire at S Maria del Carmine in 17714 . To supplement these activities Patch made copies of Old Masters, he traded in them and he painted topographical views of the city and its

116 BRITISH PAINTINGS

immediate surroundings. In a letter Lord Charlemont his vedute were described as ‘a-bridge painting’.

In comparison to views of Venice and Rome, interest in Florentine vedute painting was sluggish. It was only Bernardo Bellotto’s visit to the city in 1742 that generated a new interest in the genre. His visit resulted in four pairs of cityscapes, three of which show views of the river, of which the best-known pair is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Those shared between the Beit Foundation, Russborough, Ireland and a private collection (with Richard Green in 1994) include figures added by the Florentine Giuseppe Zocchi.

Bellotto’s visit inspired the Marchese Andrea Gerini to commission Zocchi to produce engravings of landmarks of the city and its surroundings. Two sets of prints were published in 1744, one entitled Scelta XXIV vedute delle principali contrade, piazze, chiese, e palazzi della citta di Firenze. The other, a series of fifty engravings, showed Vedute delle ville e di altri luoghi della Toscana5. Surprisingly, the view of the Piazza della Signoria was omitted from Zocchi’s Scelta but, following the choice of subjects for a pair of paintings by Bernardo Bellotto now in Budapest, they became favourite views for Patch to paint.

The present pair of Florentine views reprise two pairs of cityscapes that Patch painted in the late 1760s. The first is recorded at Holland House, but was destroyed by enemy action in September 1940, and another pair was formerly in the collection of F Brodie Lodge, Rugby6 .

Patch’s canvases are proportionally wider than those painted by Bellotto. The first of the present pair shows a morning view of Piazza del Gran Duca (renamed the Piazza del Signoria after the Risorgimento) with the Loggia dei Lanzi in the centre of the composition (shown before it housed many more sculptures) and the tower of the Palazzo to the left that provides compositional balance. Compared to Bellotto’s Budapest view of 1742, the piazza seems larger, providing extra space for many diverse activities. To the right is a regiment of Austrian guards dressed in red-lined white uniforms; in the centre, as in Bellotto’s canvas, characters from the commedia dell’arte appear

on a makeshift stage and attract a sizeable crowd, including a coach that pauses before continuing on its way. In the foreground a variety of figures introduces the beholder into the piazza: a guard and constable appear on the left, a well-dressed man introduces himself to a lady in widow’s weeds and, to the right, a group of peasants and dogs is shown in animated conversation. The pendant canvas shows the River Arno looking upstream towards the Ponte S Trinità and the Ponte Vecchio with several boats full of people, one of which sports a flag showing the Austrian eagle of the Grand Duke. Strong afternoon sunshine catches the buildings along the Lungarno Corsini on the left, the masonry of the bridge and the façade of the Palazzo Frescobaldi on the right. On the left, over the riverside buildings and invisible from the artist’s viewpoint, peep the campanile and Brunelleschi’s dome and, providing a focus for the composition, further west is the tower of the Palazzo Grand Duca (now the Palazzo Vecchio).

Thomas Patch’s topographical works have only come to be appreciated in the last thirty years; previously, they were frequently attributed to any number of British artists. The variety of the figures, the cool palette and the subtleties of the skyscapes and reflections in the river make them amongst the most attractive vedute of the eighteenth century. The present canvases are recent discoveries and are exceptional additions to this interesting artist’s oeuvre.

Dr Hugh Belsey

1 2 3 4 5

6

FJB Watson, ‘Thomas Patch (1725–1782) notes on his life, together with a catalogue of his y vol.XXVIII, 1939–40, p.21. known works’, Walpole Society, Letter from Patch’s cousin, Gideon Caulet, dated Florence 14 October 1774 (Brinsley Ford, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800, New Haven and London 1997, p.746).

Watson, op. cit., pp.44–45, nos.57 and 58.

Watson, op. cit., p.46, nos.59–62.

Zocchi’s drawings for the engravings are in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (see Elaine Evans Dee, Views of Florence and Tuscany by Giuseppe Zocchi 1711–1767, International Exhibitions Foundation, Washington DC 1968–69). Marco Chiarini and Alessandro Marabottini, Firenze e la sua imagine, exhibition catalogue, Forte di Belvedere, Florence 1994 provides commentary for these works. For the relationship between Bellotto and Zocchi see Mina Gregori, ‘Vedutismo fiorentino: Zocchi e Bellotto’, Notizie da Palazzo Albani, XII (1–2), 1983, pp.242–50.

Watson, op. cit., pp.38, 39–40, nos.16 and 30. The Brodie Lodge canvases appeared at Sotheby’s on 19th November 1986 as lots 81 and 82.

CJ FRANCIS COTES RA London 1726 – 1770 Richmond

Portrait of Mary Anne Layard, later Duchess of Ancaster (1733–1804)

Signed and dated lower left: FCotes pxt. 1763 [FC in ligature] Pastel on paper: 23 B⁄c x 17 B⁄e in / 59.7 x 43.8 cm Frame size: 30 x 24 in / 76.2 x 61 cm PROVENANCE:

Private collection, UK Christie’s London, 2nd March 1976, lot 79 Richard Green, London, 1976 Private collection, Europe

Francis Cotes was a pupil of George Knapton (1698–1778), specialising in pastels in the early part of his career. This charming work of 1763, with its refined palette of blue, pink and grey, reflects the naturalistic pastel portraits of Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–1789), who was in England from 1753 to 1756. Mary Anne Layard epitomises female gentility: graceful, lively and modest, she turns her head as if to engage us in conversation, intelligence and good-humour in her sparkling blue eyes. Cotes uses the elaborate silk ru≠les and delicate lace of her fashionable dress as an opportunity to show o≠ his virtuosity as a pastellist, mirroring in the curves of her clothing the soft lines of Mary Anne’s face and hair.

Mary Anne (1733–1804) came from a distinguished Huguenot family, the daughter of Major Peter Layard and his wife Mary Anne Croze.

In 1769 she became the second wife of Lord Brownlow Bertie (1729– 1809), the third son of Peregrine, 2nd Duke of Ancaster and Kersteven, and his wife Jane Brownlow of Belton, Lincolnshire. Ancaster’s seat was Grimsthorpe Castle, also in Lincolnshire, designed in 1715 for the 1st Duke by Sir John Vanbrugh. As a third son, Brownlow Bertie was never expected to inherit; he was MP for Lincolnshire from 1761.

In 1760 he inherited the Lincolnshire estates, centred round Castle

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Bytham, of his mother’s uncle. The successive deaths of Brownlow’s elder brother and nephew meant that in 1779 he became 5th Duke of Ancaster, Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire, a Privy Councillor and Hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain. Mary Anne and Brownlow’s only child, Mary Elizabeth Bertie (d.1797), was born in 1772. In 1793 she married Thomas Colyear, 4th Earl of Portmore. The Dukedom of Ancaster became extinct upon the 5th Duke’s death in 1809.

Francis Cotes made a three-quarter-length oil painting of Mary Anne, which is clearly based on this pastel (private collection, UK)1 .

Neither signed nor dated, it shows Mary Anne in the same blue and pink dress, sitting in a giltwood chair, with a music score on her lap.

Edward Johnson considers the oil to be ‘typical of Cotes’s best work in the last years of his career, 1767–70. The sitter married Lord Brownlow Bertie in 1769, and the portrait was probably painted at that time’2 .

1 Edward Mead Johnson, Francis Cotes, Oxford 1976, pp.100–101, no.292; illus. fig. 106.

2 However, since sitters were usually portrayed in the fashion of the moment, it seems unlikely that the large-scale portrait of Mary Anne would have shown her in the fashion of six years earlier. The oil may be closer in date to the pastel of 1763.

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DA JOHAN ZOFFANY RA Frankfurt 1733 – 1810 Kew

Portrait of Claud Alexander (1752–1809) and his brother Boyd (1758–1825) with an Indian servant

Inscribed lower centre and right: Claud Alexander / B.1752 D.1809; Boyd Alexander / B.1758 D.1825; Zo≠any pinxit Oil on canvas: 89 B⁄c x 77 in / 227.5 x 195.5 cm Frame size: 99 B⁄c x 87 B⁄c in / 252.7 x 222.2 cm Painted in 1784 PROVENANCE:

Commissioned by Claud Alexander (1752–1809); by descent in the Alexander family of Ballochmyle House, Mauchline, Ayrshire LITERATURE:

Lady Victoria Manners and Dr GC Williamson, John Zo≠any, RA: His Life and Works 1735–1810, London 1920, pp.111, 172, illus.

Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture 1770–1825, London 1987, pp.134, 242–243, 456–457; pl.165 (erroneously as by AW Devis) BF Tobin, Picturing Imperial Britain: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenthcentury British Painting, Durham and London 1999, p.262, no.37 Mary Webster, Johan Zo≠any 1733–1810, New Haven and London 2011, pp.478–80, colour illus. and colour detail

Cosmopolitan and adventurous, Johan Zo≠any was born in Germany, trained in Rome, sought success in London and spent time in Florence painting the Tribuna of the U≠izi (1772–78; Royal Collection). Returning to England in 1779, he found his lively conversation pieces superseded by the ‘grand manner’ portraits of Reynolds and Romney and determined to try his fortune in India, where there were rich commissions from Honourable East India Company o≠icials.

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Zo≠any landed at Madras in July 1783 and by 15th September was in Calcutta, armed with an introduction from Lord Macartney, Governor of Madras, who wrote that he was ‘without dispute the greatest Painter that ever visited India’1 . Zo≠any received commissions from Warren Hastings, the cultured and sympathetic Governor of Bengal, including Colonel Mordaunt's cock match, c.1784–86 (Tate Britain, London) and a magnificent full-length of Hastings’s beloved wife Marian (1783/4; Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta). He enjoyed the patronage of other members of Calcutta high society, among them the Impeys, D’Oylys, Auriols and Dashwoods.

This lifesize portrait of Claud and Boyd Alexander with an Indian servant is among the most outstanding of Zo≠any’s Indian paintings.

Claud Alexander, Military Paymaster-General, is standing on a terrace as the sun goes down over the Hooghly river. The servant has just brought him a letter, which he discusses with his brother Boyd (in the green coat). Zo≠any’s early career as a painter of theatrical conversation pieces is reflected in the lively relationship between the brothers, the alert pointer and the serene gaze of the servant, whose features and exotic costume Zo≠any observes with exquisite delicacy. Mary Webster comments that this is ‘one of Zo≠any’s finest portrayals of an Indian’2 .

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Portrait of Claud Alexander (1752–1809) and his brother Boyd (1758–1825) with an Indian servant

The painting was begun in the intervals of Zo≠any’s work for Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of Bengal. He would have determined the composition and laid in the figures before Boyd Alexander left for Scotland in February 1784. In a letter to his family of 8th December 1784, Claud Alexander declared that he had sent down to the homeward-bound East Indiaman Southampton ‘my picture wch I request you will get out of the India House as soon as possible as it is a capital painting & I should be sorry if it got any damage; as it was painted by Zo≠any a member of the academy I imagine it will be exempted from Duties’3.

The portrait was intended to commemorate the fulfilment of Claud Alexander’s career in India and to remind him, when it hung in a country house in chilly Britain, of the vivid landscape and exotic peoples of the Subcontinent. By now a rich man, having amassed about £50,000, he was intending to return to his Scottish birthplace. In 1782 he had bought the estate of Ballochmyle at Mauchline, Ayrshire from Sir John Whitefoord, who had been ruined by the Ayr Bank Crash of 1772. The letter he holds, headed ‘Glasgow 22nd Decr.

1782’ and written by his cousin Alex Cunninghame4 , refers to this purchase, hence Claud’s animation and Boyd’s a≠ectionate delight.

Even the faithful pointer seems to share in the good news. Zo≠any captures the moment for which every East India Company nabob longed: the day on which he had gained fortune enough to retire to an estate in Britain. Warren Hastings, who left India in 1785, made enough money to repurchase his ancestral estate, Daylesford in Worcestershire5. Claud Alexander followed him to Britain the same year.

Claud Alexander was typical of the young men who set out to make their fortunes in India, many of whom, like Hastings himself, came from impoverished gentry families. Claud was the third son of Claud Alexander of Newton-upon-Ayr and his wife Joanna, daughter of Alexander Cunninghame. In 1771, warned that his ‘father’s situation and the large family he has to provide for make the greatest economy necessary’, Claud set sail for Calcutta as an East India Company writer, or clerk. Like most junior Company o≠icials, he was expected to supplement a meagre salary by private trade and commission business.

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Johan Zo≠any, Colonel Mordaunt's cock match, circa 1784–86.

Tate Britain, London.

In 1774 Claud was made first assistant to the Commissiary-General, who was responsible for auditing the army’s accounts, and by 1776 was his deputy. In 1780 he rose to the lucrative position of Military Paymaster-General.

Claud Alexander was not part of Warren Hastings’s inner circle, criticising him and inclining to take the part of Hastings’s arch-enemy, Philip Francis. By 1784, however, he had recognised Hastings’s extraordinary abilities, calling him ‘that worthy good man who has been the saving of us all’. He was a close friend of Hastings’s secretary George Bogle (1746–1781), a brilliant scholar and linguist whom Hastings sent on the first British mission to Tibet in 1774. When Bogle drowned in 1781, Claud looked after his estate and sent Bogle’s daughters Mary and Martha (by his Indian ‘bibi’) to live with Bogle’s family in Scotland.

Boyd Alexander went out to Bengal in 1776, but was never a covenanted servant of the East India Company. From 1778–89 he was Deputy Paymaster to the Garrisons at Patna. He left India in February 1784.

In 1786 Claud Alexander took up residence with his unmarried sister

Wilhelmina at Ballochmyle House, designed for the Whitefoords in 1760 by Robert Adam. Robert Burns lived nearby at Mossgiel Farm; one spring evening while wandering on the estate he met Wilhemina and composed the song The Bonnie Lass o’Ballochmyle. Claud was less than amused by its rather forward sentiments, but Wilhelmina is said to have treasured Burns’s manuscript all her life.

Energetic and entrepreneurial, Claud in 1787 founded the Catrine Cotton Works with David Dale, who had built the Lanark Mill with Richard Arkwright. In 1791 Claud wrote to his friend Miss Touchet in India: ‘I have such a large family in my newly erected village to look after, that these and the management of my estate keep me constantly employed. I have got a thousand souls in the village….not less than a ton of yarn is spun and sent to market every week. I have been finishing a house for a Sunday’s school, and a subscription is now going about for a church….They say it is not the employment of a gentleman to give bread to so many people….I meant to say that a cotton spinner is not the employment of a gentleman. But I am satisfied in my own mind that I am doing good’.

Claud Alexander married Helena, the daughter of Sir William Maxwell; her beauty was also celebrated by another local poet. They had three sons, Claud, William Maxwell and Boyd.

1 2 3 4

5

Quoted in Webster op. cit., p.453, to whose catalogue raisonné this essay is greatly indebted.

See Webster pp.478–80.

Ibid., p.480.

Private collection; typescript copy in the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh.

The original of the letter is in a private collection, Scotland; typescript copy in the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. I am grateful to Richard Wenger for the details of Claud Alexander’s biography and for drawing these letters to my attention.

Today in Gloucestershire.

DB ROBERT SALMON Whitehaven, Cumberland 1775 – circa 1850 Europe

An outward-bound, eighteen-gun merchantman at the ‘Tail of the Bank’, portrayed in three positions

Signed with initials and dated: R.S. 1814 Oil on canvas: 16 D⁄e x 25 B⁄c in / 42.5 x 64.8 cm Frame size: 26 x 35 in / 66 x 88 cm

Robert Salmon was in demand among Clyde-based shipowners for his portraits of ships depicted with crystalline accuracy. From 1811 he lived in Greenock, a few miles east of the burgeoning industrial city of Glasgow and opposite the ‘Tail of the Bank’ shown in this painting.

In Salmon’s day a sandbank impeded large vessels from easily progressing further up the Clyde. The ‘Tail of the Bank’ formed a natural anchorage within reach of Greenock’s maritime facilities, where ships could await a pilot or an agent’s instructions1 .

The elegant merchantman, outward bound for the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, is shown in three positions, with the Rosneath peninsula and the rugged Argyll mountains in the distance. In the main, port broadside view she is shown hove-to, that is with the yards on the mainmast backed to check the ship’s way and allow a pilot to come aboard. She wears a merchant houseflag with the letter B at the foremast and at the mainmast a long pennant worn naval fashion.

This suggests that she has been granted letters of marque as a privateer, authorized to capture enemy shipping. In 1814, when this picture was painted, Britain’s long struggle with Napoleon was reaching its climax and she was also at war with America, whose fledgling Navy had proved surprisingly deadly. Enterprising merchant captains could show their patriotism and earn rich pickings by preying on enemy commercial vessels, with the spoils divided between the merchantman and the British government. This merchantman carries eighteen guns for defence and attack and her black and white trim could deceive an enemy at a distance that she is a Royal Navy frigate.

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Catching the sunlight just to the left of the merchantman’s foremast is the white, neoclassical Rosneath Castle, built by the Duke of Argyll 1803–5 to replace the seventeenth century castle destroyed by fire in 1802.

Report based on information kindly provided by Mr Sam Davidson

1

See AS Davidson, Marine Art and the Clyde, Upton 2001, p.34.

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DC JOHN CONSTABLE RA East Bergholt, Su≠olk 1776 – 1837 Hampstead

A study of clouds, Hampstead Heath

Oil on paper laid down on board: 5 B⁄c x 8 B⁄c in / 14 x 21.5 cm Frame size: 9 B⁄c x 12 B⁄c in / 24.1 x 31.8 cm Painted circa 1821–22 PROVENANCE:

Probably Captain Charles Golding Constable (1821–1879), the artist’s son; his daughter Mrs Ella Mackinnon, whose home in Ramsgate was purchased by Sir Henry Newson-Smith (1854–1898); his son Sir Frank Newson-Smith (1879–1971); Newson-Smith Collection, Christie’s London, 26th January 1951, part of lot 16 (bt. Agnew’s) Agnew’s, London, stock no.14478, no.J0435; by whom sold to Lewis Douglas by 19th July 1951; by descent in an American private collection

From 1819 to 1826 John Constable rented various small houses in Hampstead, an escape in the summer months from the bustle and pollution of London, but an easy coach journey from his house and painting room in Charlotte Street. Hampstead Heath, with its panoramic views and fresh breezes, had attracted writers such as John Keats and Leigh Hunt and artists such as John Linnell, William Collins and FW Watts to live there in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. It was an ideal spot for Constable’s wife Maria, who was in delicate health, and her growing brood of children.

The family settled there permanently, at 6 Well Walk, in 1827.

In his early years at Hampstead, particularly in 1821–22, Constable produced an extraordinary series of nearly one hundred plein air

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sketches of skies. Mostly in oil on prepared paper, they range from full-size, 20 x 24 in standard paper sheets to fractions of such sheets: the present work, at 5 B⁄c x 8 B⁄c in, is roughly an eighth of a sheet1 .

Subjects range from hot sunsets viewed through a fringe of trees at the western edge of the Heath, to ‘pure’ cloud studies, to works such as the present one, where a delicate cloudscape is anchored and put in context by the merest line of horizon.

‘There is room enough for a natural painture’, Constable famously declared to John Dunthorne in 1802. The close, plein air observation of clouds was part of his search for a truthful depiction of natural phenomena, something explored in oil sketches by late eighteenth century painters like Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) and even by seventeenth century Dutch exponents of naturalistic landscape. Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707) is said to have made chalk sky studies at Hampstead2 . Some of Constable’s studies are annotated with the date, wind direction, time of day and previous or subsequent weather; they encompass not only the appearance of the moment, but the endlessly changing glories of nature.

When he made his Hampstead cloud studies, Constable had had twenty years of honing his eye and hand on small oil sketches made in the countryside round his parents’ home in East Bergholt. He kept a portable paint box at the ready, with a stack of paper supports tucked inside the lid, brushes, a palette knife and ‘a highly refined selection of pigments, based around opaque and transparent primary colours, with a few Mars earth pigments, black and white’3. He might have

Actual size

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A study of clouds, Hampstead Heath

just an hour to complete a sketch.

Constable’s concentration on sky studies in the summers of 1821 and 1822 was probably impelled by his concern to achieve a more subtle balance between sky and land in his Royal Academy ‘six-footers’, such as the celebrated Haywain shown at the RA in 1821 (National Gallery, London). Another famous letter, of 23rd October 1821 to his friend Archdeacon Fisher, is almost a manifesto of the importance of skies: ‘That Landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition – neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids….It will be di≠icult to name a class of Landscape, in which the sky is not the “key note”, the standard of “Scale”, and the chief “Organ of sentiment” ’4 .

As a miller’s son, himself briefly apprenticed to the family business, Constable had a countryman’s practical appreciation of clouds, which marked a change in wind direction or presaged a storm. Towards the end of his life, he was interested in the burgeoning science of meteorology, owing a copy of Thomas Forster’s Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena, first published in 1813. Constable’s sky studies, however, are never imported wholesale into any of his large paintings, and are far from being dry, scientific documents. With its extraordinary dexterity, harmonious composition, balance of earth and sky and subtle tonal shifts, the present Study of clouds is truly an expression of Constable’s genius and his belief that the natural world reflects the glories of its Maker.

The authenticity of this painting, which was unknown to Graham Reynolds when he compiled his catalogue raisonnés of Constable’s work in 1984–96, has been confirmed by Graham Reynolds, Sarah Cove and Peter Bower.

1

See New York, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Constable’s Skies, 2004, ed. Frederic Bancroft, pp.123–152: Sarah Cove, ‘Very great di≠iculty in composition and execution: the materials and techniques of Constable’s sky and cloud studies of the 1820s’.

2 See Constable’s Skies, pp.29–46, Anne Lyles, ‘ “The glorious pageantry of heaven”: an assessment of the motives behind Constable’s ‘skying’ ’.

3 Cove, op. cit., p.124.

4 John Constable’s Correspondence, ed. RB Beckett, Ipswich 1968, vol. VI, The Fishers, pp.76–77.

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DD CHINESE SCHOOL c.1870 – 1875

A view of Shamian Island, Canton

Oil on canvas: 26 B⁄e x 56 B⁄c in / 66.7 x 143.5 cm Frame size: 34 x 63 in / 86.3 x 160 cm PROVENANCE:

Private collection, UK Leggatt Brothers, London, 1962; by whom sold to a private UK collector on 19th November 1962

From 1757 until 1842 Canton (modern Guangzhou) was the only place in China where the Qing Emperors alllowed Westerners to trade. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking, which ended the First Opium War, established five Treaty Ports: Shanghai, Canton, Ningpo, Fuchow and Amoy, while Hong Kong was ceded to the British. However, tensions between the foreigners and the Chinese remained high. When the European factories (trading houses) were destroyed in the Second Opium War of 1856–60, it was decided to rebuild on Shamian Island, a few hundred yards up the Pearl River delta, to the west of the city of Canton1 .

Shamian, which means ‘sand surface’, was largely reclaimed by 1861, political unrest in the rest of China supplying a large pool of labour which flocked to Canton. The island was embanked and laid out with tree-lined streets and rectangular plots, gradually sold o≠ over the next decades. On the north side, away from the Pearl River, ran a canal. The island was linked to the Canton suburbs by bridges guarded by customs houses; no Chinese were allowed to live on Shamian.

Shamian developed first along the southern, river front, with about a dozen buildings erected by 1865. This painting dates from circa 1870–75 and shows the Protestant church, Christ Church, built in 1864–5, next to the British Consular buildings which are surrounded

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by vegetation. Craft ply the river, from Chinese junks and sampans, to small local vessels in American and British ownership, to the handsome American three-master in the left background. Shamian was regarded by the Western merchants as a very pleasant place to live, a ‘Paradise’: ‘everything is supposed to be nearly perfection, all the residents being regarded as members of one large family’2 .

A Garden Fund had allowed the planting of banyans, willows, roseapple, mango, loquat and wampee trees, which in time filled with the sound of ‘wild pigeons and ring-doves with their constant cooings…. fringilla with their pretty twitterings’ and ‘the impudent mina with his eccentric sort of whistle’3. By the mid-1870s residents could while away their leisure with riding, billiards, boating, rackets and bowling.

Little wonder that ‘here is transported an English social life so completely fulfilling all English requirements, that the majority of the inhabitants rarely enter the city!’4 . Shamian Island remains today a charming, leafy enclave in the bustling city of Guangzhou.

1 2 3 4

See Patrick Connor, The Hongs of Canton, London 2009, pp.241–259.

Walter William Mundy, Canton and the Bogue, 1875, p.81; quoted in Connor op. cit., p.249.

RC Hurley, The Tourists’ Guide to Canton, 1898, p.9, quoted in Connor p.245.

Constance Gordon Cumming, Wanderings in China, rev. edn. 1887, p.27; quoted in Connor p.245.

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ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

JACOB BOGDANI Eperjes 1658 – 1724 London Jacob Bogdani was born in Eperjes in the County of Sáros, northern Hungary (the present day Presov, Slovakia), the son of Lewis and Susanna Bogdani, who were probably minor gentry. The threat from the Turks, who besieged Vienna in 1683, and the di≠iculties faced by the Protestant Bogdani living in a corner of the Catholic Austro-Hungarian empire, sent the young man westward. He worked in Amsterdam from 1684 to 1686, sharing a house with the Hamburg still life painter Ernst Stuven (c.1657–1712). He had settled in London by 1st June 1688 and became known as ‘The Hungarian’. Bogdani lived in the Covent Garden area for the rest of his life, marrying Elizabeth Hemmings in 1693.

For a decade or more after settling in England, Bogdani specialised in still lifes of fruit and flowers. In 1694 he supplied flowerpieces (now lost) for Queen Mary’s Looking Glass Closet in her beloved Water Gallery at Hampton Court, complementing the exquisite carved flowers and fruit provided by Grinling Gibbons. Charles Hatton commented in 1697: ‘I was this afternoon to see ye few best plants yet remaining ye noble collection of plants at Hampton very well painted by one Bugdan, a Hungarian and excellent painter of fruits and flowers’. Among the works were ‘very fine tulipps, painted from tulipps growing in my Lord Dovers garden [at Cheveley near Newmarket]’. In 1698 the 1st Duke of Devonshire bought flowerpieces from Bogdani for the decoration of his new country house, Chatsworth.

Around 1691 Bogdani explained his working methods: ‘He paint[s] in the Spring flowers & in the Somer flowers & Fruits when they are out Lobsters and oyster pieces. In the Winter pieces of Fowell & plate’. The production of bird pieces gradually became a greater part of his oeuvre.

A number were owned by Admiral George Churchill, younger brother of the Duke of Marlborough and Ranger of the Great and Little Park at Windsor, who built a celebrated aviary near his house. Churchill’s exotic birds were undoubtedly a great inspiration to Bogdani, who must have made detailed studies, in oils or perhaps in watercolour, upon which he based his deft assemblages of birds.

Queen Anne acquired several of George Churchill’s bird paintings by Bogdani after the Admiral’s death in 1710; they remain in the Royal Collection. Her brother-in-law William III bought works by Bogdani for his palace at Dieren in Holland; William’s favourite Arnold van Keppel, Earl of Albemarle, had twenty-two Bogdanis at his Huis de Voorst near Zutphen. Bogdani’s patrons also included Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Sir Robert Walpole. Bogdani prospered in England, amassing property at Finchley, Spalding in Lincolnshire and Hitchen in Hertfordshire, becoming Lord of the Manor of Hitchen.

Bogdani’s daughter Elizabeth married the Transylvanian still life and bird painter Tobias Stranover (1684–1756), who was his nephew and worked in Bogdani’s studio. Bogdani’s son William was also trained by him as an artist, although he later took a post with the Board of Ordnance and became a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. Jacob Bogdani died at his house in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in 1724. By a quirk of fate, some of his fortune eventually trickled down to the great landscape painter John Constable, as Bogdani’s grandson William Maurice Bogdani married Deborah Rhudde, kinswoman of Constable’s formidable grandfather-in-law, Dr Durand Rhudde, Rector of East Bergholt.

The work of Jacob Bogdani is represented in the British Royal Collection; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Chatsworth House, Derbyshire; Nottingham Castle Museum; the National Gallery of Hungary, Budapest and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.

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EDWAERT COLLIER Breda, active before 1663 – 1708 London Edwaert Collier was born in Breda in the province of Brabant. He may well have received his training as a painter in Haarlem, where he was a guild member, according to the list of members drawn up by Vincent van der Vinne in the eighteenth century on the basis of seventeenthcentury records now lost. Collier probably painted his earliest work in Haarlem where, already in 1669, three of his paintings were recorded in an inventory. In or before 1667, he must have moved to Leiden, where his residence is substantially documented from that year until 1693.

Subsequently he left for London, where he appears to have remained until c.1702, judging from inscriptions (on letters) in his paintings. In 1702 he appears to have returned to Leiden, staying there until 1706, but a last known work dated 1707 is signed with the addition fecit London. His burial in St James’s church, Piccadilly was recorded on 9th September 1708.

Edwaert Collier’s substantial oeuvre consists of three types of still lifes, in addition to a small number of genre paintings and portraits as well as the occasional history scene. Among his still lifes, his compositions with a vanitas connotation are the most frequent. Less frequently do his ‘traditional’ still lifes of smoking utensils or victuals occur. Third – from a chronological point of view, since Collier appears to have taken up the subject only after 1690 – are the trompe l’oeil paintings of letter racks and of prints displayed on wooden boards.

JOHN CONSTABLE RA East Bergholt, Su≠olk 1776 – 1837 Hampstead John Constable, with Turner, is the most important British landscape painter of the nineteenth century, revered for his ‘naturalism’ while Turner’s landscapes suggest grandeur and generalisation. Unlike Turner, Constable did not roam far abroad on picturesque tours, instead creating his art from familiar, much-loved scenery.

Constable, the son of a prosperous miller, was born in East Bergholt, Su≠olk in 1776. In 1799 he attended the Royal Academy Schools and had informal tuition from the landscape artist Joseph Farington, as well as copying Old Masters. Constable returned to East Bergholt and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802, surviving on family money and a modest portrait practice. In 1806 he toured the Lake District, making watercolours of the ‘sublime’ scenery.

‘Truth to nature’ was Constable’s credo; from 1808 he made oil sketches from nature as well as pencil drawings of parts of his compositions.

These were then used as aide-memoires for an exhibition piece painted in the studio, such as Flatford lock and mill (RA 1812), a view of his father’s mill. In 1811 Constable visited Salisbury at the Bishop of Salisbury's invitation and formed a lifelong friendship with the Bishop’s nephew, the Rev. John Fisher. He returned to Salisbury throughout his life, painting some of his finest, most moving pictures of the Cathedral in sunshine, showers and overarched by a rainbow. Like the productive fields of the Stour valley where he grew up, the Cathedral represented for the deeply conservative Constable the core values of England which must be preserved in a changing, often threatening world.

In 1809 Constable had fallen in love with Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of the Rector of East Bergholt, but they were not able to marry until 1816, because her family (quite correctly) doubted Constable’s ability to support a wife. That year Constable moved permanently to London and began to produce more ambitious paintings such as Whitehall Stairs, June 18th 1817 (the opening of Waterloo Bridge) (1817; exhibited 1832; Tate Gallery, London) and the ‘six-footer’ Stour view The white horse (Frick Collection, New York) which was shown to critical acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1819.

135

That same year Constable became an Associate of the Royal Academy. Seeking fresh air for his consumptive wife, he rented a house at Hampstead and from circa 1820–22 produced a series of brilliant oil studies of skies, noting times of day and weather conditions. From 1824 family holidays in Brighton inspired oils and watercolours of panoramic coast scenes full of light and air.

In 1824 Constable sold The haywain (RA 1821; National Gallery, London) to the Parisian dealer John Arrowsmith. The painting won a gold medal in the Paris Salon and Constable’s naturalistic approach to landscape and free, expressive brushwork was highly influential on French painters such as Delacroix and Huet. In 1828 Maria Constable died; the following year her devastated husband was elected RA and remarked bitterly that there was now no beloved wife to make the honour sweet. Constable’s bleakness is reflected in stormy, expressionistic paintings like Hadleigh castle, 1828–9 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT), where the ruin symbolises himself.

In 1830 Constable supervised John Lucas’s mezzotints after his paintings, English landscape. Constable increasingly saw landscape in terms of chiaroscuro – composition unified by light and shade – and was less interested in individual elements, symbolism, or ‘historical motifs’ in his painting. Like Turner, though with a totally di≠erent approach, he believed passionately in the importance of landscape painting within the heirarchy of artistic genres. Landscape painting was not inferior, but was a paramount expression of a nation’s genius. Constable was an excellent, dedicated teacher at the Royal Academy Schools and lectured widely on the history of landscape painting. A touchy, a≠ectionate and utterly sincere man, he died at Hampstead on 31st March 1837.

The work of John Constable is represented in the National Gallery, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Tate Gallery, London; the National Gallery, Washington DC and the Louvre, Paris.

FRANCIS COTES RA London 1726 – 1770 Richmond Francis Cotes was born in London, the son of an apothecary and the elder brother of the miniaturist Samuel Cotes (1734–1818). Around 1741 he was apprenticed to George Knapton, who taught him to paint in oil and draw in crayon. Cotes was influenced by the popular pastel portraits of Rosalba Carriera, but he used bolder tones and stronger lines. In 1751 he made pastel portraits of the two beautiful Gunning sisters, Maria and Elizabeth (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh and National Portrait Gallery, London); his work reached a wide public through engravings after them.

Cotes’s pastels were influenced by the naturalism of Jean-Etienne Liotard, who was in England from 1753 to 1756. This new naturalistic style is epitomised by Cotes’s portrait of Taylor White, 1758 (Coram Foundation), in which the Treasurer of the Foundling Hospital is shown checking ledgers.

In the 1760s Cotes began to paint more often in oils. His charm, informality and lightness of touch in this medium rivalled the work of Ramsay or Reynolds. From around 1764 Cotes employed the drapery painter Peter Toms and his output greatly increased. In 1765 he married and became a director of the Society of Artists, with which he had exhibited since 1760; he also took on the pastellist John Russell as a pupil. Cotes was influential in the setting up of the Royal Academy in 1768. He presented the case for an academy to George III, after painting two highly successful double portraits in oil for the royal family in 1767, Queen Charlotte with Princess Charlotte and Princess Louisa and Queen Carolina Matilda of Denmark (Royal Collection). Cotes died at Richmond in 1770, at the height of his powers, after taking a drastic medicine for gallstones.

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AELBERT CUYP 1620 – Dordrecht – 1691 Aelbert Cuyp is one of the most important Dutch landscapists of the seventeenth century, despite being virtually unknown outside his home town of Dordrecht in his lifetime. He was rediscovered and avidly collected in England from the late eighteenth century. Born in 1620, Aelbert trained with his father, the history, portrait and genre painter Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp (1594–c.1652). He provided the backgrounds to two of his father’s group portraits in 1641. By this time Cuyp had begun to travel in Holland and along the Rhine; in late 1651 or 1652 he journeyed up the Rhine and Waal to Nijmegen, Cleve and Emmerich, making drawings which provided motifs for later landscapes.

In 1658 Cuyp married Cornelia Boschman (1617–1689), the widow of a wealthy Regent, gaining him a fortune and social prominence. The family moved to a larger house in the Wijnstraat in 1663 and Cuyp and his wife owned large tracts of land around Dordrecht. In 1660 he became a Deacon and in 1672 an Elder of the Reformed Church. He was a Regent of the infirmary in 1673 and a member of the High Court of South Holland in 1679. At his wife’s death Cuyp’s estate was worth 42,000 guilders. Their only child Arendina (1659–1702) married Pieter Onderwater in 1690.

Cuyp’s earliest works are three landscapes dated 1639; in the first half of the 1640s he was influenced by the tonal, river landscapes of Jan van Goyen (1596–1656) and Salomon van Ruysdael (after 1603–1670). After 1645 he adopted the crystalline, Italianate light of painters such as Jan Both (c.1615–1652). Milking scenes became a dominant theme in the years after 1645, followed around 1650 by simple landscapes with herds of cattle: both reflect the growth of the dairy industry around Dordrecht. The Distant view of Dordrecht (the ‘Large Dort’) (National Gallery, London) combines a milking scene with a profile of the city.

Around 1650 Cuyp painted a number of figure scenes and portraits, including equestrian portraits like that of Michiel and Cornelis Pompe van Meerdervoort with their tutor and coachman, c.1652–3 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) which introduce the aristocratic theme of hunting. He painted views of Dordrecht, shipping and the occasional winter landscape bathed in a golden glow. Cuyp’s production seems to have declined after marriage in 1658 brought him increased money and status. His last works, probably from the end of the 1650s, are broad, open landscapes populated by elegant riders and shepherds, such as the River landscape with two horsemen (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), which is based on Rhineland scenery from a sketch made near Cleve. Aelbert Cuyp died in Dordrecht in 1691.

The work of Aelbert Cuyp is represented in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Kunsthalle, Bremen; the National Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

JAN FRANS VAN DAEL Antwerp 1764 – 1840 Paris Jan Frans van Dael was one of the most highly regarded painters of still lifes of flowers and fruit in Paris during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Van Dael had moved to Paris from his city of birth, Antwerp, at the age of twenty-two, after having successfully completed his studies in architecture at the Antwerp academy. In the French capital, however, he established himself as an artist and soon received important commissions for decorative paintings, among others in the castles of Saint Cloud, Bellevue and Chantilly. Beginning in the 1790s, he began to establish himself as a painter of still lifes of flowers and fruit, supported and encouraged by the leading painter of this genre of the time, Gerard van Spaendonck (1746–1822). In 1793 van Dael received the privilege to work in an apartment in the Louvre. He exhibited paintings at the annual Paris Salons many times and received various medals and distinctions over the years, in France and in Belgium, as well as in Holland. He also presided over a studio at the Sorbonne university, where he trained several pupils. Christiaan van Pol, Elise Bruyère and Adèle Riché were among them. After his death in March 1840, van Dael was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery, next to van Spaendonck.

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GERARD DONCK (Active 1630 – 1640) Very little is known about the artist Gerard Donck. No documents have been discovered about his life and the only evidence of his work is his signed paintings and prints. He is sometimes called Gerard van Donck, but on insu≠icient evidence. His earliest dated work is of 1627 and latest 1640. He painted market scenes and street vendors (see for example, The vegetable seller, Sotheby’s New York, 12th January 1995, lot 104; and Peasant selling eggs, Christie’s London, 9th July 1993, lot 164), high life genre scenes (see sale Koller, 13th November 2000, lot 1049), and small scale portraits (see for example The portrait of Jan van Hensbeeck and his wife, Maria Koeck, with an infant in a landscape, National Gallery, London, inv. no.1305). The style of his portaits resembles that of Thomas de Keyser, Hendrick Pot and Pieter Codde (see especially Portrait of a family in an interior, Sotheby’s New York, 17th October 1997, lot 78), so that it has been assumed he worked in Amsterdam and possibly Haarlem.

He was also active as a printmaker and illustrator. Donck engraved or provided the designs for most or all of the illustrations in JH Krul’s Eerlycke Tytkorting (Haarlem 1634), one of which is inscribed: G Donck in Venter [sic]. These engravings were reprinted in JH Krul’s De Pampiere Wereld, (Amsterdam 1644).

PIETRO FABRIS Fl. Naples 1756 – 1784 Pietro Fabris is said to have been English and sometimes added the phrase ‘English painter’ to his signature. He specialised in Neapolitan genre scenes and landscapes with pure, bright colours that capture the intense Mediterranean light. Fabris’s earliest dated paintings are the four Scenes of popular life, 1756–7, in a Neapolitan private collection. He depicted Court events, such as The departure of Charles III of Bourbon for Spain, 1759 (c.1759; Palacio Real, Aranjuez) and panoramas of the Bay of Naples with folkloric scenes in the foreground, for example peasants feasting and dancing the tarantella. The contrast between the grandeur of the city’s architecture and the impoverished but vibrant life of its lazzaroni accorded with the myth of ‘miseria e nobiltà’ that fascinated visitors to Naples.

Fabris enjoyed royal commissions, including Ferdinand IV after a boar hunt, 1773 (Palazzo Reale, Caserta), but was also popular with Grand Tourists and expatriots domiciled in the city. Among his most important patrons were the British envoy Sir William Hamilton (1731–1803) and his friend Kenneth Mackenzie, Lord Fortrose and later 1st Earl of Seaforth (1744–1781). The concert party, 1770 (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh) shows the interior of Fortrose’s apartment in Naples with Sir William Hamilton playing the violin and the fourteen-year-old Mozart and his father Leopold seated at the keyboard.

In 1768 Fabris exhibited two oil paintings of Posillipo at the Free Society and accompanied Sir William Hamilton to Sicily. In 1769 Hamilton sent two of his works to George III. Fabris exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1772. He was one of the first artists in Naples to use gouache, providing fifty-eight gouaches which were engraved and hand-coloured to illustrate Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776; supplement 1779). They range from landscape views to scientific illustrations of volcanic materials. Fabris’s date of death is unknown, but he is last mentioned by a Grand Tourist in 1784.

The work of Pietro Fabris is represented in the Palazzo Real, Aranjuez; the Palazzo Reale, Caserta; the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; the British Royal Collection; Compton Verney, Warwickshire and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

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JAN VAN GOYEN Leiden 1596 – 1656 The Hague Jan van Goyen was a prolific painter and draughtsman whose career spanned more than thirty-five years. During his early life he was influenced

by Esaias van de Velde, the first Dutch painter to abandon the mannerisms of the Flemish style in favour of more naturalistic landscape views.

He then began to paint in the new Haarlem landscape idiom, distinguished by its atmospheric quality and monochromatic palette, richly varied in tone. Van Goyen, Pieter de Molijn and Salomon van Ruysdael were the principal exponents of this style.

Van Goyen was born in Leiden in 1596 and from 1606 was the pupil successively of the Leiden painters Coenraet van Schilperoort, Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburgh, Jan Arentsz. de Man and the glass-painter Cornelis Cornelisz. Clock. He then studied for two years with Willem Gerritsz. at Hoorn. Van Goyen went back to Leiden and worked on his own; at the age of about nineteen he travelled in France for a year and from 1617–18 he was the pupil of Esaias van de Velde in Haarlem. Van de Velde strongly influenced the style of van Goyen’s early paintings from 1620 to 1626.

Van Goyen went to The Hague in 1632, where he acquired citizenship in 1634. During that same year he worked in Haarlem, painting in the house of Isaac van Ruysdael, the brother of Salomon. He was a hoofdman of The Hague Guild in 1638 and 1640, and in 1651 he painted for the Burgomasters’ Room in The Hague Town Hall a panoramic view of the town, for which he received 650 guilders. Despite his astounding rate of production, van Goyen was constantly beset with financial di≠iculties; he incurred great losses in the ‘tulipmania’ of 1636–7 and died insolvent.

The work of Jan van Goyen is represented in the National Gallery, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Louvre, Paris; the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

FRANCESCO GUARDI 1712 – Venice – 1793 Francesco Guardi was born in Venice in 1712, scion of a family from the Val di Sole in the Trentino, on the Austrian/Swiss border, which had been granted a patent of nobility in 1643. His father Domenico (1678–1716) trained as a painter in Vienna and settled in Venice around 1700. Guardi trained as a figure painter in the studio of his elder brother Antonio (1699–1760), whose patrons included the major collector Marshal Johann von der Schulenburg, commander of the Venetian armies. Together the Guardi brothers collaborated on altarpieces, history subjects and copies of works by other artists. Their sister Cecilia married Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770) and their brother Nicolò (1715–1786) was also a painter.

Guardi was inscribed in the Venetian fraglia in 1761 and appointed Professor of Perspective at the Venetian Academy in 1784.

It seems likely that Guardi was tempted to try his hand at view painting before Canaletto’s return from England in 1755, executing copies of engravings after Canaletto; his marriage in 1757 may have impelled him to set out in new directions. His first – and only – dated painting is the The festival of Giovedì Grasso in the Piazzetta of 1758 (private collection). Guardi received many commissions from Grand Tourists and foreigners resident in Venice, as well as Italian noble families. His earlier work is more crisply painted; as the years went by, Guardi was increasingly interested in dissolving the exquisite architecture of Venice in light and atmosphere.

Around 1776–78 Guardi made a celebrated set of twelve depictions of ceremonies involving the Doge (eleven now in the Louvre, one in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), which are based on prints by Brustolon after drawings by Canaletto. Guardi also made six delightful paintings of the festivities surrounding the ‘incognito’ visit of the ‘Conte del Nord’ (the future Tsar Paul I of Russia) to Venice in 1782. In the same year he was commissioned by Pietro Edwards, Inspector of Fine Arts of the Venetian Republic, to execute four views recording the visit of Pope Pius VI. Guardi travelled in the Trentino in 1778 and 1782 and died in Venice in 1793.

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The work of Francesco Guardi is represented in the National Gallery, London; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

CORNEILLE DE LA HAYE called CORNEILLE DE LYON The Hague c.1500/1510 – 1575 Lyon Corneille de Lyon was trained either in The Hague, where he was born, or perhaps in Antwerp. Nothing is known of him before 1533, when he was recorded in Lyon. It was probably the same year, when the French Court was resident in Lyon, that Corneille was made painter to Queen Eleanor, the second wife of François I and sister of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. By 1541 Corneille was painter to the Dauphin (later Henry II) and when the new king succeeded to the throne in 1547 and made his state entry into Lyon the following year, Corneille became Peintre du Roi. Corneille was naturalised as a Frenchman in December 1547 and married Marguerite Fradin, the daughter of a prosperous Lyonnais printer. His studio was very successful until around 1565, the year that he visited Antwerp. Thereafter it declined, probably because the upheavals of the Wars of Religion and the plague of 1564 caused economic recession in Lyon. Corneille was a Protestant, like most of those in the circle in which he moved, while Lyon reverted to the Catholic faction in the 1560s. In 1569 the artist and his family were forced to recant their Protestant faith.

However, Corneille’s post as ‘peintre et valet de chambre du roy’ was reconfirmed in 1574. Corneille died in Lyon and was buried on 8th November 1575. His children Corneille de La Haye II (b.1543), Jacques de La Haye and Clémence de La Haye were all painters and the family produced many artists down to the eighteenth century.

Corneille did not sign his work and his oeuvre has been reconstructed largely by stylistic comparisons. It was thought that he was purely a Court painter, until the rediscovery of the portrait of the Lyon merchant Pierre Aymeric, 1534 (Musée du Louvre, Paris) in 1976. An inscription on the back of the work in Aymeric’s hand states that he was painted by Corneille. As well as royal and aristocratic portraits, such as those of Claude de France (Musée Pushkin, Moscow) and Anne de Montmorency (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Corneille painted many members of the haute bourgeoisie. They are all small-scale, bust- or half-length portraits set against a green, blue or occasionally black background, with the sitter lit from the left. Some, particularly the royal portraits, show the sitter looking out of the picture to the left. Many, however, engage the viewer with a direct gaze, conveying an extraordinary sense of life. Corneille did not use underdrawing but created the most delicate e≠ects, such as the shape of the eyes, simply with brush tip. His earlier work uses stronger shadows; his later, like the exquisite Portrait of a boy in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, employs a dancing lightness of brushwork and less contrast between the sitter and the background.

The work of Corneille de Lyon is represented in the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Pushkin Museum, Moscow; the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

WILLEM CLAESZ. HEDA Haarlem c.1596 – 1680 Haarlem Willem Claesz. Heda was born in Haarlem, son of the Haarlem town architect Claes Pietersz. The family was well o≠. The painter adopted the name Heda from his mother’s side of the family. His uncle was the painter Cornelis Claesz. Heda (c.1566–1619). Nothing is known about Willem Heda’s artistic training, but this uncle may have been his first teacher. From 1631 his name can be found in the Haarlem guild records, but already in 1620, in a Haarlem document, Willem Claesz. Heda is referred to as a painter. In 1628, the town chronicler Samuel Ampzing, in his

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description of Haarlem, praised Heda’s still lifes with victuals (‘banketten’) in one breath with those of Pieter Claesz. No examples that can be dated before 1629 are known, however. There is evidence that Heda did draw and paint religious subjects about 1626–28 – a tryptych from 1626 is known. He was also active as a portraitist, with a group portrait of a family from 1647. Between 1637 and 1652 the artist served repeatedly on the committee of the painters’ guild. He trained several pupils, among them his son Gerret Heda (1622/24–1649). As well as being a painter, Heda owned a brewery later in life.

Willem Claesz. Heda’s earliest known still life is a vanitas piece from 1628 (Museum Bredius, The Hague). Heda often dated his still lifes, which provides us with a clear notion of his artistic development. From 1629, he produced many ‘monochrome banquet’ pieces of a very high quality.

His work from the 1630s, and especially that from the first half of that decade, is the most refined. During the 1640s, routine seems to have taken over to some degree, but his work still is of a very high quality. To our knowledge, Willem Claesz. Heda painted still lifes until some ten years before his death, but from the mid 1650s his advanced age clearly a≠ected the quality of his work, which declined considerably, as did his production. He died in Haarlem in 1680.

JACOB VAN HULSDONCK Antwerp 1582 – 1647 Not many details about the life of Jacob van Hulsdonck are known. He was born in Antwerp in 1582, and is reported to have received at least part of his training in Middelburg. By 1608 he was a master-painter in Antwerp, where he lived in the same house from the time of his marriage in the following year until his death, thirty-eight years later. Despite his long career, not many still lifes – as far as we know his only subject – by van Hulsdonck are known to us, far fewer than a hundred. More than half of van Hulsdonck’s known paintings are signed with his characteristic full signature in capitals, the I linked to the obliquely placed left leg of the H to make up the V and usually situated to the left or right on the table’s edge. Some examples are signed with a monogram only, and only one dated painting is known thus far, an example of his earliest type of still life, painted in 1614: a banquet-piece, now in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. In such early works, the table is partly covered with a white cloth; all of his later still lifes are set on plain wooden tables of which the grain of the wood is rendered with a high degree of detail.

Occasionally these tables are partly covered with a dark (greyish- or greenish-black) cloth.

Although, due to the of the lack of dated works, it is di≠icult to establish a firm artistic chronology, in general it appears that those still lifes by van Hulsdonck in which the edge of the table is close to the lower end of the picture plane and in which the tabletop is shown from a fairly high viewpoint belong to his earlier production. The side of the table is not shown in these still lifes. In what must be van Hulsdonck’s later works, some space is left under the table, usually one side of the table is shown, and the still life is viewed more frontally and in a slightly less rigid composition. Also, in the course of time the artist’s colouring appears to have become less subdued and his backgrounds became less dark.

Meticulous attention to detail is found throughout van Hulsdonck’s oeuvre and this may in part account for the restricted number of pictures he appears to have produced.

JAN LIEVENS Leiden 1607 – 1674 Amsterdam Jan Lievens was born in Leiden in 1607, the son of the embroiderer, hatmaker and hatseller Lieven Hendricxz. De Rechte (d. 1612) and his wife Machteld Jansdr. van Noortsant (d. 1622). At the age of eight he became the pupil of the Leiden painter Joris van Schooten (c.1587–c.1653) and circa 1617–19 studied in Amsterdam with the history painter Pieter Lastman, who influenced his early work. Lievens returned to Leiden as an

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independent master and from 1625 to 1631 worked closely with fellow townsman Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), possibly sharing a studio with him. Rembrandt had begun his training around 1620 and Lievens had the advantage of him in these early years.

Lievens’s use of half-length figures and strong chiaroscuro was influenced by the Utrecht Caravaggist Gerrit van Honthorst. Around 1625 both he and Rembrandt made their first prints. After 1628 Lievens’s use of colour became more monochromatic, with increasing use of impasto, shown for example in the grisaille oil sketch Samson and Delilah, circa 1628 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). His work was bought by the Stadholder Frederick Henry and A man reading by a fire (untraced) entered the collection of Charles I of England.

Constantijn Huygens the Elder, the Stadholder’s secretary, praised both Rembrandt and Lievens in his autobiography (1629–31), commenting that Lievens excelled Rembrandt in power of invention and daring subjects and designs. Lievens painted a portrait of Huygens in the winter of 1629–30 (Musée Municipal, Douai, on loan to the Rijksmuseum). Outstanding among Lievens’s works of these years is Eli and Samuel of 1631 (the year that Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam) which is now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. From 1632 to 1635 Lievens was in England, where he painted portraits of the Royal family and court, though none has survived. He met Anthony van Dyck and his portrait style and colouring were influenced both by van Dyck and by the Italian paintings in Charles I’s collection. In 1635 Lievens was registered in the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp. He adopted the Flemish Baroque manner of Rubens and van Dyck in altarpieces such as The Holy Family with the young Baptist, still in situ in the church of S Carlo Borromeo. He collaborated with the Flemish still-life artist Jan van de Hecke, and also produced landscape drawings and paintings that evince a subtle use of colour. In 1638 Lievens married Susanna de Nole, daughter of the sculptor Andries Colyn de Nole, but financial di≠iculties forced him to move to Amsterdam in 1644, where he remained for the rest of his life. He visited The Hague in 1650 and 1670, Berlin (circa 1653–5), Cleves (1664) and Leiden (1670–72).

In 1648 Lievens married Cornelia de Bray, daughter of the Haarlem painter Jan de Bray. He received many important commissions, adapting his style to the classicizing taste of the northern Netherlands. Amalia van Solms, the widow of the Stadholder, commissioned him in 1650 to contribute Five Muses (still in situ) to the Oranjezaal of the Huis ten Bosch in The Hague. In 1653–4 Lievens worked in Berlin for Amalia’s daughter Louisa Henrietta and her husband Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg. In 1656 and 1661 he contributed large paintings on Roman themes to the new Stadhuis (now Royal Palace) on the Dam in Amsterdam. He also undertook a number of prestigious portrait commissions in his Amsterdam years, including a portrait of Adriaen Trip, 1644 (collection of S Laman Trip, The Hague) and a posthumous portrait of the famous Vice-Admiral Maerten Harpertz. Tromp, 1653 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Lievens died in Amsterdam in 1674. His son Jan Andrea (1644–1680) also became a painter.

The work of Jan Lievens is represented in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Hertzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig; the National Museum, Warsaw; the National Gallery, London; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

JACOBUS LINTHORST 1754 – Amsterdam – 1815 Jacobus Linthorst was born in Amsterdam and spent all his life in his native town, where he died in 1815. In June 1789, he was registered as a citizen and painter and during the same month he joined the Amsterdam Guild of St Luke. Nothing is known about Linthorst’s artistic training.

He may have chosen a career as a painter somewhat later in life, since his earliest known works stem from 1780, when he was already thirty-five

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years old. Like most still-life painters of his day, he was inspired by the work of Jan van Huijsum (1682–1749) and his style is clearly related to that of his contemporaries Jan Van Os (1744–1808) and Paul Theodoor van Brussel (1754–1795). Linthorst himself was the teacher of the still-life painter Jan Evert Morel (1769–1808).

The work of Jacobus Linthorst is represented in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the Bredius Museum, The Hague.

AERT VAN DER NEER 1603/4 – Amsterdam – 1677 Aert van der Neer was one of the most important European landscape painters of the seventeenth century. He was born in 1604 at Gorinchem (Gorcum), a town on the river Waal east of Dordrecht. He was the son of Egrom van der Neer and Aeltge Jansdr. In his youth Aert was for a short time a steward (majoor) in the service of the lords of Arcel just north of Gorinchem, but by 1628 had settled in Amsterdam. Nothing is known of his early artistic development or training. He is called a painter in 1629, but his first known work dates from 1632. In 1629 van der Neer was living at Herenmarkt near the Brouwersgracht. He married Lijsbeth Govers from Bergen-op-Zoom, who lived in the Warmoesstraat near the Damrak.

In his landscapes of the 1630s van der Neer was influenced both by Flemish and the Haarlem school of landscape painting. In 1633 he worked in Amsterdam with Jochem Camphuysen, whose brother Rafael he probably also knew. In 1635 van der Neer painted his first commissioned landscape, of large dimension.

Although this was followed by further commissions around 1640, it is only after 1643 that van der Neer found his personal style. He excelled in extraordinary poetic landscapes of sunrise and sunset and is unrivalled as a painter of moonlight in Dutch art. Today, as in the eighteenth century, van der Neer’s winter scenes rank in critical estimation with those of Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634).

Van der Neer’s first real evening landscape was the painting of 1643 now in Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha. In the second half of the 1640s he explored the changing e≠ects of light in late evening or at night, reflected in rivers, lakes and marshes. His first really remarkable paintings of this kind are the moonlit river landscape of circa 1646 from the Six Collection, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the townscape by moonlight in the Museum Bredius at The Hague. There is a fine comparable riverscape in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. This phase of van der Neer’s development culminated – after the huge summer landscapes of around 1650 – in small, jewel-like paintings for collectors’ cabinets, which he executed in the 1650s.

From 1659 to 1662 van der Neer kept a tavern on the Kalverstraat, while continuing to paint winter landscapes of the highest quality. In December 1662 he was declared bankrupt. He continued to paint, probably until the beginning of the 1670s. In spite of being one of the most outstanding landscapists of the seventeenth century, van der Neer died in poverty in Amsterdam on 9th November 1677. His son Eglon van der Neer (1634–1703) became a successful genre painter while Johannes (Jan) van der Neer (1637/8–1665) followed his father as a landscape painter.

The work of Aert van der Neer is represented in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Mauritshuis, The Hague; the National Gallery, London; the Wallace Collection, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Louvre, Paris.

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CASPAR NETSCHER Heidelberg circa 1636 – 1684 The Hague According to his eighteenth-century biographers, Caspar Netscher was born either in Heidelberg or Prague around 1636, the son of Johannes Netscher, a sculptor from Stuttgart, and Elizabeth Vetter, daughter of a Heidelberg Burgermeister. At an early age, Netscher and his widowed mother arrived in Arnhem in the Netherlands, where Caspar was apprenticed to the Caravaggesque painter Hendrick Coster. In about 1654–55, Netscher moved to Deventer, where he completed his training in the workshop of Gerard ter Borch. He probably stayed four or five years in his master’s studio, before setting o≠ on a tour to Italy, but he got no further than Bordeaux, where on 25th November 1659 he married Margaretha Godijn, the daughter of a local mathematician. The couple’s first son, Theodoor, was born in Bordeaux in 1661. The following year, the family returned to the Netherlands and settled in The Hague. In October 1662 Netscher joined the Hague painters’ confraternity, Pictura, and in 1668 he joined the St Sebastian’s militia guild. Twelve children were born to Netscher and his wife, nine of whom survived to adulthood, including Theodoor (1661–1728) and Constantijn (1668–1723), who became painters, and Johannes (1665–after 1715) who became a jeweller and silversmith.

The artist died in The Hague on 15th January 1684.

JAN VAN OS Middelharnis 1744 – 1808 The Hague Jan van Os was one of the most important eighteenth century Dutch artists, specialising in opulent still lifes, flowerpieces and fruitpieces.

From circa 1767 he also painted river scenes and seascapes. Even during his lifetime, his paintings were highly acclaimed by European connoisseurs. At the Paris sale of the collection of the Comte de Vaudreuil in 1784, his work was catalogued with the remark: ‘The reputation of this modern artist is well known to Amateurs who justly accord his work the highest consideration’. Jan van Os’s river landscapes and coastal scenes, although painted in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, look back to the Dutch seventeenth century tradition of artists such as Jan van de Cappelle. Van Os’s manner of rendering ‘waterscapes’ was a typical Dutch eighteenth century one, showing still and peaceful waters, thus reflecting the somewhat tranquil atmosphere of Dutch society at that period.

Van Os was born at Middelharnis in the province of Zeeland in 1744. He moved to The Hague at an early age and became the pupil of the renowned draughtsman, watercolourist and painter Aart Schouman (1710–1792). In 1773 van Os became a member of the Painters’ Guild in The Hague and towards the end of his life he became a Director of The Hague Academy. He also established his reputation in England by exhibiting at the Society of Artists in London from 1773 until its closure in 1791, and later at the Royal Academy and the British Institution.

In 1775, van Os married Susanna de la Croix, daughter of the French portraitist Pierre de la Croix (1709–1782), who was working in The Hague.

They had three children who were to perpetuate the family artistic tradition; the eldest son, Pieter Gerardus (1776–1839) painted animals and landscapes, while the second son Georgius Jacobus Johannes (1782–1861) and daughter Margrita (1780–1862) painted still lifes.

The work of Jan van Os is represented in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the National Gallery, London; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

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GIOVANNI PAOLO PANINI Piacenza 1691 – 1765 Rome Giovanni Paolo Panini, who spent most of his career in Rome, was one of the outstanding view painters of the eighteenth century. His work epitomises the Papal city in the same way that Canaletto’s views conjure up eighteenth century Venice; both painters benefited from the patronage of aristocratic Grand Tourists.

Panini trained in Piacenza with the quadraturisti Giuseppe Natali (1661–1722) and Andrea Galluzzi (fl.1716–1743) and the stage designer Francesco Galli-Bibiena. In 1711 he went to Rome to study figure drawing, working with Benedetto Luti, a painter of small-scale religious and secular subjects. He also studied with the landscape painter Andrea Locatelli. Panini worked on the decoration of Roman palaces; his first documented commission (1719–25) is for frescoes of festoons and putti for the Villa Patrizi beyond the Porta Pia (destroyed 1911).

In 1718 Panini became a member of the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. The following year he was nominated to the Accademia di S Luca, where he taught perspective drawing and in 1754 served as principal. To celebrate his entry into the Accademia he painted Alexander visiting the tomb of Achilles, 1719 (Galleria Accademia Nazionale S Luca, Rome). In 1722 Panini was commissioned by Pope Innocent XIII to decorate the mezzanine apartment of the Palazzo Quirinale. His most complete surviving fresco cycle is that for the Villa Montalto Grazioli in Frascati, commissioned by Baldassare Erba Odescalchi and dating from the 1720s and 30s.

From 1716–17 Panini began to paint vedute. He was influenced by Gaspar van Wittel’s precise rendering of townscapes, Salvator Rosa’s dashing figures and Giovanni Ghisolfi’s capricci. Panini’s architectural capricci often include historical or mythological themes, such as Alexander cutting the Gordian knot (Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD). Occasionally he included religious scenes, as in the four canvases commissioned by Philip V of Spain to decorate the palace of S Ildefonso at La Granja. Panini’s first known vedute reale, views of Castello di Rivoli (Castello, Racconigi and Museo Civica d’Arte Antiqua, Turin) were commissioned in 1723. However, his fame lies in his views of Rome, both the monuments of antiquity and the splendid modern buildings, enlivened with groups of graceful figures. Panini frequently depicted festivals, such as the Preparations in Piazza Navona to celebrate the birth of the Dauphin, 1729 (Louvre, Paris).

Around 1745 Panini began to paint portraits. He also made paintings of real or imaginary gallery interiors, a genre popularised by seventeenth century Flemish painters. Among these is The gallery of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, 1749 (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT). Panini’s last signed painting is The Colosseum, 1764 (Sternberg Palace, National Gallery, Prague), in which the colours and brushwork are lighter and the forms less distinct than in his earlier work.

As a stage designer, Panini in 1735 worked with the architect Ferdinando Fuga on the decorations for the funeral of Maria Clementina Sobiesky.

He also worked as an architect, designing the chapel of S Teresa (inaugurated 1745) in S Maria della Scala, Rome. Panini was a highly influential vedute painter; among his pupils were Hubert Robert (in Rome from 1754) and his son Francesco Panini (b.1738). Panini died in Rome in 1765.

The work of Giovanni Paolo Panini is represented in the Palazzo Quirinale, Rome; the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; the Louvre, Paris; the Walters Art Galery, Baltimore, MD; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Toronto Art Gallery; the Sternberg Palace, National Gallery, Prague and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

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THOMAS PATCH Exeter 1725 – 1782 Florence Thomas Patch was born in Exeter in 1725, the son of a doctor, and was destined for the apothecary’s trade. Instead, he travelled to Rome in 1747, where he met Joshua Reynolds (a fellow Devonian) and worked in the studio of Joseph Vernet, making pastiches of Vernet’s works and his own views of Tivoli. In 1755 Patch was banished from the Papal States and moved to Florence. His friendship with the British envoy Sir Horace Mann brought him commissions from English Grand Tourists to copy Old Masters and to paint views of Florence.

In the 1760s Patch painted caricatures of the artists, dealers and wealthy tourists of Anglo-Florentine society. These deft, amusing works have become important historical documents recording the patrons and dilettanti who flocked to Italy in the great age of English collecting. They include the Punch party, 1760 (Dunham Massey, Cheshire) and Golden asses, 1761 (Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT). Patch made a serious study of faces and expressions, as well as producing two engraved sets of caricatures. In the 1770s he made engravings after Masaccio, Fra Bartolommeo, Giotto and Ghiberti, evidence of his scholarly interest in early Italian art. He became an art dealer and painted little towards the end of his life.

The work of Thomas Patch is represented in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the City Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Museo Storico Topografico, Florence and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

JEAN-BAPTISTE PATER Valenciennes 1695 – 1736 Paris Jean-Baptiste Pater was born in 1695 in Valenciennes, northern France, a garrison town which until 1678 had been part of the Spanish Netherlands. He studied with his father, the sculptor Antoine Pater (1670–1747) (who may also have taught Antoine Watteau (1684–1721)) and with Jean-Baptiste Guidé (d.1711). Pater followed Watteau to Paris after the latter’s brief return to Valenciennes circa 1710 and became his pupil, but Watteau’s touchy character soon led to his dismissal. Struggling to make a living in Paris, Pater returned to his home town around 1715, but had limited success since he was not a member of the corporation of St Luc. Pater returned to Paris in 1718 and must have renewed his contact with Watteau, since he worked for Watteau patrons, including the dealers Pierre Sirois and Edmé-François Gersaint. In 1721 he worked with Watteau, who was by now dying of consumption, at Nogent-sur-Marne near Paris; Pater later claimed that those few weeks taught him everything that he knew.

After Watteau’s death Pater copied some of his work for the collector Jean de Jullienne, who was preparing engravings of Watteau’s oeuvre.

He developed his own fête galante subjects, with village fairs, bivouacking soldiers, lovers in parks, musicians and dancers. Fluidly painted in delicate pastel hues, they draw inspiration both from Watteau himself and Flemish painters such as Rubens and van Dyck, whom Watteau had admired: both painters were influenced by their birthplace on the borders of Flanders.

Pater was agréé at the Academy in 1725 and reçu in 1728 as a painter of fêtes galantes, a category which had been invented for Watteau. By this time he was enjoying great success with royal and aristocratic patrons: Frederick the Great owned more than forty of his works, including fourteen small paintings illustrating Paul Scarron’s Roman Comique (Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin). In 1736 Pater provided a Tiger hunt (Musée Picardie, Amiens) for the dining room of the Petits Appartements at Versailles. He died in Paris that same year, worn out, according to the dealer Gersaint, by hard work in the pursuit of riches.

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The work of Jean-Baptiste Pater is represented in the Louvre, Paris; the Wallace Collection, London; the Royal Collection, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

ALLAN RAMSAY RA Edinburgh 1713 – 1784 Dover Allan Ramsay was the leading British portrait painter from 1738 to c.1760, bringing Italian sophistication and French rococo grace to the national tradition. The son of the Scottish poet of the same name, Ramsay attended Edinburgh High School and in 1729 the newly-founded Academy of St Luke. By 1732 he was in London studying with the Swedish painter Hans Hysing (1678–1752). The following summer he established an Edinburgh studio and helped to design the ‘Guse-pie’ house on Castle Hill for his father’s retirement.

In 1736 Ramsay went to Rome to study with Francesco Imperiali; the following year he spent time in the Naples studio of Francesco Solimena, making portrait drawings of British residents. In 1738 he set up as a portrait painter in London and married Anne Bayne, daughter of an Edinburgh professor. His patrons included important Scottish aristocratic families such as the Buccleuchs, Dalrymples and Argylls. Ramsay’s Italianate baroque manner gave way in the mid-1750s to a soft, naturalistic style influenced by Hogarth and French painters such as MauriceQuentin de la Tour and Jean-Marc Nattier. Ramsay’s ‘French’ elegance is epitomised by his portrait of his second wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick, with whom he eloped in 1752 (c.1758–60; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).

From 1754–7 Ramsay was again based in Rome, part of an artistic and intellectual circle which included Clérisseau, Piranesi and Robert Adam.

In 1755 he published his Hume-influenced Dialogue on Taste which a≠irms the relativity of aesthetic judgements. Upon his return to London, Ramsay was commissioned by the Prince of Wales’s mentor Lord Bute to paint the young heir to the throne. When the Prince succeeded as George III in 1760, Ramsay was given the duties of Principal Painter, although he did not hold the title o≠icially until 1767. Ramsay’s portraits of the royal family added a note of intimacy and informality which suited the new monarch’s domestic style of kingship.

In the early 1760s Ramsay was pitted against rising star Joshua Reynolds when both contributed to a major series of family portraits for Holland House commissioned by Lady Caroline Lennox, Baroness Holland. He was elected Vice-President of the Society of Artists in 1766 but never showed there, preferring private views in his own house. From the mid-1760s Ramsay’s paintings show an increasing concern with light and chiaroscuro, with forms modelled in cool greys, as can be seen in the perceptive portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1766 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).

In March 1773 Ramsay injured his right arm and retired from painting to devote himself to literary pursuits, although his large studio continued to produce Coronation portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte as ambassadorial gifts, mostly painted by Philip Reinagle. Ramsay stayed once more in Rome 1775–7 and on a long visit to Ischia returned to making exquisite chalk studies. He began a learned treatise (never published) concerning the site of Horace’s Sabine villa, staying at Licenza and making landscape sketches which were worked up in watercolour by Jacob More for the engraver. Although frail, Ramsay made one more visit to Italy from 1782–4 to assuage the grief of his wife’s death, enjoying the company of Batoni, James Barry, John Robert Cozens and Sir George Beaumont. In 1784 he began the long voyage home and just reached the shores of Britain, dying at Dover on 10th August.

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PIETER DE RING Leiden or Ypres circa 1615 – 1660 Leiden Pieter de Ring was born in Leiden, or possibly at Ypres, where his parents came from and where his older brother was born. Reputedly, he started his career as a mason. Houbraken reported from hearsay that an employer paid for lessons he took from Jan Davidsz. de Heem. If this is true, de Ring would have had to go to Antwerp for his training, where de Heem had settled by 1636, but he has not been traced in any record there.

Whatever the case, de Ring was clearly influenced by de Heem’s still lifes from the late 1640s and early 1650s. Pieter de Ring was one of the founding members of the Leiden painters’ guild in 1648 and worked there until his death. His burial in the Pieterskerk was recorded in September 1660. His earliest known dated work (indistinct, 1645 or 1647) combines a Haarlem (Heda) idiom with Leiden (Dou) lighting. Some younger Leiden still-life painters, notably Harmen Loeding, Johannes Hannot and Nicolaes van Gelder, were clearly influenced by de Ring and were perhaps his pupils.

JACOB ISAACKSZ. VAN RUISDAEL Haarlem 1628/9 – 1682 Amsterdam Jacob van Ruisdael was born in Haarlem in 1628/9, the son of the art dealer Isaack van Ruysdael and nephew of the landscape painter Salomon van Ruysdael (after 1603–1670). His first dated painting is from 1646; many paintings are dated between 1646 and 1653, but few thereafter. He joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1648; according to Houbraken, he also studied and practised medicine. Ruisdael’s early work was influenced by Salomon van Ruysdael and Cornelis Vroom. Around 1650 Ruisdael travelled to Bentheim on the Dutch-German border with the painter Claes Berchem. In the mid-1650s he moved to Amsterdam, where he died unmarried in 1682.

Ruisdael was a painter, draughtsman and etcher in many categories of landscape. Following his early dunescapes, Ruisdael developed landscapes with large central motifs, such as oaks, ruins and watermills. Jan Porcellis and Simon de Vlieger influenced his marines. Later in his career he devoted himself to the depiction of waterfalls, panoramic landscapes, winter landscapes, beach scenes and city views. With their dynamic compositions, intense observation of natural phenomena and emphasis on untamed landscape, Ruisdael's works are among the most powerful paintings of the seventeenth century. Meindert Hobbema was Ruisdael’s most important pupil; he had many other followers, including Cornelis Decker, Jan van Kessel and Adriaen Verboom.

The work of Jacob van Ruisdael is represented in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Mauritshuis, The Hague; the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; the National Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

ADRIAEN CORNELISZ. VAN DER SALM 1657 – Delfshaven – 1720 Adriaen van der Salm was born in Delfshaven in 1657. In 1686 he married Annetje Roelofs van der Veur of Schoonderloo in the village of Charlois near Rotterdam. They had nine children, including Roelof (1688–1765), who worked in the same style as his father. In the year of his marriage Salm applied for a teaching job in Schoonderloo, explaining that he had ‘studied reading, writing and arithmetic for several years’ and was ‘competent to tutor small children in the foresaid skills’.

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Salm moved to Delfshaven, where he is documented from September 1693, continuing to teach until at least 1699. From 1698 to 1717 he was a member of the 10th Regiment of the Delfshaven militia, serving as pikeman and from 1709 as corporal. In 1701 he bought a house on the west side of the Oude Haven. In 1706 he was registered as a ‘master draughtsman’ with the Guild of St Luke in Delft. At the end of his life Salm was a textile merchant, with a shop on the Oude Haven selling clothing, wall fabrics and sailcloth. He died in 1720, a reasonably prosperous man. An inventory of his estate includes fine silverware and porcelain, ‘two Japanese robes’, a painting of ‘the town school’ (presumably where he had taught) and a ‘model book’.

No oil paintings by Salm are known. He specialised in penschilderijen (pen paintings) on panel, mostly of marine subjects, following in the tradition of Willem van der Velde the Elder (1611–1693), whose first pen paintings on panel were made in 1649. Salm’s pen paintings emulate the delicacy of engravings. He prepared a panel with a light ground, then washed in the composition with brush largely in grey. Details, such as the intricacies of the shipping and the choppy waves, were hatched in with a pen, achieving a work that is both highly specific and atmospheric.

One of Salm’s characteristic techniques was to paint details, such as the whales in Whalers (Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, Rotterdam), in both pen and brush, then scratch the surface with a hard, fine-tipped object to expose the colour underneath.

Salm made views of Amsterdam and Archangel for Tsar Peter the Great, who also owned a book of forty-two of his drawings (Hermitage, St Petersburg). He executed several pen paintings of whalers operating o≠ Greenland, often identifying the ships on the stern. Dutch whaling was at its most prosperous during his lifetime and Delfshaven was a major centre. He also put his hand to more mundane commissions, painting the Ten Commandments and Twelve Articles of Faith for the Oude Kerk in Delfshaven, where they remain to this day. Salm is named in documents as ‘Salm’, ‘V. Salm’ and ‘van der Salm’, but he seems to have preferred the signature ‘A. V. Salm’ on his pen paintings later in his career.

The work of Adriaen van der Salm is represented in the Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, Rotterdam; the Hermitage, St Petersburg; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull and the Mariners’ Museum, Newport News.

ROBERT SALMON Whitehaven, Cumberland 1775 – circa 1850 Europe A Whitehaven man, Robert Salmon was the son of Francis Salomon, a jeweller from London. He was baptised in the Parish Church of Saint James, Whitehaven, Cumberland, on 5th November 1775. Nothing is known about Robert’s early training, but he developed a unique style of carefully crafted crispness and clarity. He was an extremely peripatetic artist, who may have moved back to London with his family by 1800. By 1806 he had settled in Liverpool, where he remained until 1811, when he moved to Greenock; he divided the early part of his life between these three places. He seems to have been a loner, which may account for his restlessness; one journey from London took him all the way down the south coast to Land's End. In 1826 Salmon was at Greenock for the earlier part of the year, but in November 1828 he sailed for America on the Blackwall sailing packet New York, settling in Boston, where he lived for the next thirteen years. He had a studio at the end of the Marine Railway Wharf overlooking the harbour, at a time when Boston was enjoying great maritime prosperity. As Samuel Eliot Morison remarked, ‘Never before or since had Boston Harbour been so crowded or the water front so congested with sailing vessels’. It was here that Salmon achieved his greatest success.

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In June 1842 Salmon returned to Europe in failing health and his whereabouts become uncertain, although he is known to have painted Italian views, the latest being of Venice and Palermo, dated 1845. Another painting of this year has recently come to light, a Yacht regatta o≠ New Brighton in the River Mersey, clearly dated 1845 (see AS Davison, Marine Art and the Clyde). It is likely that Salmon was in Europe circa 1845, although his death was not recorded in the Boston Evening Transcript until 1851.

The work of Robert Salmon is represented in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Peabody Museum of Salem and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

FRANCESCO SOLIMENA Canale di Serino 1657 – 1747 Barra Francisco Solimena was one of the most influential and complex painters of the Italian baroque, with a very long and varied career. Born in Canale di Serino in 1657, he was trained by his father Angelo Solimena (1629–1716), pupil of Guarino and painter of religious subjects. He moved to Naples in 1674, encouraged by his patron Cardinal Pierfrancesco Orsini (later Pope Benedict XIII). Solimena’s religious works of the 1670s and 80s combine baroque grandeur and theatrical lighting e≠ects derived from Luca Giordano, Mattia Preti and Giovanni Lanfranco with his own instinct for naturalism.

In 1681 Solimena began a long association with the Abbey of Montecassino with an altarpiece of SS Jerome, St Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua (destroyed), developing a use of golden light influenced by Giordano. From 1691–95 he sought inspiration in the more sombre art of Mattia Preti in works such as the Miracle of St John of God (Ospedale di S Maria della Pace, Naples). In the mid-1690s Solimena began to move to a more classical style, with the emphasis on disegno rather than colore. He painted monumental canvases of the Life of the Virgin for S Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples (1696–1701). In 1701 he was in Rome, painting The abduction of Oreithyia (Galleria Spada, Rome) for Cardinal Fabrizio Spada Varalli.

Solimena was at the height of his powers in the early eighteenth century, with a growing emphasis on precious fabrics and the elaborate depiction of objects. From the second decade of the eighteenth century he returned to the dramatic chiaroscuro of Preti in frescoes such as the Triumph of Faith for the vault of the Sacristy of S Domenico Maggiore, Naples (1706–7). Solimena gained patrons among the courts of Europe as well as the Italian nobility: in 1714 he painted Dido welcoming Aeneas to the Royal Hunt (Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata) for Raimondo Buonaccorsi. He also had an international reputation as a portrait painter. Among his highly successful pupils were the Scot Allan Ramsay, as well as Francesco de Mura and Corrado Giaquinto, beneficiaries of his rigorous academic method of instruction.

In 1725 Solimena’s vast fresco of The expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple for the Gesù Nuovo, Naples marked a return to the principles of classical art, with clear, primary colours and careful drawing. In 1737 he began to work on decorations for the Palazzo Reale, Naples to celebrate Charles III’s marriage to Maria Amalia of Saxony. The Trinity with Saints, 1741, commissioned by Elizabeth Farnese, Queen of Spain for the royal chapel of S Ildefonso at La Granja, reverted to a brilliantly free handling of colour shot through with vivid flashes of light. Francesco Solimena died at Barra on 3rd April 1747.

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TOBIAS STRANOVER Szeben (Hermannstadt), Transylvania 1684 – 1756 Bath Tobias Stranover was the son of the Hungarian-born religious and portrait painter Jeremias Stranover the Elder (d.1702), who spent the greater part of his career in Szeben (Hermannstadt; today in Romania). Tobias’s brother Jeremias the Younger (d.1729) was also a painter. Probably trained by his father, Stranover worked in Szeben, Holland, Hamburg and Dresden. He is said to have come to London in 1703 in the entourage of William Paget, English ambassador extraordinary to the Ottoman Porte. In London Stranover spent time in the studio of his uncle, the Hungarian flower and bird painter Jacob Bogdani (c.1660–1724), whose daughter Elizabeth he married around 1720.

Like his father-in-law, Stranover specialized in rich-toned, decorative still life and bird paintings, frequently borrowing motifs from Bogdani.

Tobias Stranover and his wife lived near Bogdani in the Covent Garden area of London. In 1724 he was a beneficiary in Bogdani’s will of part of his father-in-law’s considerable fortune and studio contents.

Among Stranover’s London patrons was Dr Richard Mead, the famous collector and physician who treated Watteau for tuberculosis. In 1733 he travelled to Vienna and Germany, and seems on this occasion to have received commissions for four large Still lifes with animals and fruit for the Garden Room of Schloss Ahrensburg near Hamburg. Stranover’s latest dated painting was made in 1731 and he spent his latter years in Kingsmead Square, Bath.

The work of Tobias Stranover is represented in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; the Kunsthalle, Hamburg and the Landesmuseum, Schwerin.

See: Miklos Rajnai, ‘Tobias Stranover 1684–1756’, Annales de la Galerie Nationale Hongroise/A Magyar Nemzeti Galleria Evkonyve (Budapest 1991), pp.175–178, illustrated.

DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER Antwerp 1610 – 1690 Brussels David Teniers the Younger was one of the most important seventeenth century Flemish painters of genre and landscape. Born in Antwerp, he first studied with his father David Teniers the Elder, and became a member of the Guild of St Luke in 1633. He married Anna Brueghel, daughter of the celebrated flower and landscape painter Jan Brueghel the Elder, in 1637. Anna’s guardian Peter Paul Rubens was a signatory to their marriage contract.

Between 1645 and 1646, Teniers was Dean of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke. In 1651, while he was at the height of his powers, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, brought Teniers to Brussels as Court Painter and Curator, giving Teniers an authoritative role in building up the royal collection. From 1656–59 he was Court Painter to the new Spanish governor, Don Juan of Austria, brother of Philip IV, and retained close ties with the court for the rest of his life. In 1663 Philip IV gave Teniers permission to found the highly influential Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. His last known dated work was painted in 1683; Teniers died in Brussels in 1690.

Teniers’s early works were influenced by Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6–1638), particularly his treatment of peasant, low-life subjects and interior scenes, although he also painted landscapes, genre, portraits, religious and allegorical subjects. Later, Teniers turned increasingly to landscapes with figures; unlike his predecessors, however, he sought to convey the serenity of rural life rather than the more basic aspects of rustic realism.

The works of Teniers were extremely influential on Flemish painting during his lifetime and beyond, and his paintings were avidly collected by princely connoisseurs.

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The work of David Teniers the Younger is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hermitage, St Petersburg; the Louvre, Paris; the Prado, Madrid; the National Gallery, London and the Wallace Collection, London.

JACOB VAN WALSCAPELLE Dordrecht 1644 – 1727 Amsterdam Jacob van Walscapelle was born in Dordrecht as Jacobus Cruydenier. The surname van Walscapelle he adopted from his maternal great-grandfather. He probably received his first training in Dordrecht and the mention of an architectural painting by Walscapelle in a 1729 Dordrecht inventory suggests that he did not start out as a still-life painter, even though today we know no paintings of other subjects by him. Around the mid-1660s, he is known to have been a pupil of the still-life painter Cornelis Kick (1631/34–1681) in Amsterdam and indeed his early flower paintings can barely be discerned from his teacher’s. In 1673, Jacob van Walscapelle entered the service of the Amsterdam drapers’ hall and Arnold Houbraken, writing in the early eighteenth century, claimed that he soon gave up painting in favour of his municipal job. Known dated works ranging from 1667 up to 1685 seemed to confirm this statement, but a recently surfaced, rather elaborate example of his work dated 1699 provides evidence to the contrary.

Jacob van Walscapelle’s main still-life subjects were flowers and fruit. Until circa 1670, flower paintings in the style of Cornelis Kick dominate his oeuvre, but subsequently he seems to have been inspired to some degree by still lifes that were being produced in Utrecht by Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606–1682/84) and Abraham Mignon (1640–1679). His meticulously rendered, strongly lit and sharply defined fruit and flowers, in any case, are strongly reminiscent of the works de Heem and particularly Mignon painted during the second half of the 1660s. Among Walscapelle’s most impressive works is a pair of garlands of fruit and flowers he painted in 1672–74 now in the collection of the Municipal Museum in Arnhem. Walscapelle died in Amsterdam in 1727.

JOHAN ZOFFANY RA Frankfurt 1733 – 1810 Kew Zo≠any was born Johannes Zau≠aly, son of Anton Franz, court architect to Alexander Ferdinand, Prince von Thurn und Taxis. He was apprenticed to Martin Speer in Regensburg. In 1750 Zo≠any went to Rome, studying with the fashionable portrait painters Agostino Masucci (c.1691– 1750) and Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), whose smooth, sophisticated portrait style he was to emulate. Zo≠any returned to Regensburg c.1757 and worked for the Prince-Archbishop of Trier, producing decorative rococo oils and frescoes for the palaces of Ehrenbreitstein and Trier.

In 1760 he tried his luck in England, becoming friendly with the actor David Garrick and making a speciality of innovative, small-scale theatrical ‘conversation pieces’ which show actors in character on stage. Zo≠any also developed ‘conversation piece’ portraits, family groups arranged in lively tableaux. These are painted with psychological acuteness and great realism in the details of interiors and dress, combining the meticulousness of his German training with the suavity of Italian influence.

Through the Prime Minister Lord Bute, Zo≠any was brought to the notice of German-born Queen Charlotte and was commissioned by her to paint the Tribuna of the U≠izi in Florence. There he gained the patronage of Pietro Leopoldo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and mixed with English Grand Tourists such as the antiquities collector Charles Towneley, whose marble-filled library he later painted (1781–3, Towneley Hall Art Gallery).

In 1776 Zo≠any travelled to Vienna with his portrait of the Grand Duke’s family to present to Pietro Leopoldo’s mother-in-law, Maria Theresa. He was rewarded by the Empress with the title Baron of the Holy Roman Empire.

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After a year in Parma (1778–9) Zo≠any returned to England to find his place as a fashionable portrait painter usurped and the Queen displeased by his Tribuna of the U≠izi (1772–7/8; Royal Collection) filled with English connoisseurs. In 1783 Zo≠any set sail for India to repair his fortunes, for there were rich pickings to be had painting wealthy East India Company o≠icials. Zo≠any produced some outstanding conversation pieces, among them The Auriol and Dashwood Families, and views of Indian life such as Colonel Mordaunt’s cock match (Tate Gallery), painted in a freer style than his earlier works.

His fortune made, Zo≠any returned to England in 1789 and lived in style at Strand-on-the-Green, ‘an easy una≠ected well informed agreeable Man’, as Lord Macartney described him. He exhibited at the Royal Academy until 1800, producing some history paintings including the French Revolutionary subject Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris (1794). He died at Strand-on-the-Green in 1810 and is buried in Kew churchyard.

The work of Johan Zo≠any is represented in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; the British Royal Collection; the National Gallery, London; Tate Britain, London; the U≠izi, Florence; the Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.

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4.2 Full payment of the Price shall be made to Seller within 30 days of receipt of In-

‘Price’ the Invoice price of the Work;

voice. Interest shall be payable on overdue amounts at the rate of 3% per annum

‘Seller’ Richard Green (Fine Paintings) or Richard Green & Sons Limited;

above Royal Bank of Scotland Base Rate for Sterling.

‘Terms’ the terms and conditions of sale in this document which include any

4.3 Until full title to the Work has passed, Buyer shall not sell, export, dispose of, or

special terms agreed in writing between Buyer and Seller; ‘Third Party Payer’ shall have the meaning set out at clause 2.4;

part with possession of the Work.

4.4 Until full title to the Work has passed, Buyer shall hold the Work unencumbered

‘VAT’ United Kingdom value added tax; and

as Seller’s fiduciary agent and bailee and shall: (1) keep the Work at Buyer’s premis-

‘Work’ the work or works of art detailed on the Invoice.

es separate from the property of Buyer and third parties and identified as Seller’s property and properly stored with adequate security measures; (2) keep the Work

2.

BASIS OF PURCHASE

comprehensively insured for not less than the Price, have Seller’s interest noted

2.1 The Terms shall govern the Agreement to the exclusion of any other terms and

on the policy and provide a copy of such notification to Seller; and (3) preserve the

representations communicated to Buyer prior to entering into this Agreement

Work in an unaltered state, in

and to Buyer’s own conditions (if any) and constitute the entire agreement and

particular not undertake any work whatsoever and shall take all reasonable steps

understanding of the parties in relation to the sale of the Work.

2.2 Delivery of the Work will be made following receipt by Seller of the Price in cleared

to prevent any damage to or deterioration of the Work.

4.5 Until such time as full title to the Work has passed, if Buyer is in breach of clauses

funds. Buyer shall be responsible for all costs of Delivery.

4.3 or 4.4; or (1) Buyer (if it is more than one person, jointly and/or severally) shall

2.3 Seller reserves the right to require Buyer to present such documents as Seller may

enter into, and/or itself apply for, and/or call meetings of members and/or part-

require to confirm Buyer’s identity.

ners and/or creditors with a view to, one or more of a moratorium, interim order,

2.4 Where payment of the Price is made by someone other than Buyer (‘Third Party

administration, liquidation (of any kind, including provisional), bankruptcy (includ-

Payer’) Seller may require documents to confirm the identity of Third Party Payer

ing appointment of an interim receiver), or composition and/or arrangement

and the relationship between Buyer and Third Party Payer. Seller may decline pay-

(whether under deed or otherwise) with creditors, and/or have any of its property

ments from Third Party Payers.

subjected to one or more of appointment of a receiver (of any kind), enforcement of security, distress, or execution of a judgment (to include similar events under

3.

RISK TITLE AND INSURANCE

the laws of other countries);or (2) Seller reasonably apprehends that any of the

3.1 Seller shall deliver the Work to the Address. Risk of damage to or loss of the Work

events mentioned above is about to occur in relation to Buyer and notifies Buyer

shall pass to Buyer on Delivery. Dates quoted for Delivery are approximate and

accordingly; or (3) Buyer does anything which may in any way adversely a≠ect

Seller shall not be liable for delay. Time of Delivery shall not be of the essence.

Seller’s title in the Work, then Seller or its agent may immediately repossess the

Buyer shall provide Seller with all information and documentation necessary to

Work and/or void the sale with or without notice and Buyer will return the Work

enable Delivery.

to Seller’s nominated address (at Buyer’s sole risk and cost), or, at Seller’s option,

3.2 Notwithstanding Delivery and passing of risk, title in the Work shall not pass to

Seller may enter the premises where the Work is kept to regain possession.

Buyer until Seller (1) receives in cleared funds the Price and any other amount owed by Buyer in connection with the sale of the Work; and (2) is satisfied as to

5.

the identity of Buyer and any Third Party Payer and its relationship to Buyer.

5.1 Seller confirms that, to the best of its knowledge and belief, it has authority to sell

3.3 If Buyer fails to accept delivery of the Work at the Address at the agreed time (1) Seller may charge Buyer for the reasonable costs of storage, insurance and

REPRESENTATION OF SELLER the Work.

5.2 Buyer agrees that all liability of Seller and all rights of Buyer against Seller in

re-delivery; (2) risk in the Work shall immediately pass to Buyer; and (3) Seller is

relation to the Work howsoever arising and of whatever nature shall cease after

irrevocably authorised by the Buyer to deposit the Work at the Address if delivery

the expiry of five years from Delivery. This paragraph does not prejudice Buyer’s

has not occurred within six months.

statutory rights.

5.3 Notwithstanding anything in this Agreement to the contrary, Seller shall not be li-

by Buyer. Seller may sub-contract its obligations.

able to Buyer for any loss of profits, loss of revenue, goodwill or for any indirect or

8.4 Any notice in connection with the Agreement shall be in writing and shall be de-

consequential loss arising out of or in connection with this Agreement, whenever

livered by hand or by post to Seller’s registered o≠ice at the time of posting or to

the same may arise, and Seller’s total and cumulative liability for losses whether

Buyer to the Invoice Address, and shall be deemed delivered on delivery if by hand

for breach of contract, tort or otherwise and including liability for negligence (except in relation to (i) death or personal injury caused by Seller’s negligence or

or on the third day after posting if posted.

8.5 In the case of a consumer contract within the meaning of the Unfair Contract

(ii) fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation by Seller) shall in no event exceed the

Terms Act 1977, these conditions shall not apply to the extent that they would be

Price.

rendered void or unenforceable by virtue of the provisions thereof.

5.4 All representations made by Seller as to the authenticity, attribution, descrip-

8.6 No amendment, modification, waiver of or variation to the Invoice or the Agree-

tion, date, age, provenance, title or condition of the Work constitute the Seller’s

ment shall be binding unless agreed in writing and signed by an authorised

opinion only and are not warranted by Seller. Seller accepts no liability as a result of any changes in expert opinion or scholarship which may take place subsequent

representative of Buyer and Seller.

8.7 Neither Seller nor Buyer intends the terms of the Agreement to be enforceable by

to entry into this Agreement.

a third party pursuant to the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

8.8 The Agreement and all rights and obligations of Seller and Buyer under it shall

6.

7.

COPYRIGHT

be governed by English Law in every particular and, subject always to the prior

All copyright in material relating to the Work vesting in Seller shall remain Seller’s.

application of the arbitration provisions set out in clause 9, both parties agree to

Seller reserves the right to exploit all such copyright.

submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English Courts.

EXPORT AND LOCAL TAXES

7.1 Where the Work is to be exported from the UK by Buyer, this Agreement is con-

9.

ARBITRATION

9.1 All claims and disputes relating to, or in connection with, the Agreement are to

ditional on the granting of any requisite export licence or permission, which the

be referred to a single arbitrator in London pursuant to the Arbitration Act 1996.

parties shall use reasonable endeavours to obtain.

In the event that the parties cannot agree upon an arbitrator either party may

7.2 Where the Work is, or is to be exported from the European Union and VAT has not been charged because, by reason of such intended export, the Work is zero rated or not subject to VAT, both parties shall take all necessary steps to ensure that there is compliance with the time limits and formalities laid down by HM Revenue

apply to the President of the Law Society of England and Wales for the time being to appoint as arbitrator a Queen’s Counsel of not less than 5 years standing. The decision of the arbitrator shall be final and binding.

9.2 Save that Buyer acknowledges Seller’s right to seek, and the power of the High

& Customs and that such documentation as is required, including any neces-

Court to grant interim relief, no action shall be brought in relation to any claim or

sary proofs of export and Bills of Lading are fully and properly completed. Buyer

dispute until the arbitrator has conducted an arbitration and made his award.

shall indemnify Seller against any claims made against Seller for VAT or any other expenses or penalties imposed by reason of Buyer’s failure to observe and comply with the formalities referred to herein.

7.3 Unless otherwise stated on the Invoice, Buyer shall be responsible for all Local Taxes.

8.

GENERAL

8.1 Buyer shall not be entitled to the benefit of any set-o≠ and sums payable to Seller shall be paid without any deduction whatsoever. In the event of non-payment Seller shall be entitled to obtain and enforce judgement without determination of any cross claim by Buyer.

8.2 Both parties agree that in entering into the Agreement neither party relies on, nor

March 2006

has any remedy in respect of, any statement, representation or warranty, negligently or innocently made to any person (whether party to this Agreement or not)

“Richard Green” is a registered trade mark of Richard Green Old Master

other than as set out in the Agreement as a warranty. The only remedy for breach

Paintings Ltd in the EU, the USA and other countries.

of any warranty shall be for breach of contract under the Agreement. Nothing in the Agreement shall operate to limit or exclude any liability for fraud.

8.3 The benefit of the Agreement and the rights thereunder shall not be assignable

Asking prices are current at time of going to press – Richard Green reserves the right to amend these prices in line with market values.

RICHARD GREEN

UNITED KINGDOM Aberdeen: City Art Gallery Altrincham: Dunham Massey (NT) Barnard Castle: Bowes Museum Bedford: Cecil Higgins Museum Canterbury: Royal Museum and Art Gallery Cheltenham: Art Gallery and Museum Chester: The Grosvenor Museum Coventry: City Museum Dedham: Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum Hampshire: County Museums Service Hull: Ferens Art Gallery Ipswich: Borough Council Museums and Galleries Leeds: Leeds City Art Gallery Lincoln: Usher Gallery Liskeard: Thorburn Museum London: Chiswick House (English Heritage) Department of the Environment The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood The Museum of London National Maritime Museum National Portrait Gallery National Postal Museum Tate Britain The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum Lydiard Tregoze: Lydiard House Norwich: Castle Museum Plymouth: City Museum and Art Gallery Richmond: London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and Orleans House Gallery St Helier: States of Jersey (O≠ice) Southsea: Royal Marine Museum Stirling: Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum York: York City Art Gallery

CANADA Fredericton: Beaverbrook Art Gallery Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts Cincinnati, OH: Art Museum Gainesville, FL: Harn Museum of Art Houston, TX: Sarah Campbell Bla≠er Foundation Los Angeles, CA: J Paul Getty Museum New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art New York, NY: Dahesh Museum Ocala, FL: The Appleton Museum of Art Omaha, NE: Joslyn Art Museum Pasadena, CA: Norton Simon Museum Rochester, NY: Genessee County Museum St Louis, MO: Missouri Historical Society Sharon, MA: Kendall Whaling Museum Toledo, OH: Toledo Museum of Art Ventura County, CA: Maritime Museum Washington, DC: The National Gallery The White House Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Winona, MN: Minnesota Marine Art Museum Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum BELGIUM Antwerp: Maisons Rockox Courtrai: City Art Gallery DENMARK Tröense: Maritime Museum

EIRE Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland FRANCE Compiègne: Musée National du Château GERMANY Berlin: Staatliche Kunsthalle Darmstadt: Hessisches Landesmuseum Hannover: Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe: Staatliche Kunsthalle Speyer am Rhein: Historisches Museum der Pfalz HOLLAND Amsterdam: Joods Historisch Museum Rijksmuseum Utrecht: Centraal Museum SOUTH AFRICA Durban: Art Museum SPAIN Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Sun Fernando Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional del Prado SWITZERLAND Zurich: Schweizerisches Landesmuseum

Published by Richard Green © 2012 All rights reserved.

Published by Richard Green for European Old Master Paintings, opening March 2012. © 2012 All rights reserved. Catalogue by Susan Morris. Photography by Sophie Drury.

Graphic Design by Chris Rees. Printed in England by Hampton Printing (Bristol) Ltd. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated (without the publisher’s prior consent), in any form of binding or other cover than in which it is published, and without similar condition being imposed on another purchaser. All material contained in this catalogue is subject to the new laws of copyright, December 1989.