CKS23859 Old Masters

OLD MASTERS

EVENING SALE

PROPERTIES FROM

THE HEIRS OF DANIËL GEORGE VAN BEUNINGEN (1877-1955)

THE COLLECTION OF MICKEY CARTIN

THE ESTATE OF SANFORD R. ROBERTSON

THE COLLECTION OF THE VISCOUNT WIMBORNE

FRONT COVER Lot 8 (detail)

INSIDE FRONT COVER

Lot 42 (detail)

PAGE 2

Lot 6 (detail)

OPPOSITE

Lot 22 (detail)

INDEX

Lot 7 (detail)

BACK COVER

Lot 4 (detail)

AUCTION

Tuesday 1 July 2025 at 6.30 pm

8 King Street, St. James’s London SW1Y 6QT

VIEWING

Thursday 26 June 10.00 am - 5.00 pm

Friday 27 June 9.00 am - 5.00 pm

Saturday 28 June 12.00 pm - 5.00 pm

Sunday 29 June 12.00 pm - 5.00 pm

Monday 30 June 9.00 am - 5.00 pm

Tuesday 1 July 9.00 am - 3.00 pm

AUCTIONEER

Henry Pettifer

AUCTION CODE AND NUMBER

In sending absentee bids or making enquiries, this sale should be referred to as ISABELLA-23859

ADMISSION

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CONDITIONS OF SALE

The sale of each lot is subject to the Conditions of Sale, Important Notices and Explanation of Cataloguing Practice, which are set out in this catalogue and on christies.com. Please note that the symbols and cataloguing for some lots may change before the auction. For the most up to date sale information for a lot, please see the full lot description, which can be accessed through the sale landing page on christies.com.

BUYER’S PREMIUM

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Check Section D of the Conditions of Sale at the back of this catalogue.

Estimates in a currency other than pounds sterling are approximate and for illustration purposes only.

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AUCTION CALENDAR 2025

TO INCLUDE YOUR PROPERTY IN THESE SALES PLEASE CONSIGN TEN WEEKS BEFORE THE SALE DATE. CONTACT THE SPECIALISTS OR REPRESENTATIVE OFFICE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

18 NOVEMBER

MAÎTRES ANCIENS: PEINTURESDESSINS - SCULPTURES

PARIS

6 - 20 NOVEMBER

MAÎTRES ANCIENS: PEINTURESDESSINS – SCULPTURES, ONLINE PARIS

2 DECEMBER

OLD MASTERS EVENING SALE LONDON

3 DECEMBER

OLD MASTERS TO MODERN DAY SALE: PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, SCULPTURE LONDON

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CONSULTANTS

Sandra Romito

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SPECIALISTS FOR THIS AUCTION

SERVICES FOR THIS AUCTION

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EMAIL

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BUYING AT CHRISTIE’S

For an overview of the process, see the Buying at Christie’s section. christies.com

Henry Pettifer International Deputy Chairman

Andrew Fletcher Global Head

Clementine Sinclair Head of Department

Freddie de Rougemont Director

Francis Russell Deputy Chairman, UK

Maja Markovic Director, Head of Evening Sale

John Hawley Director, Head of Private Sales, EMEA

John Stainton International Deputy Chairman Deputy Chairman, UK & Ireland

Letizia Treves Global Head of Research & Expertise

Flavia Lefebvre d’Ovidio Associate Director

OLD MASTERS INTERNATIONAL

OLD MASTERS LONDON

Isabella Manning Junior Specialist

Lucy Speelman Junior Specialist, Head of Day Sale

Annabel Kishor Associate Director

Zack Boutwood Cataloguer

BRITISH DRAWINGS & WATERCOLOURS

Alastair Plumb Director

19TH CENTURY EUROPEAN ART

CIRCLE OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH ('S-HERTOGENBOSCH C. 1450-1516)

The Harrowing of Hell oil on panel

12 x 11√ in. (30.5 x 30.3 cm.)

with a later inscription ‘1584’ (lower left)

£50,000-70,000

US$68,000-94,000

€60,000-83,000

PROVENANCE:

Anonymous sale; Hugo Helbing, Munich, 25 April 1904, lot 9, as 'Hieronymus Bosch'.

Anonymous sale [Auswärtige Privat-Galerie]; Rudolph Lepke, Berlin, 8 May 1906, lot 44, as 'Hieronymus Bosch'.

Anonymous sale; Rudolph Lepke, Berlin, 5 March 1907, lot 133, as 'Hieronymus Bosch'.

Anonymous sale; Paul Brandt B.V., Amsterdam, 24 May 1977 (=1st day), lot 93, as 'Gillis Mostaert'.

Acquired by the father of the present owner before 1988.

This intriguing panel, which in the early twentieth century was believed to be by Hieronymus Bosch himself, belongs to a small group of Boschian images painted within the master's lifetime. Bosch's influence would come to have a lasting and widely felt impact on the visual arts throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Perhaps the most inventive and individual painter working in the Netherlands during the late Middle Ages, Bosch’s unique imaginative powers and vivid pictorial vocabulary proved a source of constant inspiration for painters seeking to imagine and visualise the otherworldly.

The Harrowing of Hell seems first to have appeared in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, written in the mid-fourth century, and was later adapted and disseminated by popular theological texts, like the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine. While no depictions of this subject by Bosch are known today, four apparently different pictures of this, or closely related subjects, are recorded in early sources. In 1574, a painting by Bosch showing ‘the Descent of Christ our Lord to Limbo’ was given by Philip II of Spain to the Escorial outside Madrid, with a further painting by the artist of ‘Christ after the Resurrection in Limbo, with many figures’ owned by the king upon his death. Another depiction of the same subject was listed in the 1595 inventory of Archduke Ernest of Austria (1553-1595) at Brussels, and a final one recorded by Karel van Mander in his famous Het Schilder-boeck (1604), which described a ‘Hell […] in which patriarchs are released’ (see L. Campbell, The Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen: The Early Flemish Pictures, Cambridge, 1985, p. 11, under no. 7).

It is likely that the present painting was derived from one of these lost works by an artist who was working in Bosch’s orbit within his lifetime. Dendrochronological analysis of the oak panel provides the earliest felling date of 1483, with a possible date of creation from 1485 onwards (report by Dr. Peter Klein, 29 October 2024, available upon request). Infrared reflectography reveals a combination of planned underdrawing and more spontaneously executed elements, with Christ and the figures before him partially underdrawn and the landscape and surrounding staffage rendered with greater freedom (fig. 1; analysis by Tager Stonor Richardson, 26 April 2025, available upon request). The painting's composition, conceived within a unique square format, also suggests that it may have been intended for a specific form of display, attested to by the barb of its painted edges.

Bosch’s diabolic landscapes created an artistic phenomenon so revered in his lifetime and beyond that they gained a life of their own, with his designs disseminated by draughtsmen, painters and printmakers through an intense exchange of models. Artists would reinterpret Boschian themes through motifs derived from drawings, often assembled in sketchbooks and modelbooks, and while most such books are now lost or dismembered, one can imagine that such an invaluable workshop tool may have helped the present artist build a visual repertoire as a means of developing this composition.

Christ’s Descent into Limbo was, like many Christian iconographies that were popularised during the Middle Ages, not based on the Biblical account of his life. As told in de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, following his Crucifixion, Christ descended into Hell in triumph, bringing salvation to the righteous who had died since the beginning of the world. Arriving at the entrance of Hell, he called out in a voice ‘as of thunder… Lift up your gates…and the King of Glory shall come in’ (Gospel of Nicodemus, 16:1). The figure of Christ, dressed in a red mantle and carrying a banner of victory, is shown smashing down the gates of Hell at centre of this work. Surrounding him is a disturbing account of the tumultuous mass of sinners and demons that were to fascinate and horrify Bosch’s contemporaries, retaining even today their enduring force.

Fig 1. Infrared reflectography detail of the present lot

MORE

STUDIO OF SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS (SIEGEN 1577-1640 ANTWERP)

Three head studies of a bearded man oil on panel

18æ x 25 in. (47.7 x 63.5 cm.)

£100,000-150,000

US$140,000-200,000

€120,000-180,000

PROVENANCE:

Peter Michallat, Lower Failand, Bristol; his sale (†), Christie's, London, 23 January 2011, lot 36, as 'Manner of Sir Peter Paul Rubens', where acquired after sale by the present owner.

This rediscovered panel is a vigorously worked and psychologically penetrating study of the head of a bearded man viewed from three vantage points, providing an insight into the reproduction and diffusion of figure types by the most significant Flemish painter of the seventeenth century: Sir Peter Paul Rubens.

When the painting was offered in 2011, the head studies were only faintly perceptible beneath dark, obscuring layers of historic dirt and discoloured varnish, which left it largely overlooked at the sale, after which it was acquired by the present owner. Subsequent conservation was transformative, revealing the original paint surface beneath.

Rubens’s prolific use of head studies for his larger multi-figural compositions is well documented. Spontaneous, rapidly painted studies from a model in the studio provided Rubens with an essential cast of real-life characters to draw from. Recorded often from a variety of angles, they were never intended as finished paintings for display, but kept as working tools to add variety and a sense of human veracity to his history paintings, communicating the master’s ideas to his assistants. Along with his compositional modelli, these head studies were amongst his most important possessions, which he relied on as part of his working practice for his whole life. Indeed, a work of this type was referenced in the so-called Specificatie – an inventory of works compiled for auction following Rubens’s death in 1640 – testifying to their importance for the artist: 'Une quantit des visages au vif, sur toile, & fonds de bois, tant de Rubens, que de Mons. Van Dyck' ('A parcel of faces made after the life, vppon bord and Cloth as well by Sir Peter Paul Rubens as van Dyck'; see J. Müller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector, Princeton, 1989, p. 145).

The present heads were evidently painted by at least one talented hand, and perhaps multiple, working in Rubens’s orbit at the end of the 1610s, which included the young Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens. They leave a fascinating record of study heads that may have been based on now-lost individual prototypes by Rubens. The majority of Rubens’s large projects were executed with the assistance of pupils and collaborators working under the master’s supervision. The present head studies can be associated, with slight divergences, to figures found in works by the artist from around 1617, during one of the busiest phases of his career: the upturned head at left, the first of the three to have been rendered on the panel, bears semblance to the shepherd raising his hat in Rubens’s Adoration of the Shepherds of circa 1617 (Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts); the head in the centre, painted second, closely resembles that of Saint Peter in Rubens’s Saint Peter Finding the Tribute Money of circa 1617 (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland; fig. 1), which Rubens sold to Sir Dudley Carlton in 1618 as part of an exchange of goods agreed between the two; and the last, painted in the lower right, can be associated with the figure holding the shroud in the upper right of Rubens’s Descent from the Cross, again of circa 1617 (Lille, Musée des Beaux-Arts). Dendrochronological analysis of the present panel supports a similar time of execution, providing a felling date to after circa 1594 and usage before circa 1630 (dendrochronological report by Ian Tyers, June 2024, available upon request).

Fig. 1 Peter Paul Rubens, Saint Peter Finding the Tribute Money, National Gallery of Ireland Collection

SELECTIONS FROM THE COLLECTION OF MICKEY CARTIN (LOTS 3, 20, 21 AND 22)

°*3

WILLEM KEY (BREDA 1515/16-1568 ANTWERP)

Portrait of Margret Halseber of Basel, also known as 'The Lady with the two beards', bust-length oil on panel 12Ω x 10º in. (31.7 x 26 cm.)

£300,000-500,000

US$410,000-670,000

€360,000-590,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517-1586), Besançon, as 'Tête de femme portant barbe, de la main de Guillaume Chayez' (Jonckheere, op. cit., p. 133). (Possibly) Joseph van Huerne, Ghent (d. 1844); his sale (†), Dullaert-Vandervin, Ghent, 21 October 1844, lot 22, as 'Holbein' (210 FF).

Private collection, England, as 'Hans Holbein the Younger'.

Gustave Becker, London (according to a note on the reverse of a photograph in the RKD Research Files).

Miss B. Campe-Becker; Christie's, London, 13 July 1951, lot 39, as 'Sir Antonio Mor', where unsold. with Colnaghi, London, circa 1957, as 'Antonio Moro' (according to labels on the reverse and Koopstra, op. cit.), where acquired by, Benjamin Sonnenberg (1901-1978), 19 Gramercy Park South, New York; his sale (†), Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 5 June 1979 (=1st day), lot 75, as 'Willem Key'. Dr. Samuel Schaefler (1929-1991), New York.

Anonymous sale; Arteprimitivo, online, 23 April 2007, lot 67, as 'Anthonis Mor'.

Anonymous sale [The Property of a Lady]; Sotheby's, Amsterdam, 7 May 2008, lot 7. with French & Company, New York, where acquired in 2011 by the present owner.

EXHIBITED:

New York, David Zwirner Gallery, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, 4 November-18 December 2021, unpaginated.

LITERATURE:

(Possibly) A. Castan, Monographie du Palais Granvelle à Besançon, Paris, 1867, p. 332. (Possibly) T. von Frimmel, Geschichte der Wiener Gemäldesammlungen, I, Lepizig, 1899, p. 480.

A. Koopstra, Schattengalerie: die verlorenen Werke der Gemäldesammlung, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2008, pp. 140-4, no. 60.

K. Jonckheere, Willem Key (1516-1568): Portrait of a Humanist Painter, Turnhout, 2011, pp. 132-135, no. A68, illustrated.

E. Gordon and S. Holmes, ed., Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, London, 2023, pp. 35 and 40.

ENGRAVED:

P. de Vlaminck, 1836.

This highly unusual and wonderfully preserved portrait depicts Margret Halseber (Halscher), as testified through an inscription on an autograph replica (formerly Aachen, Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, stolen in 1972), about whom nothing is known. She may have had hirsutism, a condition caused by an imbalance in hormones, namely testosterone, that results in the growth of coarse hair on the face, chest and back. This unusual medical condition must have been a source of curiosity – and perhaps ridicule – in the early modern era. Some eighty years later, in 1631, Jusepe de Ribera would paint a woman with the same condition in his well-known Magdalena Ventura with her husband and son (fig. 1; Toledo, Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli, on long-term loan to the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid).

A label on the reverse of the present panel identifies the sitter as being a resident of Basel and the artist as Hans Holbein the Younger. While this was previously taken as evidence that the present painting was probably the panel attributed to Holbein that featured in both the 1819 sale of the Chevalier François Xavier de Burtin and that of the Van Huerne collection in 1844, in each of which it was said that the panel in question lacked the inscription that appears on the ex-Aachen example (see, for example, the entry to the 2008 Sotheby’s sale, op. cit.), it can now be shown for the first time that the present panel was definitively not the version in the collection of de Burtin. The second volume of his Traité des connaissances nécessaires aux amateurs de tableaux (Brussels, 1808) mentions how ‘Margret Halseber’s name is spelled out in full’ (‘le nom de Margret Halseber se lit en toutes lettres’) in the painting in his collection (p. 217), referring to the inscription on the Aachen picture, which must therefore have instead been the one in his possession.

For much of the twentieth century, the painting was frequently attributed to Antonis Mor, though in 1931 Louis Dimier correctly gave the composition to Willem Key on account of contemporary documentary evidence relating to one of the versions in the collection of Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517-1586) in Besançon (op. cit.). There, the panel is described as the work of one ‘Guillaume Chayez,’ whom Dimier correctly identified as Willem Key. As Koenraad Jonckheere has surmised, the present painting was probably the version in Granvelle’s collection as the inventory fails to make mention of the inscription that appears on the ex-Aachen version (op. cit., pp. 133-134). Granvelle apparently maintained a particular fascination with portraits of distinctive individuals. In addition to commissioning this portrait from Key, he ordered from Mor a portrait of a person with dwarfism in his household (Paris, Musée du Louvre). That Granvelle was equally familiar with Key is confirmed by his having sat for a portrait by the artist (see Jonckheere, op. cit., no. A41).

Despite the uncharacteristically vivacious, virtuoso and carefree execution of this painting within Key’s oeuvre, from a technical point of view, Jonckheere has stressed how ‘several features fit in seamlessly with Willem Key’s manner of painting’ (op. cit., p. 134). These include the rapid, summary underdrawing in black chalk, visible in places where the paint has been fairly thinly applied; its comparatively coarse finish (especially when compared with paintings by Mor); and the ochre-pink tonality of the woman’s flesh tones, which can likewise be found in other portraits by Key.

While the ex-Aachen example has not resurfaced since its theft and consequently has not benefited from technical examination, several factors point to the present painting being the prime version of this composition. While the two versions correspond in almost every detail, the treatment of the beard in the two paintings is different and it appears the Aachen portrait lacks the underdrawing so evident in our example.

In addition to the second version formerly in Aachen, this portrait is known through a copy in the collection of the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (see Jonckheere, op. cit., no. E3).

Fig. 1 Jusepe de Ribera, Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband and Son, Museo Fundación Lerma, Toledo

JAN DAVIDSZ. DE HEEM (UTRECHT 1606-1684 ANTWERP)

A pie on a pewter plate, a partially peeled lemon and overturned silver spoon on a pewter plate, crayfish and shrimp in a Wanli bowl, fruit, a walnut and an oyster on a pewter plate, a basket of fruit, a fluted glass, a silver-gilt cup, a roemer, an overturned silver tazza on a strong box, a silver ewer and a bread roll all on a partially draped table with a curtain beyond signed and dated ‘J. De Heem f. A° 1649’ (lower left, on the table) oil on canvas

29¡ x 44¡ in. (75.3 x 112.7 cm.)

£3,000,000-5,000,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) Jacques Meijers (d. 1721), Rotterdam; his sale (†), Willis, Rotterdam, 9 September 1722, lot 118 (f 225).

US$4,100,000-6,700,000

€3,600,000-6,000,000

E.H. Davenport, Davenport House, Bridgnorth, Shropshire, by 1881, and by inheritance to his daughter, Mrs. Leicester-Warren; Christie’s, London, 12 June 1931, lot 74 (740 gns. to Collings).

Alexander Jergen, Cincinnati, presumably by 1931 and until 1984. with French & Co., New York, 1984.

Linda and Gerald Guterman; their sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 14 January 1988, lot 19, where acquired by the following, with Thomas Brod, London. Private collection, Germany.

Anonymous sale [The Property of a Gentleman]; Christie’s, London, 3 December 1997, lot 22, where acquired.

EXHIBITED:

Whitechapel, London, Saint Jude’s School House, Annual Fine Art Loan Exhibition, 1886, no. 138.

Cincinnati, Cincinnati Museum of Art, until 1984, on loan. Delft, Stedelijk Museum het Prinsenhof; Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum and Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, De Rijkdom Verbeeld / A Prosperous Past: The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands, 1600-1700, 1988, no. 40 (cat. by S. Segal). Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Jan Davidsz de Heem und sein Kreis, 1991, no. 7A (cat. by S. Segal).

LITERATURE:

G. Hoet, Catalogus of naamlyst van schilderyen met derzelver pryzen…, I, The Hague, 1752, p. 277, no. 118.

G. Keyes, in Dutch and Flemish Masters – Paintings from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, exhibition catalogue, Minneapolis, Houston and San Diego, 1985, p. 52, under no. 17.

‘Auction: Sotheby’s: Thursday January 14,’ Tableau, X, December 1987, p. 83, illustrated. F. Fox Hofrichter, ‘Review of the exhibition A Prosperous Past: The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands 1600-1700,’ The Burlington Magazine, CXXX, no. 1029, December 1988, pp. 962-963, fig. 109.

C. Hergenröder, ‘Gesunder Markt mit Hochpreistendenzen. Altmeistergemälde in den vergangenen Jahren,’ Kunst und Antiquitäten, 5/88, 1988, pp. 16-17, illustrated.

S. Segal, ‘De Heem and his Circle,’ in A Prosperous Past, exhibition catalogue, Delft, Cambridge, MA and Fort Worth, 1988, pp. 151-153, plate 40, as ‘[a] magnificent work’.

S. Segal, ‘De rijkdom verbeeld,’ Tableau, X, no. 6, 1988, pp. 67 and 69, illustrated.

I. de Wavren, ‘Le Triomphe de l’Éphémère,’ L’objet d’art, III, June 1988, pp. 102-103, illustrated in reverse.

F.G. Meijer, ‘Book review of Exh. Cat. A Prosperous Past: The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands 1600-1700,’ Simiolus, XX, 1990/1, no. 1, p. 96.

S. Segal, in Jan Davidsz de Heem en zijn kring, exhibition catalogue, Utrecht and Braunschweig, 1991, p. 214, note 1.

J. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw, 1585-1630. Met biografieën als bijlage, Antwerp, 1997, p. 281, illustrated.

‘Adjugé,’ L’Estampille, March 1998, p. 19, illustrated.

C. Fritzsche, Der Betrachter im Stilleben. Raumerfahrung und Erzählstrukturen in der niederländischen Stillebenmalerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Weimar, 2010, pp. 55, 62-63, 92-93, 104, 175 and 284, fig. 16.

F.G. Meijer, Jan Davidsz. de Heem 1606-1684, I, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2016, pp. 105, 157-158, 160-161, 192, 209, 358, illustrated; II, pp. 141-142 and 308, no. A 121.

F.G. Meijer, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, 1606-1684, I, Zwolle, 2024, pp. 210-211, fig. 253, illustrated (detail), as ‘[t]he core work for the year 1649’; II, pp. 588-589, no. 126, illustrated.

F.G. Meijer, Opulence Distilled: The Still Lifes by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Antwerp, 2024, p. 53, fig. 54, as ‘[t]he core work for the year 1649’.

This luxurious and immaculately preserved still life is among the finest paintings by the artist to have appeared on the market in recent decades. On account of its exceptional quality, the two most important scholars of northern still-life painting in recent times, Fred G. Meijer and Sam Segal, have praised it variously as ‘the core work for the year 1649’ (see Meijer, op. cit. 2024, p. 210) and ‘a magnificent work’ (see Segal, op. cit., 1988, p. 152).

The painting reprises themes from an extraordinary group of four large-scale paintings that de Heem executed earlier in the decade. Two of these paintings are today at the Louvre (inv. no. 1321; fig. 1) and the Musée de la Ville de Bruxelles (inv. no. K.1878.5). A third is in a private collection, and the fourth was sold for a world auction record at Christie’s in London on 15 December 2020. Much like the present painting, the variety of textures and sheer number of expensive foods and objects the artist managed to compose within a relatively tight pictorial space offers the viewer an example of virtually everything de Heem was capable of and perhaps served as a calling card to display the range of his abilities.

Fig. 1 Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Table of Deserts 1640, Musée du Louvre, Paris © Bridgeman Images

De Heem’s meticulous, refined handling of paint in the present painting contrasts strikingly with his more broadly brushed works of 1647. A number of the still-life elements can, however, be found in other of de Heem’s paintings or associated with surviving examples, including the silver-gilt cup and cover, silver tazza and silk-covered box. An identical tazza, for example, reappears in a painting from the 1650s in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (fig. 2), while, as Segal has noted (op. cit.), the cup and cover is similar to one made by Friedrich Hirschvogel in Nuremberg around 1638. Similar pies with different crust designs likewise appear sporadically in de Heem’s still lifes of the 1640s and early 1650s, including in the aforementioned work sold in 2020. Other details, like the elaborate silver ewer at right, are unique to this painting. No similar ewer with swan-head spout surmounted by a seated putto, repoussé and chased neck with a grotesque mask and scroll handle with applied motif

of Hercules and the Nemean Lion is known today, suggesting it may be de Heem’s own invention or, as Meijer has proposed (op. cit., p. 210), added at the behest of a patron.

De Heem’s refined approach and the painting’s exceptional state of preservation enable the appreciation of a number of small details cleverly reflected in the metal and glassware. The central boss of the silver-gilt cup shows the reverse of a painting on an easel, while certain still-life elements, a candlestick and books on a table can be made out in the mirror-like vacant cartouche of the ewer. Claudia Fritzsche perceptively pointed out that the artist himself can be seen in this cartouche (fig. 3; op. cit.). Additionally, though it has never before been pointed out in the literature, the windows reflected in the roemer also include a church spire (fig. 4), presumably that of the Cathedral in Antwerp where de Heem was then working.

Fig. 3 Detail of the present painting

Fig. 4 Detail of the present painting

Fig. 2 Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life with Ham, Lobster and Fruit, Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

This painting may be identical with the de Heem still life described simply as ‘Een Tafel vervult met Fruyten, en andere eetwaare’ in the 1722 posthumous sale of the leading Rotterdam collector and art dealer Jacques Meijers. Despite the generic description in the sale catalogue, it is the only known painting by de Heem whose size comports so closely with the dimensions provided in the catalogue: ‘h: 2 v: 5: duym, b: 3:v:6½ duym.’ Meijers was a Catholic collector who privileged quality over a focus on a specific school of painting. In addition to the Dutch and Flemish paintings one would expect from a Dutch collector of his generation, Meijers included sterling examples by a number of the best French and Italian artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the Italian works that appeared in the sale were paintings attributed to Caravaggio, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Meijers also owned no fewer than nine paintings given to Nicolas Poussin, including his Camillus and the Schoolmaster of Falerii (Pasadena, CA, Norton Simon Museum) and Venus and Mercury (Dulwich Picture Gallery), and Claude’s The Sermon on the Mount (New York, The Frick Collection). Highlights of the Dutch and Flemish paintings include a pair by Gerrit Dou depicting women bathing (both St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum), ten paintings attributed to Peter Paul Rubens – the finest of which was the artist’s large-scale masterpiece depicting The Meeting of David and Abigail (fig. 5; Detroit Institute of Arts), which was previously in the collection of the Duke of Richelieu and Roger de Piles – and five works given to Anthony van Dyck.

Two somewhat reduced painted copies of this still life are known, one of which by Anthony Oberman (17811845). A seventeenth-century drawing, previously attributed to de Heem but recently rejected by Meijer (op. cit., p. 671, no. D R 07), was offered Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 2012, lot 115.

Fig. 5 Peter Paul Rubens, The Meeting of David and Abigail, Detroit Institute of Arts

FRANS HALS

(ANTWERP 1582/3-1666 HAARLEM)

Portrait of Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617-1666), half-length, in black dress, holding a book oil on panel

12¿ x 9æ in. (30.8 x 24.7 cm.)

£600,000-800,000

US$810,000-1,100,000

€720,000-950,000

PROVENANCE:

Sir James Stuart (Sir John James Stuart of Allanbank, 5th Bt.?); his sale, Christie's, London, 23 May 1835, lot 64, as 'Frank Hals [sic]', where acquired for 15 gns. by, Andrew James, Harewood Square, London, and by inheritance to his daughter, Miss Sarah Ann James (d. 1890), Norfolk Square, London; (†) Christie's, London, 20 June 1891 (=1st day), lot 31, as 'F. Hals' (230 gns. to M. Colnaghi).

Mrs. Joseph, London, from whom acquired by, with P. D. Colnaghi & Co., London, from whom a quarter share was acquired on 29 May 1911 by the following, with Knoedler & Co., Lippmann, Sulley & Co., from whom acquired on 28 June 1911 by the following, with Roebel and Reinhardt Galleries, Milwaukee. Emory Leyden Ford (1876-1942), Detroit, and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of the works of the Old Masters, associated with works of deceased Masters of the British School, 1871, no. 250, as 'Frans Hals' (lent by Miss James).

Detroit, Museum of Art, Exhibition of Paintings loaned by E.L. Ford, Esq. of Detroit, Michigan, October 1915, no. 2, as 'Frans Hals' (illustrated on the front cover).

Detroit, Institute of Arts, Fifty Paintings by Frans Hals, 10 January-28 February 1935, no. 42.

LITERATURE:

E.W. Moes, Frans Hals: sa vie et son oeuvre, Brussels, 1909, p. 102, no. 49, as 'Frans Hals'.

C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, III, London, 1910, p. 60, no. 194, as a 'replica', with incorrect dimensions.

W. von Bode and M.J. Binder, Frans Hals: Sein Leben und Seine Werke, II, Berlin, 1914, pp. 63, 73 and 83, no. 225, pl. 143a, as 'Frans Hals', with incorrect dimensions.

W.R. Valentiner, Frans Hals: Des Meisters Gemälde (Klassiker der Kunst), 1st ed., Stuttgart and Berlin, 1921, p. 209; 2nd ed., 1923, p. 222, as 'Frans Hals'.

W.R. Valentiner, Frans Hals Paintings in America, Westport, 1936, p. 78, as 'Frans Hals'.

S. Slive, Frans Hals, III, London and New York, 1974, p. 85, no. 165.1, fig. 42, as 'a reduced copy by another hand after the Brussels painting'.

S. Slive, Frans Hals, exhibition catalogue, London, 1989, pp. 300 and 302, fig. 60c, as 'Unknown artist, copy after Hals'.

ENGRAVED:

Jonas Suyderhoef (1613-1686), 1651. Jan Brouwer (c. 1626-after 1688).

The re-emergence of this small-scale portrait of Johannes Hoornbeeck after more than a century offers an opportunity to look afresh at an important part of Frans Hals’s oeuvre: the small-scale portrait. Hals’s small-scale portraits on panel or copper, nearly forty of which are known or documented today, occupied a critical place in his artistic production and count among the artist’s liveliest and most spontaneous works. This relatively small group of paintings amounting to little more than fifteen percent of Hals’s known output would come to be especially prized by generations of collectors and commentators in ensuing centuries.

Théophile Thoré, the driving force behind the resurgence of interest in the artist and his work in the middle of the nineteenth century, first gave voice to the particular appeal of these intimately scaled works when, in 1860, he enthused about the artist’s 1634 portrait of the Haarlem historian Pieter Christiaansz. Bor: ‘What a jewel this little Frans Hals is!...Here in Rotterdam, Frans Hals enclosed his man in an oval medallion 22 centimetres high; only the bust, but with one hand…All of this is of such skill, such knowledge, such freedom, such spirit!’ The painting was sadly destroyed when a fire broke out four years later at the Museum Boymans in Rotterdam, but its appearance is known today through a print executed in the same year by Adriaen Matham.

PORTRAITS AND PRINTS

The identities of a surprising number of Hals’s sitters for his small-scale portraits have come down to us, in large part due to the fact that – as with his portrait of Bor and the present picture – they often served as models for engravings in which the sitter’s name is inscribed in the print. Nearly one-third of the surviving or documented small-scale panels by Hals were copied in prints, generally appearing in reverse on account of the printing process and

of identical scale, suggesting they were traced by the printmaker. In addition to the lost Bor portrait, evidence exists for at least three further modellos – the portraits of Arnold Möller (Slive, op. cit., no. L9), Caspar Sibelius (Slive, op. cit., no. L11) and Theodor Wickenburg (Slive, op. cit., no. L17) – for which only a print is known today. The panel portrait depicting the Deventer preacher Sibelius, sadly destroyed by fire in 1956 when in the collection of Billy Rose, was regarded by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1910), Wilhelm von Bode (1914), Wilhelm Valentiner (1921) and, most recently, Justine Rinnooy Kan (2023) as Hals’s modello for a print of similar scale by Jonas Suyderhoef (for an image of the painting, see W.R. Valentiner, op. cit., 1923, p. 150). Seymour Slive, who knew the portrait of Sibelius solely from a poor black-and-white photograph, described it instead as ‘either very badly abraded and clumsily restored or…a copy by another hand after one of Suyderhoef’s prints’ (op. cit., III, under no. L12). That the ex-Rose painting was executed in reverse of Suyderhoef’s print confirms that it is not a copy after the print but most likely the lost prototype by Hals.

Hals enjoyed particularly friendly relations with the select group of contemporary printmakers who made engravings after his painted portraits. No fewer than twenty-six of Hals’s portraits were engraved in his lifetime, though by only nine engravers, three of whom hailed from the Matham family. As Rinnooy Kan has pointed out (‘Portrait Prints’, Frans Hals, exhibition catalogue, London and Amsterdam, 2023, p. 143), both Jacob Matham – who was perhaps the first to engrave a portrait by Hals when, in 1618, he produced a scaled print after the portrait of Theodorus Schrevelius – and Hals were members of the local chamber of rhetoric, De Wijngaertrancken (Vine Tendrils). Hals similarly knew Jacob’s son, Adriaen, whom he painted at far left in a civic guard portrait around 1627. Adriaen, who made three prints after Hals’s portraits in the mid1630s, also witnessed the baptism of Hals’s daughter, Susanna, in 1634. Jan van de Velde II, who produced a further six prints after Hals’s portraits, similarly served as a witness to the baptisms of Hals’s niece, Hester, in 1624 and his son, Reynier, in 1627. But it was Jonas Suyderhoef, a precociously talented Haarlem engraver nearly thirty years his junior, who enjoyed the strongest binding ties with the elder artist and, perhaps unsurprisingly, produced the largest number of reproductive prints after his portraits. Archival records reveal that Jonas’s brother, Adriaen, appeared in 1641 as a witness in a court case alongside Hals’s second wife. A decade later the engraver would become a member of Hals’s extended family through Adriaen’s marriage to the painter’s niece, Maria.

Suyderhoef produced thirteen prints after portraits by Hals between about 1638, when he engraved Hals’s extraordinary portrait of Jean de la Chambre, and at least 1651, the year in which he engraved both the present portrait (fig. 1) and Hals’s lost depiction of Willem van der Cramer (collaboration between the two artists may have continued several years thereafter with the portrait of Theodor Wickenburg, which was probably painted in the first half of the 1650s). The close working relationship between these two artists can be inferred not only through the sheer number of collaborations but their consistent approach to working together. Of the nine instances in which Hals’s painting survives, smallscale portraits to aid the engraver are known for all but one – the Conradus Viëtor of 1644 (New York, The Leiden Collection). This stands in stark contrast to Hals’s collaborations with the other eight printmakers, where in nearly twothirds of cases where Hals’s portrait survives, small-scale portraits are unknown. This striking dichotomy between Hals’s collaboration with Suyderhoef on the one hand and that of other printmakers on the other apparently bespeaks a particular preference on Suyderhoef’s behalf to work directly from a modello at scale rather than be compelled to personally reduce a large-scale portrait.

The present example is exceptional within the Hals/Suyderhoef collaboration in that it is the only instance in which both a life-size portrait (fig. 2) and small-scale modello by Hals have survived. However, evidence exists for several further instances in which Hals painted both life-size and small modello portraits that functioned as an aid to the printmaker. Archival documents, for example, suggest that the surviving small-scale portrait of the Haarlem minister Hendrick Swalmius was probably once accompanied by a life-size example. The 1662 estate inventory compiled following the death of his wife, Yda Willems, mentions two portraits of the sitter: ‘A portrait of Henricus Swalmius’ (‘Een conterfeytsel van Henricus Swalmius’) and ‘Another small portrait of Henricus Swalmius’ (‘Noch een cleijn conterfeytsel van Henricus Swalmius’) (Haarlem, NHA, acc. no. 1617, ONA, inv. no. 388, notary Jacob van de Camer, fols. 76-80, 12 September 1662). While Frans Grijzenhout, who has recently studied Hals’s portraits of Protestant ministers, interpreted this as ‘the painted version,

Fig. 1 Jonas Suyderhoef, Portrait of Johannes Hoornbeeck, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

probably in a somewhat bigger frame, and the print, either in smaller frame or unframed’ (‘The Religion(s) of Frans Hals', Frans Hals: Iconography – Technique – Reputation, N.E. Middelkoop and R.E.O. Ekkart, eds., Amsterdam, 2024, p. 25), this likely more straightforwardly references two paintings, one small and one large.

Similarly, Hals’s portrait of René Descartes, the artist’s most famous sitter, is known today through a small, compromised modello (Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek) and no fewer than eight copies (the best of which is in the Louvre Museum in Paris). Five of these paintings measure ± 76 x 65 cm., a format Hals frequently employed in the mid-1640s, including for his life-size portrait of Hoornbeeck in Brussels. There is a strong likelihood, therefore, that each of these copies is modelled after a now-lost life-size portrait by Hals. As Slive himself has previously concluded, ‘the possibility that an original life-size painting based on the Copenhagen sketch [of Descartes] may turn up one day cannot be excluded’ (op. cit., p. 90).

Nor was Hals opposed to making autograph replicas of his portraits. In the mid1630s, he executed the first of two informal portraits of Willem van Heythuysen (fig. 3). Following the sitter’s death in 1650, the artist painted a replica for the regents' room of the Van Heythuysen hofje in Haarlem, which is now thought to be the version in Brussels (fig. 4; P. Biesboer, ‘Willem van Heythuysen en zijn twee portretten’, Hart voor Haarlem: Liber amicorum voor Jaap Temminck, H. Brokken et al., eds., Haarlem, 1996, pp. 113-126).

THE SITTER

Johannes Hoornbeeck was precisely the type of man who would have valued having his visage painted by Hals and engraved by Suyderhoef. He belonged to a group of at least fifteen clergymen to have been painted by Haarlem’s leading portraitist. Most, including Hoornbeeck, who was born in Haarlem in 1617, had connections to the city in which Hals lived and worked. However, unlike many of the other prelates who sat for Haarlem’s greatest portraitist, Hoornbeeck was less orthodox in his Calvinist sensibilities, preferring moderation and unity over dogma and conflict.

Hoornbeeck, whose eponymous grandfather had immigrated from Flanders to Haarlem in 1548, left Haarlem to begin his university studies in Leiden in 1633. Two years later, an outbreak of the plague in the city compelled him to transfer to Utrecht. He would stay there until September 1636, by which point the plague subsided and he returned to Leiden. The death of his father, the merchant Tobias Hoornbeeck, in April 1637 necessitated a return to his hometown, where he would remain until early 1639. On 1 March of that year, he became a minister at Mülheim near Cologne and remained there through late 1642, when he again returned to Haarlem. On 2 December 1643, he was promoted to Doctor of Theology in the Utrecht academy. Several months later, he was named minister in Maastricht on 19 February 1644 and on 3 March he accepted the same position in Graft in Noord-Holland. In May of 1644, he took up the position of professor of theology at Utrecht University, giving his inaugural lecture in July, as well as the Illustre School in Harderwijk. It was these appointments

Fig. 2 Frans Hals, Portrait of Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617-1666), Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Present lot illustrated

that may well have induced him to commission the life-size portrait from Hals in Brussels. On 20 April 1650, he married Anna Bernard of Amsterdam, whose grandfather was the famous geographer Jodocus Hondius. After nearly a decade at Utrecht University, Hoornbeeck – who spoke thirteen languages – left for Leiden University, where he gave his inaugural address on 9 June 1654. He remained in the position until he passed away, aged 48, on 1 September 1666.

Described as ‘a scholar of no ordinary stamp’ (‘een geleerde van niet alledaagschen stempel’; J.P. de Bie and J. Loosjes, Biographisch Woordenboek van Protestantsche Godgeleerden in Nederland, IV, The Hague, 1931, p. 278), Hoornbeeck was a notably prolific writer. Between 1644 and 1674, more than forty treatises were published (and at least four texts appeared posthumously) dealing with topics as diverse as euthanasia (1651; 2nd ed. 1660) and the origins of Arminianism (1662), many going through multiple editions.

Hals presents his sitter in a manner befitting his role as both a preacher and academic. As Grijzenhout has pointed out (op. cit., pp. 21-2), all but two of Hals’s portraits of Protestant ministers depict their sitter wearing a skullcap. Moreover, these religious men frequently hold a book, a finger placed between the pages. It is as if their reading has been momentarily interrupted, either by the painter or viewer.

THE ATTRIBUTION

Since it first came to light nearly 200 years ago, this small portrait has generally, if not universally, been given to Hals. Hals’s production of small-scale portraits on panel reached their apogee between about 1645 and 1660, with around fifteen surviving examples dating to this decade-and-a-half period. As Dr. Norbert E. Middelkoop has recently pointed out following first-hand inspection of the present picture (private communication, 9 May 2025), this portrait of

Hoornbeeck anticipates a number of similar works painted in the second half of the 1650s or shortly thereafter. These include the Portrait of a preacher of circa 1657-60 (fig. 5); the Portrait of a man of circa 1660 (The Hague, Mauritshuis) and the Portrait of a preacher of circa 1660 (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).

In the course of the twentieth century, all major scholars of Hals and his work attributed the painting to Hals without reservation, the only exception being Seymour Slive (op. cit., 1974; 1989). These include Ernst Wilhelm Moes (op. cit., 1909), Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (op. cit., 1910), Wilhelm von Bode (op. cit., 1914) and Wilhelm Valentiner (op. cit., 1923; 1936). In a letter dated 7 September 1911 that was transcribed in full and included in the catalogue of the 1915 exhibition at the Detroit Museum of Art (now Detroit Institute of Arts), von Bode not only praised the painting’s quality but was the first to point out the relationship between it and the print:

‘the free, spiritful and broad way in which it is handled, proves absolutely that it is an original direct from nature…Taking Snyderhoef’s [sic] engraving into consideration, one can positively conclude that this engraving was copied from that little portrait of Franz Hals, as it is exactly of the same size’ (op. cit.).

The attributional history of this painting is, therefore, comparable to the aforementioned portrait of Heythuysen, now regarded as Hals’s prime. Slive only appears to have had the opportunity to study the small portrait of Hoornbeeck on one occasion, at the Detroit Institute of Arts on 26 January 1974, just as the third volume of his catalogue raisonné was about to go to press (private communication between Frederick J. Cummings and the painting’s then-owner). In published opinions, Slive would come to regard the painting as ‘a reduced copy by another hand after the Brussels painting’ (op. cit.,1974) and a ‘copy after Hals’ (op. cit., 1989), much as he had with the portrait of Heythuysen. The unpublished letter from Cummings, then the director of the Detroit

Fig. 4 Frans Hals, Portrait of Willem van Heythuysen, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Fig. 3 Frans Hals, Portrait of Willem van Heythuysen, Private Collection

museum, relayed Slive’s further belief that this and other known copies of Hoornbeeck ‘were probably produced for members of the sitter’s family or for his friends’. At no point does Slive appear to have recognised the function of this small portrait of Hoornbeeck as the modello for Suyderhoef’s print.

Recent dendrochronological examination of the present panel undertaken by Ian Tyers demonstrates that the portrait was all but assuredly produced in advance of Suyderhoef’s print (report dated April 2025, available upon request). The latest heartwood ring present in the board dates from 1633 and no sapwood was present, suggesting the panel dates from after circa 1639 if one is to allow for a minimum number of sapwood rings. To this can be added the fact that the painting and print overlay with almost no discrepancies, save a millimetre or two in the fingers.

Middelkoop has also presciently noted that certain details, including the unusually long baby finger in the painting in Brussels, have been corrected in the modello, a detail Suyderhoef adopted in his print. He further noted that the sitter’s face in the present painting is slightly thinner than that of his visage in the picture in Brussels. Unlike so many of us, Hoornbeeck appears to have lost a bit of weight in the years that had elapsed since the Brussels portrait. Middelkoop noted a similar phenomenon in the two versions of Heythuysen, whose appearance is that of a man more advanced in age in the portrait in Brussels when compared with the one that appeared on the market in 2008.

With the purpose of this small painting firmly established, its authorship should be on equally firm ground. It is instructive that the attribution of none of the other seven known modellos for prints by Suyderhoef has been credibly questioned. Only Claus Grimm has regarded the majority of these works – with the notable exception of the portrait of Jean de la Chambre in London – as workshop productions, often, as in the case of the

extraordinarily penetrating portrait of Samuel Ampzing on copper in The Leiden Collection, as the product of a workshop assistant ‘working from a no longer extant model by Hals’ (Frans Hals and His Workshop: RKD Studies, online, under 1.15, 'A presumably more expensive commission'). Among the other modello portraits that Grimm consigns to a studio hand are the portraits of Petrus Scriverius (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Swalmius (fig. 6) and Theodorus Schrevelius (Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum; for further information on the relationship between modello and print, see M. Bijl, ‘The Portrait of Theodorus Schevelius', The Learned Eye: Regarding Art, Theory, and the Artist’s Reputation: Essays for Ernst van de Wetering, M. van den Doel et al., eds., Amsterdam, 2005, pp. 47-55). The notion that, in each instance, Hals’s prototype has been lost while a workshop variant survives strains credulity.

Martin Bijl (private communication, 8 May 2025) and the late Pieter Biesboer (private communication, 14 May 2025), both on the basis of photographs, have proposed that the present painting is a joint venture between Frans Hals and his son, Frans II. Few, if any, pictures have generally been given to Frans II with certitude, making this suggestion difficult to prove. In light of the close collaboration between Hals and Suyderhoef, the lack of evidence for two distinct hands, the painting's small scale and, not least, its evident quality, the notion that Hals might have uniquely entrusted the production of a modello for one of Holland’s leading academics and theologians in part to his son is not a wholly satisfactory one. If nothing else, Bijl and Biesboer raise interesting questions about the degree to which others would come to participate in Hals’s portrait production in the final two decades of his career.

The attribution has been endorsed by Dr. Norbert E. Middelkoop and others upon first-hand inspection of the portrait. We are further grateful to Dr. Middelkoop for his insightful thoughts on this entry and to Martin Bijl and Pieter Biesboer for their comments on the basis of photographs.

Fig. 6 Frans Hals, Portrait of Hendrik Swalmius, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Fig. 5 Frans Hals, Portrait of a man, possibly a clergyman, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

PIETER BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER (BRUSSELS 1564-1638 ANTWERP)

The Birdtrap signed 'P·BREVGHEL·' (lower right)

oil on panel

15º x 22¿ in. (38.6 x 56.2 cm.)

£1,000,000-1,500,000

US$1,400,000-2,000,000

€1,200,000-1,800,000

PROVENANCE:

François-Michel Ghesquière, seigneur de Stradin (1717-1792), and by descent. with Galerie Finck, Brussels, 1970.

Anonymous sale; Ader Tajan, Paris, 18 December 1991, lot 37, as 'Attribué à Pieter Brueghel II'. with Galerie de Jonckheere, Paris, from whom acquired by the present owner in October 1997.

LITERATURE:

K. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere (1564-1637/38): Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog, II, Lingen, 1998/2000, pp. 580-1 and 619, no. E715, fig. 484.

This Birdtrap is a finely preserved example of what is arguably the Brueghel dynasty’s most iconic invention and one of the most enduringly popular compositions of the Netherlandish landscape tradition. Although no fewer than 127 versions have survived from the family’s studio and followers, only 45 are now believed to be autograph works by Pieter Brueghel the Younger himself, with the remainder being largely workshop copies of varying degrees of quality (K. Ertz, op. cit., pp. 605-30, nos. E682 to A805a).

The original prototype for the composition appears to be the panel, signed and dated 1565, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, now in the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels. This work has been almost universally accepted as the prime, though authors like Gustav Glück have doubted its attribution, with another version dated 1564, formerly in the A. Hassid collection in London, complicating the debate. Whatever the prototype, the composition derives ultimately from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s celebrated masterpiece The Hunters in the Snow of 1565 (fig. 1; Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum) in which the basic formal components were established in subtly modulated tones of white, blue, brown and black. As was the case for many of his compositions and designs, Brueghel the Younger adapted and reused various themes and subjects that had originated in his father’s workshop. In the case of The Birdtrap, it is perhaps his work, and that of his studio, that truly established the composition as one of perennial popularity from the seventeenth century onwards.

The Birdtrap is one of the earliest and certainly most significant winter landscapes of the Netherlandish tradition. In contrast to The Hunters in the Snow where the figures trudge through a stark, still countryside, the present work shows villagers enjoying the pleasures of winter in a more convivial atmosphere, offering a vivid evocation of the various diversions of wintertime. In the middle ground, blanketed by snow, a group of villagers are shown skating, curling and playing games of hockey and skittles on a frozen river. The cold winter air, conveyed with remarkable observation through the artist’s muted palette, is carefully interrupted by the lively red clothes of figures peppered across the ice.

Yet beneath the seemingly anecdotal, light-hearted subject lies a moral commentary on the precariousness of life: as the birds crowd around the eponymous trap at the right of the composition, they mirror the skaters on the frozen river, both unaware of the danger each poses. Elsewhere, villagers rush onto the ice without apparent consideration of its fragility, reminding the viewer of the dangers lurking beneath the innocent pleasures of the Flemish winter countryside. The ephemeral nature of life was a message commonly associated with ice and winter in the early modern Netherlands, with a print of Skating before the Saint George’s Gate, Antwerp by Hieronymous Cock, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, underlying the poignant theme in its inscription: ‘Oh learn from this scene how we pass through the world, Slithering as we go, one foolish, the other wise, on this impermanence, far brittler than ice’ (N.M. Ortsein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2001, p. 176).

Fig. 1 Pieter Bruegel I, Hunters in the Snow Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

JOHN CONSTABLE, R.A. (EAST BERGHOLT, SUFFOLK 1776-1837 LONDON)

Cloud Study, possibly over Harnham Ridge oil on paper, laid down on panel 4Ω x 9º in. (11.3 x 23.5 cm.)

£150,000-250,000

US$210,000-340,000

€180,000-300,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) by descent from the artist to his daughter, Isabel Constable (1823-1888); her sale (†), Christie's, London, 17 June 1892, lot 140, 'Constable's Palette, together with several oil sketches by him', where acquired for 4 gns. by the following, with Thomas McLean, London (his post-1866 label on the reverse). Private collection, France; Deauville Enchères, Deauville, 7 June 2024, lot 51, as 'Workshop of Constable', where acquired by the present owner.

It is testament to John Constable’s genius that he was able to capture on a slender sheet of paper the immensity of the heavens. In swift, sure strokes he captures dark rain clouds massing on the horizon, airy cirrus clouds scudding high across still blue skies, and heavy cumulous clouds resting on the far ridge. In all paintings, the sky, omnipresent and ever-changing, was for Constable ‘the “key note” – the “standard of scale” – and the chief “Organ of Sentiment”’ (J. Constable, letter dated 23 October 1821), but it is in studies such as the present work that this idea is distilled down to its purest form.

It is likely that this sketch depicts Harnham Ridge. Situated to the west of Salisbury, it was an area that Constable explored with his great friend Archdeacon John Fisher (himself a keen amateur artist), producing numerous paintings of the gentle landscape. John’s uncle, Bishop Fisher, had first invited Constable to stay in Salisbury in 1811. The artist returned for extended periods on a number of occasions over the following decades, with his final two visits being in 1829 after the death of his wife, Maria, when he turned to his friend for support. Harnham was then for the artist a place of both artistic possibility and personal importance. The elevated viewpoint of the present composition implies that it may have been executed looking out from an upper window of Fisher’s house, rather than from a vantage point in the garden, as is the case in works such as Harnham Ridge from Leadenhall Gardens (Private collection, UK), in which he is clearly looking up at - rather than down on - the scene.

Constable’s interest in the changing appearance of the sky dates to his very first forays into artistic creation. At twenty-two, newly enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy, he described the London sky as being how ‘a pearl must look through a burnt glass’ (quoted by J.E. Thornes, ‘Constable’s Meteorological Understanding and his Painting of Skies’, Constable's Clouds, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, 2000, p. 155). It is not, however, until 1805 that we find his first dated weather notes on the back of a sketch, when he wrote ‘Nov. 4 1805 – Noon very fine day on the Stour’. As he developed as an artist, the notes on his sketches became more and more detailed. Perhaps the most famous group of pure cloud studies dates from the period 1821-22, when Constable was living in Hampstead. On these he made comments such as ‘Septr. 13th – One o’clock. Slight wind at North West, which became tempestuous in the afternoon, with rain all the night following’ (Study of Altocumulus Clouds, Yale Centre For British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, PA-F01129-0065).

While it might be tempting to see Constable’s plein air oil sketches, so different from the pencil and chalk studies of his contemporaries, as a form of nascent Impressionism, this type of very careful note marks a clear difference in both their aim and their conception. Whilst Monet’s Impression, Sunrise spoke of the search for spontaneous expression and presented a (debatably utopian) notion of the present, Constable’s commentary shows that he was trying to capture a sense of time and place that was much more closely linked to a lived experience that by necessity incorporated the passage of time. His altocumulus clouds were intended to tell the viewer not only of the prevailing weather, but also of previous and future weather, the night of rain that was to come. Similarly, in the present study, the gold highlights in the grass speak of hot summer sun, that in the preceding weeks has bleached the dark green grass, and the grey clouds to the left tell of rain to come. With great agility, Constable thus situates his viewer at a point that stretches both forwards and backwards in time.

We are grateful to Anne Lyles for endorsing the attribution after first-hand inspection.

GIOVANNI

ANTONIO CANAL, CALLED IL CANALETTO (VENICE 1697–1768)

Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day oil on canvas

33√ x 54¡ in. (86 x 138.1 cm.)

Estimate on Request

PROVENANCE:

Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), created 1st Earl of Orford in 1742, 10 Downing Street, London, by 1736 and until his resignation as Prime Minister in 1742, when removed to another of his London residences, and by descent to his son, Robert Walpole, 2nd Earl of Orford (1701–1751), and by descent to his son, George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford (1730–1791); his sale, Langford’s, London, 13 June 1751 (=1st day), lot 65 as ‘Ditto [Cannaletti]. The Marriage of the Sea by the Doge, it’s Companion’, where acquired for £34-13 by ‘Raymond’ for the following, Samson Gideon (1699–1762), Belvedere, near Erith, Kent, and by descent to his son, Sir Sampson Gideon, 1st Bt. (1745–1824), created Baron Eardley in 1789, Belvedere, near Erith, Kent, and by descent to his daughter, Maria Marow Gideon (1767–1834), wife of Gregory William Twistleton (from 1825 Eardley-Twistleton-Fiennes), 8th Baron Saye and Sele (1769–1844), Belvedere, near Erith, Kent, and by descent to their son, William Thomas Eardley-Twistleton-Fiennes, 9th Baron Saye and Sele (1798–1847), Belvedere, near Erith, Kent, Sir Culling Smith, 2nd Bt. (1768–1829), widower of Lord Eardley’s second daughter Charlotte Elizabeth (d. 1826), Belvedere, near Erith, Kent, and by descent to their son, Sir Culling (Eardley-) Smith, 3rd Bt. (1805–1863), who assumed the name of Eardley, Belvedere, near Erith, Kent, from which removed in 1860 to Bedwell Park, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and by descent to his eldest daughter, Frances Selena, who married in 1865 Robert Hanbury M.P., who added the name of Culling to his surname, Bedwell Park, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and by inheritance to her sister, Isabella (d. 1901), wife of the Very Rev. the Hon. William Henry Fremantle, M.D., Dean of Ripon (1831–1916), Bedwell Park, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and by descent to their son, Lt.-Col. Sir Francis Edward Fremantle, O.B.E. (1872–1943), Bedwell Park, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, from whom acquired on 3 July 1930 (with its pendant Venice: The Grand Canal looking North-East from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge) by the following, with Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd., London, where acquired on 4 April 1940 (with its pendant) for £4,400 by, with Giuseppe Bellesi (1873-1955), Florence and London. Senator Mario Crespi (1879-1962), Milan, by 1954 (with its pendant; according to Moschini, under Literature).

Presumably acquired with its pendant in Paris in the 1960s, and by descent until sold at the following, Anonymous sale, Ader Tajan, Paris, 15 December 1993, lot 13, where acquired.

EXHIBITED:

London, British Institution, 1844, no. 89, as ‘Marriage of the Doge of Venice’ (lent by Lord Saye and Sele).

London, British Institution, 1861, no. 68, as ‘Doge marrying the Adriatic’ (lent by Sir Culling Eardley). Lausanne, Les Trésors de l’Art Vénitien, 1947, no. 125 D (ex-catalogue).

LITERATURE:

Anon. [Horace Walpole?], A Catalogue of Sir Robert Walpole’s Pictures in Downing Street, Westminster, Ms. 1736 (part of a complete catalogue of Sir Robert Walpole’s collection of pictures bound into Horace Walpole’s personal copy of the Aedes Walpolianae.., 2nd ed. of 1752, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, PML 7586), no. 125, as ‘The Doge of Venice in His Barge, with Gondola’s & Masqueraders. Canaletti. 2-9½ 4-5¾’ and as hanging in the Parlour (with its pendant).

R. and J. Dodsley, London and its Environs described, containing An Account of whatever is most remarkable for Grandeur, Elegance, Curiosity or use, In the City and in the Country Twenty Miles round it, London, 1761, I, p. 272, as ‘Ditto, with the Doge marrying the sea. Its companion’ Height 2 feet 9 inc. Breadth 4 Feet 6 inc. [Painted by] Canaletti’.

T. Martyn, The English Connoisseur: containing an Account of Whatever is Curious in Painting, Sculpture, & c. In the Palaces and Seats of the Nobility and Principal Gentry of England, both in Town and Country, London, 1766, I, p. 12 (repeating Dodsley).

E.W. Brayley, The Beauties of England and Wales…, VII, London, 1808, p. 546, as ‘the collection of pictures evince a very judicious choice: among them is a view of Venice, and its companion, with the ceremony of the Doge marrying the Sea, by Canaletti’. Exhibition review in The Atlas, 947, XIX, 6 July 1844, p. 456, as ‘one of the unrivalled artist’s masterpieces’.

Pictures at Belvedere, 1856, p. 3, as hanging in the Dining Room with its pendant, this one to the right of the chimneypiece [This document is known from a typescript in the library of the National Gallery, London, entitled Pictures at Belvedere 1856. Copy of a Manuscript Catalogue. The paintings by Canaletto are recorded on p. 2 of the typescript.]

G.F. Waagen, Galleries an Cabinets of Art in Great Britain, London, 1857, p. 282, as hanging in the Dining Room and described (with its pendant) as ‘Good specimens of the master’.

E.J. Climenson, Passages from the Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys of Hardwick House, Oxon. A.D. 1756 to 1808, London, 1899, p. 150, noting that she recorded in her diary in 1771 having seen ‘two views of Venice by Canaletti’ shortly before the remodelling of Belvedere.

A. Graves, A Century of Loan Exhibitions 1813-1912, London, 1913, I, pp. 143 and 144. V. Moschini, Canaletto, London and Milan, 1954, p. 22-26, illus. fig. 114 and pl. 16 (colour detail), as datable to circa 1730 and in the collection of Mario Crespi, Milan.

W.G. Constable, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, Oxford, 1962, I, illus. pl. 64; II, p. 336, no. 340.

L. Puppi, L’opera completa del Canaletto, Milan, 1968, p. 100, no. 109 A, as datable to 1731-32.

L. Puppi, Tout l’oeuvre peint de Canaletto, Paris 1975, p. 100, no. 109 A, as datable to 1731-32 and location unknown.

W.G. Constable, ed. J.G. Links, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, Oxford, 1976, I, illus. pl. 64; II, p. 361, no. 340, as location unknown and without its earliest provenance (the painting’s connections with Sir Robert Walpole being then unknown).

J.G. Links, The Complete Paintings, St Albans, 1981, pp. 36, 44, no. 115, illus. p. 40.

A. Corboz, Canaletto, una Venezia immaginaria, Milan, 1985, p. 627, no. P205, illus. J.G. Links, A Supplement to W.G. Constable’s Canaletto, Giovanni Antonio Canal 16971768, London, 1998, pp. 22-23, under no. 216(a), and p. 34, no. 340, illus. pl. 271, fig. 340. L. Dukelskaya and A. Moore, A Capital Collection. Houghton Hall and The Hermitage, New Haven and London, 2002, pp. 23, 24, 35, 52, note 133, and Appendix VII, p. 458.

C. Beddington, in Venice. Canaletto and His Rivals, exhibition catalogue, London, 2010, pp. 169-170, illus. on p. 169, fig. 72, as datable to c. 1731-32;

C. Beddington, in Canaletto: Painting Venice. The Woburn Series, exhibition catalogue, London, 2021, pp. 90-91, note 10, and pp. 181, 183, note 12.

Antonio Visentini, after Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Portrait of Canaletto, 1742, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This breathtaking view of the Feast of Ascension Day has been largely inaccessible to scholars, having appeared at auction only twice in its 300-year history, in 1751 and 1993. It is in a remarkable state of preservation – the surface of the painting is beautifully textured and the impasto on many of the figures intact – and this is in large part due to its relatively few passages in ownership. The painting is first recorded at 10 Downing Street, in the collection of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). This distinguished early eighteenth-century provenance has only recently come to light and was not known at the time of the painting’s sale in 1993. Canaletto painted the view at the beginning of the 1730s, a highpoint in the artist’s career and a time during which his views were in great demand, particularly among British collectors. Exceedingly ambitious in both scale and conception, this is Canaletto’s earliest known representation of the Bucintoro returning to the Molo on Ascension Day; a subject to which he would return repeatedly throughout the ensuing two decades.

Falling on the fortieth day after Easter Sunday, the Feast of the Ascension of Christ was the most spectacular of all Venetian festivals and was frequently commented upon by visitors and travellers who witnessed it. It was on this day exclusively that the Bucintoro, the official galley of the Doge of Venice and a symbol of the Serenissima, was used. The model depicted here, the last to be made at the Arsenale, was designed by Stefano Conti and decorated by the sculptor Antonio Corradini, identifiable by the lion – symbol of the city of Venice – on the prow and the figure of Justice. Accompanied by the city’s officials, the doge would sail out to the Lido on the Bucintoro and cast a ring into the water, a symbolic act representing the marriage of Venice to the sea. It was a ceremony that brought the entire city together and remained a key date in the Venetian calendar until the fall of the Republic in 1797. Given the popularity of Ascension Day among tourists in Venice, views of the occasion by Canaletto were in particular demand and several different treatments of the celebrations by the artist are known, though these vary in viewpoint, scale and staffage.

The Bacino di San Marco, where the scene is set, was the usual – and certainly the most thrilling – point of arrival for visitors coming to Venice by sea. This oblique panoramic view looks west towards the entrance to the Grand Canal and the composition is framed by the Punta della Dogana at left and the Molo, in sharply angled perspective, at right. In the centre is the Bucintoro, decorated in red and gold, moored between gondolas and other boats alongside the Piazzetta. The impressive buildings lining the waterfront provide the perfect backdrop to the pomp and spectacle of Ascension Day, with the principal landmarks forming a theatrical backdrop to the lively boats and staffage. Particularly prominent are the Palazzo Ducale, with its unique Gothic forms and distinctive pink Verona marble patterned façade, and the towering Campanile behind. The picture is imbued with the warm tonality of an early summer’s day. The lagoon is populated with elegantly-dressed figures reclining in gondolas, the moored Bucintoro stands majestically beyond, and a crowd of onlookers gathers on the Molo in the distance.

Canaletto’s technique is supremely confident: controlled flicks of the brush evoke feathered parasols and trailing ribbons. Vivid accents of colour guide the viewer’s eye around the composition, with touches of vibrant red punctuating the entire composition. As noted by Viola Pemberton-Pigott, ‘despite the impression of colour and brightness in so many of Canaletto’s paintings, his range of pigments is remarkably limited’ (V. Pemberton-Pigott, ‘The Development of Canaletto’s Painting Technique’, in K. Baetjer and J. G. Links eds., Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1989, p. 58). Canaletto seems to have already mastered the formula for creating the effect of rippled water, as pale arcs skip across the surface of the lagoon. He demonstrates an assured touch in describing figures in movement, even those in different planes. The elegant protagonists in the gondolas are painted as individual characters whilst the throng gathered on the Molo pulsates with life despite being painted in abbreviated form as ‘calligraphic squiggles’ (Pemberton-Pigott, op. cit., p. 57). The foreground figures are given an almost three-dimensional structure through the application and manipulation of the paint itself, with Canaletto’s vivid use of impasto – so characteristic of his paintings in the 1730s – beautifully preserved. The artist demonstrates complete mastery of his medium and technique: as Pemberton-Pigott observes, Canaletto ‘has learned to control the viscosity of the binding medium so that the paint retains its shape and assumes the form it represents’, such as the folds and creases of voluminous skirts and shawls or the gilded ornamentation of the Bucintoro, which stands out in relief (op. cit., p. 54). The scene as a whole has an airy, spontaneous quality and yet Canaletto’s technique is very precise. His architecture is meticulously constructed, with every building outlined and detailed with rigorous precision. Canaletto used a ruler and incising instrument ‘sometimes for laying in his design into the ground layers and sometimes for outlining or incising architectural details into the upper paint layers’ (ibid., p. 54): this is clearly evident on the ground-floor arcade of the Palazzo Ducale and Palazzo delle Prigioni at far right.

Canaletto planned his painted compositions carefully and this is confirmed by the existence of the Cagnola Sketchbook, a book of 138 pages of architectural drawings, now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. In that sketchbook there are drawings for the whole panoramic view of the Bacino di San Marco –spanning from the church of San Giorgio Maggiore at left to the Palazzo delle Prigioni at right (fig. 1). Although dating from the 1730s, and thus placed in relation to the series of paintings for the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey,

we can safely assume that Canaletto would have made similar use of drawings when composing the present view slightly earlier in the decade. The drawings that survive vary in finish from rapidly sketched building outlines drawn by eye or from memory, called ‘scaraboti’ (‘scribbles’) by Canaletto, to more careful drawings of buildings in red or black pencil, worked over in black or brown ink. The latter are frequently annotated with the names of shops and colours, while building materials and numbers of windows, arches or columns are also noted. Canaletto also made use of a camera obscura (pinhole camera) in the elaborate process of planning his compositions. With it, he was able to sketch out individual buildings or record partial detailed views, assembling them later into a visually more coherent whole. Canaletto was singled out by the eighteenth-century art historian Antonio Maria Zanetti the Younger (1706–1778) for his ability in ‘correcting’ the distortions of the projected image to ensure that his compositions aligned more closely with what the eye perceived. Though Canaletto ‘frequently shows a disregard for topographical precision’, he went to ‘considerable lengths to disguise his use of [the camera obscura], notably by giving the impression that viewpoints had been used which were, in fact, unattainable’ (Beddington, op. cit, 2021, p. 28).

Canaletto demonstrates a great sensitivity to changing weather conditions, intersecting a fluffy white cloud at centre with a bold horizontal brushstroke, painted wet-in-wet, and applying a streaky haze on the horizon. A gentle breeze can be felt through the water ripples in the Bacino and the movement of the gondoliers’ feathered caps.

This view dates from about 1732, with the 1730s being considered ‘the great decade of Canaletto’s production of Venetian views’ (Beddington, op. cit., 2010, p. 24). It was during these years that he received some of his most distinguished commissions from British patrons, notably the series of views for the Duke of Bedford, still at Woburn Abbey. In the 1720s Canaletto had rapidly cornered the market in painting Venetian views and the merchant and banker, Joseph Smith (c.1674-1770), British Consul in Venice from 1744 to 1760, took the painter under his wing. Acting as his principal agent and dealer, Smith did a great deal to promote the artist among the British clientele in addition to commissioning works from Canaletto himself. This particular view would prove to be extremely popular and Canaletto would adopt a similar viewpoint for notable paintings of the same subject later in the 1730s; a large canvas commissioned by the Duke of Bedford and still at Woburn Abbey (1732-36; fig. 2); another painted for the

Fig. 1 Canaletto, Quaderno Veneziano (Cagnola Sketchbook), pp. 40v-41, Archivio fotografico G.A.VE, courtesy of Ministero della Cultura (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe)

Fig. 2 Canaletto, The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day with the Bucintoro returning to the Molo, 1732-36, from the Woburn Abbey Collection

Fig. 3 Canaletto, Venice, The Grand Canal, looking North-East from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge, Private Collection

Duke of Leeds, today in the National Gallery, London (c. 1738); and a third on loan from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (c. 1739). The view under examination here is the earliest and marks the starting point for Canaletto painting festivals; a genre which, by the fifth decade of the eighteenth century, the painter and his studio had turned into a specialty.

The Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day was formerly accompanied by a pendant showing The Grand Canal, looking North-East from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge (private collection; fig. 3). The two paintings share a remarkable early history, having been owned by Britain’s first Prime Minister, the great patron and collector Sir Robert Walpole. Their presence in Walpole’s collection was first noticed by Sir Oliver Millar, who found them referenced in the 1736 manuscript catalogue of paintings at 10 Downing Street and in the 1751 sale (see Links, op. cit., 1998). The Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day is to be identified with the first of the ‘Canalletti’ hanging ‘In the Parlour’, described as no. 125, ‘The Doge of Venice in His Barge, with Gondola’s & Masqueraders’ (fig. 4). This reference is particularly significant for it is the earliest record of a Canaletto painting hanging in a house in England, predating George III’s purchase of Consul Joseph Smith’s Canalettos by a quarter of a century.

The Downing Street residence was offered to Sir Robert Walpole by King George II in 1732. The British architect William Kent gutted the interiors of two adjacent properties and united them to create a new complex of sixty rooms. Sir Robert and his wife took up residence in 1735, remaining there until Walpole left office in 1742, whereupon he took his collection of pictures to Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Sir Robert had begun collecting in the 1720s and his 1736 inventory lists 154 paintings at 10 Downing Street, 120 at Houghton, 78 at Orford House in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and 66 in his five-bay terrace house at 16 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, with its first-floor Great Room where pictures were displayed. It is not known how or when Sir Robert acquired this magnificent view and its pendant. It may have been through his son Edward, who was dispatched to Venice charged with acquiring works of art between January 1730 and March 1731, though both views are datable on stylistic grounds to circa 1731-32 and, as such, slightly postdate Edward’s Venetian sojourn. Whilst no doubt facilitated by Edward’s connections in Venice, the purchase of the pictures must have been instigated by the refurbishment of the Downing Street residence in 1732-35.

Fig. 4 ‘A

The original picture-hanging plans for ‘Treasury House’, 10 Downing Street, by Isaac Ware survive in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Taken together with the 1736 inventory, they allow for an accurate reconstruction of the arrangement of pictures. The Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day and its pendant hung on either side of the fireplace in the first-floor Parlour, also known as the ‘North East Corner Room’ (figs. 5 and 6). A number of old masters were on display in this room, including a pair of pictures by Francesco Solimena, two described as by Castiglione (now attributed to Antonio Maria Vassallo), and a painting by David Teniers the Younger which was paired with a kitchen scene by Paul de Vos. As noted by Andrew Moore, ‘the effect of these paintings in the rooms at Downing Street was quite stunning and it was here that the collection acquired its early reputation’ (L. Dukelskaya and A. Moore, op. cit., 2002, p. 24).

Catalogue of Sir Robert Walpole’s Pictures in Downing Street, Westminster’, 1736, bound into Horace Walpole’s own copy of Aedes Walpolianae, 2nd ed., 1752, pp. 11-12, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, PML 7586.2

Figs. 5 and 6 (detail), Isaac Ware, Treasury House, 10 Downing Street, London: Plan of the First-floor Parlour or North-East Corner Room, 1732–35, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

CANALETTO AT DOWNING STREET

Sir Robert Walpole (fig. 7) was a collector and patron of the highest order, making full use of the financial opportunities of his long period in power as First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister for his own sake and that of members of his family. He formed a collection of old master pictures which outshone even that of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough and stimulated three architects in succession to create at Houghton what was effectively his own masterpiece and remains one of the great achievements of European architecture. Of pictures he was a connoisseur rather than a patron, and this majestic view and its former pendant were unquestionably the greatest works by a contemporary painter that he acquired.

It is likely that Sir Robert obtained the pair through the agency of the banker and merchant, Joseph Smith, himself a discriminating collector, who was the intermediary in many and perhaps most commissions to Canaletto. Placed prominently in his ‘official’ residence, 10 Downing Street, the pictures must have been seen by many of Walpole’s associates, although it was not until a century later that the young Benjamin Disraeli inveighed about the ‘Venetian constitution’ of the early Georgian period. Venice of course had had a long diplomatic association with England and members of the Whig oligarchy, many of whose ancestors had disassociated themselves from the cause of King Charles II, were clearly aware that his execution had a precedent in that of Doge Marino Faliero.

Views of Venice were no doubt in demand for visual reasons, but for the Whig patron clearly – as the correspondence of the 4th Duke of Bedford demonstrates – had an added appeal as representations of an aristocratic republic, whose monarch, the doge, had restricted powers. The great Whig families were closely interrelated and it was on their patterns of local patronage that the stability of Walpole’s administration was partly based. Ten such families who acquired pictures by Canaletto, or in one case copies after Canaletto by

an assistant, can be linked on a single genealogical table. Of Walpole’s key associates, a number including the 2nd Duke of Richmond (who held the key office of Master of the Horse), the 3rd Duke of Devonshire (Lord Privy Seal), and the 2nd Duke of Argyll (Field-Marshal) bought pictures by Canaletto, as did the Lord Lincoln, nephew and heir of the 1st Duke of Newcastle, that unrivalled master of the art of exercising control through local patronage. The office of Lord Lieutenant of counties was central to what might be thought of as the Newcastle system. Among those who held high office in the Whig interest and acquired works by Canaletto were the 3rd Duke of Bedford (Bedfordshire, Devonshire and Glamorgan), the 3rd Duke of Devonshire (Derbyshire) and the 3rd Duke of Bolton (Dorset and Southamptonshire), as well as the Duke of Newcastle himself (Middlesex, 1714-62). The Duke of Manchester (Huntingdonshire) had no need for Venetian views by Canaletto as he owned Luca Carlevarijs’ celebrations of his father’s embassy to Venice, while Viscount Bateman (Herefordshire) had to make do with copies by an assistant of pictures done for his brother-in-law, the Duke of Bedford. For these men and numerous others their Canalettos were not just consummate works of art and in many cases appealing mementoes of their Grand Tours, but also seductive statements of the durability of an aristocratic republic that balanced the views and capricci of ancient Rome, the history and literature of which had been central to their education. Walpole’s two great views of Venice by Canaletto have thus epicentral positions in the patterns of eighteenth-century taste and political attitudes in England.

Canaletto’s views were sold at auction by Sir Robert’s grandson, George Walpole, in 1751. In the manuscript copy of the sale held in the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day appears as lot 65: ‘Ditto [Cannaletti]. The Marriage of the Sea by the Doge, its Companion’, where it sold for £34-13 to ‘Raymond for Gideon’. Mr Raymond may be identifiable with Jones Raymond (1706–1769), a Director of the East Indies Company who was an amateur engraver and collector. From 1739 Raymond was a client of Arthur Pond, from whom he purchased prints

Fig. 7 Arthur Pond, Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford (1676–1745), 1742 © National Portrait Gallery, London

and Old Master pictures, including a landscape by Rembrandt and a view of the Campo Vaccino by Gian Paolo Panini (in 1745) and a landscape by ‘Rysdale’ (presumably Jacob or Salomon van Ruysdael) in 1748 (see L. Lippincott, ‘Arthur Pond’s Journal of Receipts and Expenses, 1734-1750’, The Walpole Society, 54, 1988, pp. 273, 295). As Lippincott observes, Jones Raymond was ‘one of Pond’s best patrons’ and ‘spent £676 for fifty European paintings at twenty-seven auctions’ (L. Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London. The Rise of Arthur Pond, London, 1983, p. 63). He was also the purchaser in 1756 of Francisco de Zurbarán’s Benjamin, from the series of Jacob and his Twelve Sons (the rest of which is at Auckland Castle, Bishop Auckland).

The ‘Gideon’ on whose behalf Raymond purchased the work is Samson Gideon (1699-1762), whose name appears as the first line of provenance in W.G. Constable’s catalogue of Canaletto’s paintings. The son of an eminent West Indian merchant, Samson Gideon was a celebrated Jewish financier who rose to prominence and amassed a great personal fortune in the City of London. Gideon sought to use his great wealth to establish his family among the ranks of Britain’s landed aristocracy and eventually secured a baronetcy for his son, Sampson. In 1751, the same year in which he acquired Canaletto’s two views at auction, he used part of his enormous fortune to acquire Belvedere House in Kent. He added a ‘great room’, in which he assembled his remarkable collection of pictures containing ‘none but pieces which are the originals by the greatest masters, and some of them very capital’ (Dodsley, op. cit., 1761). These included, among others, works such as Peter Paul Rubens’s Gerbier Family (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's Immaculate Conception (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), as well as important Dutch old masters. Canaletto’s paintings passed by descent to his son, Sampson, and at the latter’s death to his only surviving heir, his daughter Maria, who was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds at Sampson Gideon’s instigation (fig. 8).

The Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day is remarkable for having remained in private hands for nearly 200 years, passing through family descent from 1751 to 1930. It was purchased by Agnew’s in that year (together with its pendant) and sold ten years later to Giuseppe Bellesi, a Florentine art dealer based in London. Bellesi had founded The Italian Art Gallery in 1926, first located in Savile Row, then moved to New Bond Street and latterly to Duke Street. During the Second World War Bellesi returned to live in Italy and on his return to London in 1948 he reopened his gallery at 15 Paddington Green. It seems likely that Bellesi sold the painting to Mario Crespi, in whose collection both Canalettos were published in 1954 (see Moschini, op. cit.). The eldest son of Benigno Crespi, Senator Mario Crespi was an important figure in Italy during the first half of the 20th century. When his father died in 1910, Mario and his two brothers inherited an empire that included the publishing group that controlled the Corriere della Sera. In 1952 he moved with his wife to a palazzo on via Sant’Andrea in Milan where, after a lengthy restoration project, he was to display his impressive collection of 18th-century Venetian paintings.

The Return of the Bucintoro was presumably acquired in Paris in the 1960s by a French collector, together with its pendant of The Grand Canal, looking NorthEast from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge. The two paintings remained together until the present work’s sale at Ader Tajan in 1993 where, appearing at auction for the first time in nearly 250 years, it fetched a record price for an old master painting at auction in France. The exceptional pictorial quality, distinguished provenance and exceptional condition of both pictures ensured that when the pendant was sold in 2005, it made a world record price for the artist at auction; a title it still holds twenty years later.

This highly evocative view of The Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day is a supreme example of Canaletto’s early maturity. Painted at the cusp of the 1730s, a decade during which the artist would receive many of his most prestigious commissions, it is testimony to Canaletto’s prodigious talent and exacting technique. The artist’s masterful views, replete with details and unparalleled in atmospheric effects, made him the most successful vedutista of his age and influenced succeeding generations of landscape painters.

Fig. 8 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mary Marow Gideon and her Brother, William, 1786/7

© Barber Institute of Fine Arts / © The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham / Bridgeman Images

MATTHIAS STOMER (?AMERSFOORT 1599/1600-1645 OR AFTER ?VENICE)

Head of a young man

oil on canvas

19√ x 14√ in. (50.5 x 37.7 cm.)

£50,000-70,000

US$68,000-94,000

€60,000-83,000

PROVENANCE:

(Probably) In the family of the present owner since at least 1833 (according to an inventory label on the frame).

Matthias Stomer is often regarded as the last great representative of the socalled Caravaggesque painters in Italy and his works are distinguished from those of his predecessors in their display of greater openness to Baroque innovations, especially those of Peter Paul Rubens. This painting is exemplary of the spirited brushwork and broad, painterly approach that is so characteristic of Stomer’s style. Despite his prodigious talents and significant oeuvre – more than two hundred autograph paintings are known – Stomer remains one of the most understudied artists of the seventeenth century. Research into him and his work has been hampered by a comparative lack of biographical documentation and firmly dated pictures, though Gert Jan van der Sman has recently published a reappraisal of Stomer’s movements and artistic development (see G.J. van der Sman, ‘Roma, Napoli, Sicilia: sul percorso artistico di Matthias Stom con una postilla su Jacques de l’Ange,’ Fiamminghi al Sud: Oltre Napoli, eds. G. Capitelli, T. De Nile and A. Witte, Rome, 2023, pp. 201-3).

Stomer, who was known by the surname Stom in his lifetime, may have been of Flemish origin. As Marten Jan Bok has pointed out, many individuals of this surname in the Dutch Republic had emigrated from Flanders, particularly Brussels and Ostend (see M.J. Bok, ‘Matthias Stom’, Nieuw licht op de Gouden Eeuw: Hendrick ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten, Utrecht, 1986-7, p. 333, notes 16 and 17). Whether a Flemish immigrant himself or the descendant of those who were, the artist probably received his artistic training in Utrecht, possibly with the leading Caravaggesque painter Hendrick ter Brugghen, or in Amersfoort. The influence of artists working in these centres can already be detected in Stomer’s earliest works.

At some point prior to 1630 – the year in which he is recorded in the Stato delle Anime (annual Easter census) as living on the Strada dell’Ormo with the slightly younger French painter Nicolas Prévost (1604-1670) in the parish of San Nicolà in Arcione (Rione Trevi) – Stomer had departed the Netherlands for Rome (see G. J. Hoogewerff, Nederlandsche kunstenaars te Rome (1600-1725): uittreksels uit de parochiale archieven, The Hague, 1942, p. 279). He was said to be thirty years old at the time of the census, making his birth year either

1599 or 1600. Records place him in Naples by 28 July 1635 (see M. Osnabrugge, ‘New Documents for Matthias Stom in Naples’, The Burlington Magazine, CLVI, no. 1331, 2014, pp. 107-8), though he may have been resident there by late 1632 or 1633. Stomer moved to Sicily in 1639, where, in 1641, he painted his only surviving signed and dated work, the Miracle of Saint Isidorus Agricola for the high altar of the church of the Agostiniani, Caccamo, Sicily (where it remains in situ). In 1642, baptismal records indicate he had relocated to Venice, where he would remain until at least 1645, after which time all documentary trace of his movements is lost.

This work, which has probably been in the same family’s possession for nearly two centuries or more, can be dated to Stomer’s residency in either Naples and Sicily (circa 1632/3-1642). Several similar bust-length works of aged figures, soldiers and youths are known, in which Stomer adapted the typical Dutch tronie to an Italian idiom. These include examples today at the Galleria Nazionale della Sicilia, Palermo, and Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Stomer often painted his figures brightly lit by a candle, such as in An Old Woman and a Boy by Candlelight (Birmingham Museums Trust). Less commonly, as in the present picture and a painting that appeared on the Berlin art market in 1933, the figure is illuminated by a light source beyond the pictorial frame (for the ex-Berlin painting, see B. Nicolson, Caravaggism in Europe, 2nd ed., Turin, 1989, I, p. 187, no. 1521; III, fig. 1521).

Despite scant biographical evidence, Stomer appears to have enjoyed a prominent position within the contemporary artistic milieu. Indeed, when six paintings by Stomer were gifted to a Capuchin convent in Naples in 1635, the bequest document described the artist as the ‘famous Stomer’. A little over a decade later Antonio Ruffo (1610/11-1678), Duke of Messina, acquired three pictures by the artist. By the time of these acquisitions, Ruffo’s collection included such masterpieces as Anthony van Dyck’s Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo of 1624 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Ruffo maintained a particular interest in works by northern European artists, many of whom had travelled to Italy, with additional paintings by the likes of Jacob Jordaens and Paul Bril, and tapestries after designs by Peter Paul Rubens. In 1653, Ruffo’s interest in Dutch art would see him commission the first of three paintings from Rembrandt, the Aristotle with a bust of Homer (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art).

JAN BRUEGHEL THE ELDER (BRUSSELS 1568-1625 ANTWERP)

A mountainous wooded landscape with hermits and a mass being held at a shrine signed and dated '· BRVEGHEL · 1619 ·' (lower left) oil on copper, unframed 15√ x 23Ω in. (40.3 x 59.5 cm.)

£500,000-800,000

US$680,000-1,100,000

€600,000-950,000

PROVENANCE: with Galerie de Jonckheere, Paris, where acquired by the present owner in circa 1995.

Jan Brueghel the Elder was one of the finest landscapists in seventeenthcentury Flanders and his work was avidly sought by collectors across Europe in his own lifetime. The artist spent the first half of the 1590s in Italy and it was in Rome, where he lived between 1592 and 1594, that he met Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who was to become a lifelong friend and patron and may also have introduced him to Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, who likewise owned no fewer than six works by the artist. A trip to Prague in 1604 introduced Brueghel to Emperor Rudolf II, whose penchant for finely wrought works of art ensured he would likewise become a patron. Interest in Brueghel’s work extended as far east as Poland, where King Sigismund III likewise commissioned paintings from the artist.

Dated 1619, Brueghel executed this painting during a period in which he enjoyed particular success among leading Flemish patrons. Though first appointed court painter to the Archdukes Albert and Isabella in Brussels in 1608, in 1618, a year before our painting, Brueghel contributed to one of the most significant commissions made on the Habsburg regents’ behalf. It was in that year that the Antwerp magistrates commissioned twelve of the city’s leading painters – including Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders, and Frans Francken II – to collaborate on an allegorical series of the Five Senses as gifts to them, works that were unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1713. By virtue of his status, Brueghel was selected to oversee the project.

This picture amply testifies to Brueghel’s consummate abilities at incidental narrative detail. In the central middle ground, two weary travelers approach a group of kneeling hermits and laypeople celebrating mass in a grotto. Despite the rustic setting, the seemingly makeshift space is outfitted with several sculptures, including a life-size depiction of Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child; various paintings, the most prominent of which is the largescale Crucifixion with saints above the altar; and numerous liturgical objects strung from garlands suspended along the cave’s ceiling. At lower left, two hermits converse with visitors. One is evidently a pilgrim on his way to or

from Santiago de Compostela, owing to the scallop shells that embellish his grey mantle, while the other, a well-dressed gentleman, has only recently alighted from the handsome white horse in the painting’s foreground.

An array of spoliated stonework and a natural bridge enframing an expansive mountainous landscape divide these colourful vignettes from the more prosaic activities at right. There, one hermit feeds a donkey while a second pours food for an eagerly assembled group of fish. A third strains under the weight of a basket as he walks toward a humble refectory with several modest bowls laid out along a simple wooden table. In another chamber, a pair of hermits, one of whom warms his hands by the fire, put the finishing touches on the meal, while a bedstead visible at right completes the spartan monastic quarters.

Though the painting was unknown to Klaus Ertz, it belongs to a small group of fewer than a dozen known depictions of hermits in verdant landscapes by Brueghel (see in particular K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere: Die Gemälde, II, Lingen, 2008-2010, pp. 598-609, nos. 278-287). The present painting, which is exceeded in scale only by the pendant pair executed in 1597 in collaboration with Gillis van Coninxloo in the Ambrosiana, Milan (inv. no. 67; Ertz, op. cit., nos. 281-282), was painted some two decades after the other works, each of which Ertz places between 1595 and 1602. Compositionally, the present painting has a number of affinities – notably the predominant central arch –with a smaller painting on copper of 1595, likewise in the Ambrosiana (inv. no. 75/27; Ertz, op. cit., no. 278), and, to a lesser extent, another copper of similar dimensions in the same institution (Ertz, op. cit., no. 280). To this group must be added another little copper in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, from which the left portion of our painting is derived (fig. 1). The figural group of the standing priest with his back turned and kneeling parishioners are disposed in nearly identical fashion in both works (though with additions in the present painting). Similarly, details like the horse and groomsman have been adapted with slight changes.

Fig. 1 Jan Brueghel the Elder, Mass in a grotto Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

JACOB JORDAENS (ANTWERP 1593-1678)

Portrait of the artist, bust-length, in a cap oil on canvas

22¿ x 18¡ in. (56.2 x 46.7 cm.)

£300,000-500,000

US$410,000-670,000

€360,000-590,000

PROVENANCE:

(Probably) Painted for the artist, with a pendant portrait of his wife Catharina van Noort, and kept in his personal collection until his death in 1678.

Gerard Cópius, The Hague; his sale, Doorschot, The Hague, 21 March 1786, lot 11, where acquired by the following,

Confrerie Pictura, The Hague, by whom sold with the rest of the association's possessions during the French occupation.

Bernardus Jeronimozn. de Bosch II (1742-1816), Amsterdam, 1817 (according to Antwerp exhibition catalogue, 1993).

Guillaume Thierry Arnaud-Marie, Baron de Brienen de Groote Lindt (1814-1863), Amsterdam (according to Antwerp exhibition catalogue, 1993). with P. de Boer, Amsterdam, by 1949.

Walter P. Chrysler Jr., Virginia (1909-1988).

Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 8 December 1961, lot 177. with Fred Wengraf, London, until June 1962.

Anonymous sale; Weinmüller, Munich, 21-24 June 1963, lot 1148, where acquired by the father of the present owners.

EXHIBITED:

Miami, University of Miami Art Gallery, February-March 1961. Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Le Siècle de Rubens, 15 October-12 December 1965, no. 129.

Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678): Paintings and Tapestries, 27 March-27 June 1993, no. A. 58. Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, 2015-2025, long-term loan.

LITERATURE:

A. Bredius, 'De boeken der Haagsche 'Schilders Confrerye', Archief Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis (Obreens Archief), IV, Rotterdam, 1881-2, p. 213, nos. 30 and 31, 'Het portrait van J. Jordaens en dat van desselfs huysvrouw; gekogt op de genoemde verkooping, zijnde aldaar No. 11 en 12' ('The portrait of J. Jordaens and that of his wife; bought at the aforementioned auction [Copius sale, op. cit.], being nos. 11 and 12').

P. Buschmann, Jacques Jordaens et son oeuvre, Brussels, 1905, p. 90.

M. Rooses, Jacob Jordaens: his life and work, London, 1908, p. 112, no. 1.

A.R. Peltzer, Joachim von Sandrarts Academic der Bau- und Mahlerey Kunste von 1675, Munich, 1925, p. 340.

L. van Puyvelde, Jordaens, Brussels and Paris, 1953, p. 25, fig. 1.

H. van Hall, Portretten van Nederlandse Beeldende Kunstenaars, Amsterdam, 1963, p. 160, no. 1067 (2-3).

M. Jaffé, Jacob Jordaens 1593-1678, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, 1968-69, p. 182, under no. 189.

G. Eckardt, Selbstbildnisse niederländischer Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1971, pp. 73 and 193, pl. 69.

R.-A. d'Hulst, Jordaens Drawings, I, London and New York, 1974, p. 251, under no. A159.

R.-A. d'Hulst, Jacob Jordaens, New York, 1982, pp. 286-7, 290 and 315, fig. 246.

A.W. Lowenthal, D. Rosand and J. Walsh, eds., Rubens and his Circle: Studies by Julius S. Held, Princeton, 1982, p. 23, no. 18.

H.-J. Raupp, Untersuchungen zu Künstlerbildnis und Künstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden im 17. Jahrhundert, Hildesheim, 1984, p. 126.

J.W. Salomonson, 'A self-portrait by Michiel van Mierevelt: the history, subject and context of a forgotten painting', Simiolus, XX, no. 4, 1990-1991, pp. 240, 241 and 243, fig. 3.

N. de Poorter and R.-A. d'Hulst, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, 1993, I, pp. 188 and 189, no. A58, illustrated; II, p. 72, under no. B45, fig. B45a. J. Lange, B. Ulrike Műnch, Reframing Jordaens: Pictor doctus, Techniques, Workshop practice, Petersberg, 2018, pp. 21-25, fig. 4.

ENGRAVED:

R. Collin for J. von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, 1679.

The Jordaens scholar Roger d’Hulst heralded Jordaens as one of ‘the trio of painters who conferred lustre on seventeenth-century Antwerp’, along with Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony van Dyck (op. cit., 1982, p. 314). Of the five self-portraits that Jordaens executed in oil over the course of his career, this is the earliest and one of only two remaining in private hands. D’Hulst dated it to circa 1640, a decisive moment in the artist’s career when, following the deaths of both Rubens and van Dyck, Jordaens became the greatest living painter in the Southern Netherlands (ibid.). While there is no documentary evidence of its earliest ownership, Nora de Poorter suggests that it was probably painted for the artist himself and kept in his collection until his death (Antwerp, op. cit., 1993, p. 188). In the late-eighteenth century, it formed part of the collection of the Confrerie Pictura (the artistic brotherhood) in The Hague and was included in the seminal Jordaens exhibition in Antwerp in 1993 (op. cit.). Most recently, it has been on long-term loan at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in the Wilhelmshöhe Palace, Kassel, which boasts the largest holding of works by Jordaens in Germany.

Jordaens became an independent master in circa 1615, following his training under Adam van Noort, who also taught Rubens, and in 1621, at the age of twenty-eight, was appointed dean of Antwerp’s Guild of Saint Luke. By 1634, he was working under Rubens’ direction on the decoration for the ‘Joyous Entry’ of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria, the new governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and collaborated with him again in 1637-38 on paintings intended for Philip IV’s hunting lodge near Madrid, the Torre de la Parada. The fact that Jordaens was able to acquire a stately residence in Antwerp large enough to accommodate a busy workshop in 1639 is a clear indication of his growing success and prosperity. Following the deaths of Rubens in 1640, and of van Dyck the following year, Jordaens became the most important painter of the Southern Netherlands; demand for his work intensified and his clientele grew. Already in 1639-40, Jordaens was engaged by Sir Balthasar Gerbier, King Charles I’s agent in Brussels, to paint a series of pictures narrating The Story of Psyche for the Queen’s House at Greenwich, London. Other royal, princely

Fig. 2 Jacob Jordaens, Self Portrait, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin

Fig. 1 Jacob Jordaens, The Painter’s Family, Museo del Prado, Madrid

and ecclesiastical commissions followed, and as his reputation grew beyond the confines of the Southern Netherlands, he began to attract young artists from abroad who wanted to study with him, including from Poland and Sweden.

Both d’Hulst (ibid.) and De Poorter (ibid.) have dated this portrait to this pivotal moment in the artist’s career when he was working at the height of his powers and attracting more elevated patrons in circa 1640. Other scholars have dated the work to the 1630s, believing the sitter to be in his thirties, rather than his forties (Eckardt, op. cit., p. 73; Held, op. cit., p. 23, note 18; Raupp, op. cit., p. 126, note 404; and Meier, in Lange, op. cit., pp. 21-2). However, a full judgement is somewhat impeded by the fact that none of the subsequent self-portraits, to which the sitter’s relative age might be compared, are dated.

Prior to executing this first standalone self-portrait in oil, Jordaens incorporated his likeness into group portraits with his parents, brothers and sisters (c. 161516; St Petersburg, Hermitage Museum); with his master, Adam van Noort’s family, almost certainly on the occasion of his engagement to van Noort’s daughter, Catharina, in 1616 (Kassel, Staatliche Museen); and again, following his marriage, with his now wife Catharina and their daughter Elizabeth, in circa 1621-22 (Madrid, Prado; fig. 1). A drawing now in Berlin (Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz; fig. 2), showing Jordaens in the same jacket and hat, was probably executed around the same time as this painting. This was followed by a portrait of Jordaens thought to date to the mid-1640s (Angers, Musée des Beaux-Arts; fig. 3) in a black cloak and wide-brimmed black hat, holding a sculpture of Venus and Cupid (roughly corresponding with an ivory by Georg Petel in the Ashmolean, Oxford), previously thought to represent the Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy. Jordaens probably painted a portrait of himself playing the bagpipes around this date (Antwerp, Rubenshuis). Two further selfportraits are thought to show the artist in his mid-fifties, and therefore date to

the late-1640s: the first showing the sitter in the same gold-trimmed jacket with gold buttons as the present, but excluding the cap and holding a rolled scroll of parchment (Munich, Alte Pinakothek; engraved by Pieter II de Jode); the second ‘somewhat weaker portrait’, according to d’Hulst (Antwerp, op. cit., 1993, p. 242, under no. A78), presents the sitter in a related pose, but against a background with columns and drapery, holding an open piece of parchment (recorded in the collection of Thomas Harris in 1953 and now untraced). Jordaens also appears almost like a caricature of himself in several of his many-figured genre scenes, such as in As the Old Sang, So the Young Pipe (Munich, Alte Pinakothek).

In this portrait, the sumptuous hat decorated in gold ribbon, and buttoned smock trimmed in the same fashion, point to Jordaens’ success and affluence, yet his demeanour remains humble and dignified. It was the likeness of the artist that Joachim von Sandrart chose for his celebrated dictionary of art, Teutsche Academie der edlen Bau-, Bild-und Malereikünste (The German Academy of the Noble Arts of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting), when it was updated with illustrations in print by Richard Collin in 1679. Von Sandrart explained that ‘only now’, following Jordaens’ death in 1678, had he gained access to this self-portrait for the engraving (op. cit.). The image is shown in reverse, in an oval frame, excluding the artist’s hand and parchment (fig. 4).

This portrait was originally paired with a pendant of Jordaens’ wife, Catharina van Noort (now untraced), with both works owned by the painter Gerard Copius and included in his estate sale in 1786, from which they were acquired by the painters’ association Confrerie Pictura (Bredius, op. cit.). Martinus Schouman made copies of the association’s collection of artists’ portraits, including the present work in 1788, held today in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Another copy after this portrait of Jordaens also exists in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie at Besançon, bearing an inscription ‘G. Flinck pinxit 1642’, with dimensions slightly larger than the current canvas (73 x 55 cm.) and the composition extending to include the hands and sheet of paper. Nora De Poorter, in the catalogue to the 1993 exhibition, suggested that this may reflect the original state of the present painting before it was trimmed (op. cit.). Recent examination of the painted canvas, however, confirms the presence of cusping along the lower edge, indicating that the original did not extend to include the hands and that this was in fact an elaboration by the copyist.

Fig. 4 Richard Collin in Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-Bild-und Mahlerey-Künste, III, Nuremberg, 1679, p. 68a.

Fig. 3 Jacob Jordaens, Self-Portrait © Musées d’Angers, Pierre David

JAN VAN HUYSUM (AMSTERDAM 1682-1749)

Roses and other flowers in a terracotta vase with a bird’s nest on a marble ledge; and Fruit, roses and peonies in a basket with hazelnuts on a marble ledge

the first signed, inscribed and dated ‘Jan Van Huysum / fecit 1744’ (lower left, on the ledge); the second signed, inscribed and dated ‘Jan Van Huysum / fecit 1744 1745’ (lower left, on the ledge) oil on panel

the first, 20¬ x 16æ in. (52.5 x 42.6 cm.); the second, 20æ x 16æ in. (52.7 x 42.6 cm.) a pair (2)

£1,200,000-1,800,000

US$1,700,000-2,400,000

€1,500,000-2,100,000

PROVENANCE: (Probably) Herman ten Kate, Amsterdam; his sale (†), v.d. Schley a.o., Amsterdam, 10 June 1801, lots 71 and 72, with dimensions as ‘Hoog 23 breed 19 duim’, where acquired for f 810 and f 810 by, Louis-Bernard Coclers (1741-1817), Amsterdam; his sale, Lebrun, Paris, 27 August 1801 (=2nd day), lots 68 and 69, where erroneously dated ‘1645’ (unsold).

Louis Pierre Marie Paulin Hippolyte, Marquis de Montcalm (1775-1857), Montpellier; his sale, Christie’s, London, 5 May 1849 (=2nd day), lots 115A and 116A, as ‘a pair of exquisite specimens’ and dated ‘1644 [sic]’ (FF 168 and FF 162.15).

Joseph Eugène Schneider (1805-1875), Paris; his sale (†), Pillet, Paris, 6 April 1876 (=1st day), lots 14 and 15, where erroneously as on canvas (FF 3000 and FF 2800).

with Artemis, London, 1970-1. with H. Terry-Engell, London, by 1973. Private collection, Los Angeles. with Silvano Lodi, Campione, 1977. with Richard Green, London, 1977.

Qaboos bin Said Al Said (1940-2020), Sultan of Oman (according to the RKD). with Noortman, Maastricht, by 1994 and until 1998, where acquired by the following, Anonymous sale [Property Sold to Benefit a Midwestern Trust]; Christie’s, New York, 24 January 2003, lot 147, where acquired.

LITERATURE:

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French Painters, VI, London, 1835, p. 471, nos. 34 and 35.

C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, X, Stuttgart and Paris, 1928, pp. 359 and 384, nos. 97 and 231.

M.H. Grant, Jan van Huysum, Leigh-on-Sea, 1954, pp. 21 and 30, nos. 58 and 190.

C. Moiso-Diekamp, Das Pendant in der Niederländische Malerei der 17 Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt, 1987, p. 273.

S. Segal, in The Temptations of Flora: Jan van Huysum, 1682-1749, exhibition catalogue, Delft and Houston, 2007, pp. 270-271, under no. F39, figs. F39.1 and F39.2, as on canvas and ‘his [van Huysum’s] last two known works’.

These two beautifully preserved paintings are the last known works in the career of an artist who was, in the words of the eminent scholar of still-life paintings Ingvar Bergström, ‘the greatest of all flower-painters’ (I. Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, London, 1961, p. 226).

Though van Huysum also painted classicising landscapes, his reputation today chiefly rests on the roughly 250 luxuriously composed flower and fruit arrangements. Though earlier in his career van Huysum tended to set his floral bouquets against dark backdrops (fig. 1), there is a significant shift in palette in his later paintings, which are frequently conceived in brightly-lit spaces and sometimes include a landscape background. These works earned him the adoration of contemporaries like the artist and theorist Jacob Campo Weyerman (1677-1747), who described him as ‘De Fenix aller bloemschilders’ (‘the Phoenix of all flower painters’; J. Weyerman, De Levens-beschryvingen der Nederlandtsche konst-schilders…, The Hague, 1750, p. 210).

The compositions of these two paintings relate to a highly comparable pair of flower and fruit pieces executed on copper and dated 1742 and 1743 respectively, in the collection of the Staatliches Museum Schwerin (figs. 2 and 3). In both instances, the floral still life is arranged in a similar, though not identical, terracotta vase with putti and bird’s nest at lower right. The vase in the present flower still life - which contrasts with the pendant picture's tightly-woven

basket - features cherubs and a goat, together with grapes on a vine, all of which serve to underline the paintings' Bacchic overtones. The sinuous S-shaped composition of the floral bouquet in each pair is accentuated by a creeping morning glory stem at lower left and one or two prominent flowers at upper right: a brilliant red opium poppy here and a pair of pink roses in the painting in Schwerin. The compositions of the two fruit pieces are even more similar. The artist has employed the same open-topped, rectangular woven wicker box in each. The centre of both compositions are anchored by a bunch of green grapes whose broken vine tendril emphasises the painting’s diagonal compositional arrangement. Behind this are arranged a group of white roses. The foreground is equally similar with, from right to left, a cracked walnut and cherries on a grape leaf, an open pomegranate and stone fruit with several leaves overhanging the stone ledge in each. The only significant alteration is at lower left, where the artist has substituted the figs and plums found in the Schwerin painting with a bunch of blue grapes. The corner of the room is articulated in the background of both fruit pieces.

A series of intriguing and oft-cited letters from van Huysum to Duke Christian Ludwig von Mecklenburg, who acquired the pair in Schwerin directly from the artist, and the duke’s agent, A.N. van Haften, sheds light on van Huysum’s creative process in the period. Though dated 1742 and 1743, the Schwerin

Fig. 1 Jan van Huysum, Still life with flowers and fruit, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

paintings must have absorbed van Huysum’s attention over the course of several years. Already on 27 February 1740, the artist referenced ‘the two above-mentioned pieces […] the one with fruit and the companion with flowers’ in a letter to his patron and the patron’s agent. In a subsequent letter dated 18 March 1741, van Huysum provided a further update, indicating ‘I am, at present, occupied in painting in the pieces on copper plates putti on a pot…’. Perhaps sensing his patron’s growing impatience, in a letter dated 17 July 1742 the painter informed the duke ‘that with all diligence I hope to finish painting the two pieces this year…; the flower piece is very far advanced, last year I could not get a yellow rose, else it would have been finished; the grapes and figs and pomegranate still have to be painted in the fruit piece’ (all quoted in Segal, 2007, pp. 270-271, under no. F39). The pictures were evidently delivered sometime before 19 December 1743, when van Huysum acknowledged receipt of the substantial sum of 2,000 guilders for the pair.

That van Huysum lavished up to four years’ attention on the duke’s paintings can only partly be explained by his technical virtuosity and painstaking method of painting for such an important patron. Equally important were the delays caused by seasonal access to specimens and van Huysum’s insistence that his blooms and fruit be depicted from life as a means of enhancing the illusionistic effects of his paintings. The ensuing delays may explain why a number of his paintings, the present fruit piece among them, are inscribed with two dates.

When this pair last appeared on the market more than twenty years ago, their earliest known provenance was said to be a putative 1799 sale referenced by both John Smith and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot. Prior to the 2003 sale, Burton Fredericksen confirmed this reference to be spurious and that their first recorded owner was probably Herman ten Kate, a wealthy Amsterdam cloth dealer who also owned such masterpieces as Johannes Vermeer’s Woman reading a letter in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig. 4). At ten Kate’s sale, the paintings were acquired by the artist Louis-Bernard Coclers, who entered them into a sale in Paris only a little over two months later.

Fig. 4 Johannes Vermeer, Woman reading a letter, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 3 Jan van Huysum, White roses with grapes and other fruit in a wicker basket on a stone ledge, Staatliches Museum Schwerin

Fig. 2 Jan van Huysum, Roses and other flowers in a terracotta pot with a bird’s next on a stone ledge, Staatliches Museum Schwerin

DANIËL GEORGE VAN BEUNINGEN

A coal magnate and business tycoon, Daniël George van Beuningen is perhaps best known today for assembling one of the most significant private collections of Old Masters in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. The son of the co-founder of Steenkolen Handels Vereeniging, van Beuningen oversaw the growth of the business into a vast conglomerate after the First World War. His focus was always on Rotterdam, bringing about an economic transformation of the city that saw the port grow into one of the largest in the world at the time. His legacy lives on in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which he supported throughout his lifetime and which adopted his name from 1958 after his collection was acquired by the Rotterdam Municipal Government. The pictures in this sale once formed an integral part of Van Beuningen’s collection.

Van Beuningen was a passionate collector with huge spending power. He had what Max J. Friedländer described as: ‘not only financial resources, but to a far greater extent enthusiasm and understanding’, with which to compete for some of the best pictures and collections to come to the market. This legacy includes how he took advantage of the times to make many of the acquisitions for his collection. Three of the works in this group, for example, came from the collection of the Austrian banker Stefan von Auspitz whose entire collection was bought en bloc in 1931. The business (SHV) continued to prosper

during World War II and Van Beuningen carried on collecting, pulling off perhaps his most famous coup with the acquisition of Jan van Eyck’s Three Marys from the Cook Collection in England in 1940 for £250,000, a price considered to be outrageously high in Holland at the time. In the same period he also sold some works from the collection including, in July 1941, a group of eighteen pictures (including the Virgin and Child with parrot in this sale, lot 17) to Hans Posse for the Führermuseum, all of which were re-acquired after the War.

Van Beuningen’s taste was expansive to say the least. As well as seventeenth-century Dutch pictures, here exemplified by the beautiful Dou deaccessioned from Munich in 1937, he also bought Flemish, Italian, German and Spanish pictures – all of which are represented in this sale. Early Netherlandish paintings were perhaps where his passion ran deepest. His acquisition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel in 1936, together with the Cook Van Eyck, were regarded by Friedländer as Van Beuningen’s crowning achievement as a collector and they remain two of the outstanding masterpieces in the museum today.

The pictures in this auction were held back by the family from the sale to the museum in 1958 and have remained their treasured possessions ever since. Together they offer a remarkable cross-section of one of the greatest art collections ever formed in the Netherlands.

PROPERTY

OF THE HEIRS OF DANIËL GEORGE VAN BEUNINGEN (1877-1955) (LOTS 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 AND 19) *13

BRUGES SCHOOL, CIRCA 1525

The Virgin and Child with a parrot oil on panel

11Ω x 8º in. (29.2 x 21 cm.)

£100,000-150,000

US$140,000-200,000

€120,000-180,000

PROVENANCE:

Nelles Collection, Cologne, until 1895. Camillo List, Mödling.

Aldo Noseda, Milan (according to RKD Research Files).

Stefan von Auspitz (1869-1945), Vienna, by whom consigned in 1931 to the following, with K.W. Bachstitz, The Hague, where acquired in 1932 by, Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, from whom acquired in July 1941 via the following, Hans Posse, for the "Sonderauftrag Linz" (Linz no. 2030).

Recovered by the Allies' Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Section from the Altaussee salt mines, Austria, and transferred to the Munich Central Collecting Point, 12 July 1945 (MCCP no. 3913).

Returned to the Netherlands (Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit), 29 March 1946 (SNK no. 607), from whom reacquired in June 1950 by the following, Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

London, Thos. Agnew & Sons, An Exhibition of the Von Auspitz Collection of Old Masters by courtesy of Herr Walter Bachstitz, November-December 1932, no. 14, as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Herwonnen kunstbezit: keuze-tentoonstelling van uit Duitsland teruggekeerde Nederlandse kunstschatten, 19 November 1946-2 January 1947, no. 4, as 'Ambrosius Benson'. Paris, Petit Palais, Chefs d'oeuvre de la collection D.G. Van Beuningen, 31 October 195215 February 1953, no. 37, as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Fleurs et Jardins dans l'Art Flamand, 1960, no. 12, as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

Laren, Singer Museum, Nederlandse Primitieven uit Nederlands Particulier Bezit, 1 July-10 September 1961, no, 7, as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

LITERATURE:

M.J. Friedländer, Die Altniederländische Malerei: Die Antwerpener Manieristen. Adriaen Ysenbrant, XI, Leiden, 1933, p. 144, no. 261, as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting: The Antwerp Mannerists, Adriaen Ysenbrant, XI, Leiden and Brussels, 1974, p. 97, no. 261, pl. 170, as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

G. Marlier, Ambrosius Benson et la peinture à Bruges au temps de Charles-Quint, Damme, 1957, pp. 111, 112, 299 and 300, no. 68, pl. XXI, as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

A. Janssens de Bisthoven, Stedelijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Groeningemuseum) Brugge: De Vlaamse Primitieven, I, rev. ed., Brussels, 1981, p. 211, no. 2(g), as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

J. Giltaij, D.G. 50 jaar Van Beuningen 1958-2008, online, 2012, accessed 13 May 2025, p. 42, as 'Ambrosius Benson'.

This Virgin and Child with a parrot, rendered with extraordinary delicacy, is indebted to the central motif of Jan van Eyck’s resplendent masterpiece The Virgin and Child with Saints and Canon van der Paele (fig. 1; Bruges, Groeningemuseum), which was displayed in Bruges' St. Donatian’s Cathedral until its destruction in 1779. It is a beautiful example of the powerful influence that van Eyck exerted on the city in the early sixteenth century, at a time when drawings, designs and ideas were borrowed and exchanged between artists. The success of the leading studios run by the likes of Gerard David, Adriaen Isenbrandt and Ambrosius Benson relied to some extent on their stock of these workshop patterns and models.

It was to Benson that this work has hitherto been attributed. Famed as a North Italian artist who went to study and work in Bruges, Benson established a successful workshop in the city that catered to a wide range of local and international patrons. It is in light of his prolific workshop that his artistic identity has been reassessed by scholars in recent years. While the present composition relates closely to Benson’s Madonna and Child of circa 1520-25 (Bruges, Groeningemuseum), it also betrays the influence of David’s Triptych of the Sedano Family (Paris, Musée du Louvre), which is unsurprising given the almost ubiquitous influence that David had on Bruges painting in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Indeed, such was Benson and David’s connection, that the two artists were involved in a legal dispute in 1519, in which David refused to relinquish two chests of drawings, patterns and unfinished paintings that Benson had left in his workshop, claiming it contained unfinished pattern drawings that in turn belonged to him. Despite this acrimonious litigation, David’s works clearly continued to be an important source for Benson’s workshop.

While the present Virgin and Child will have probably been based on a workshop drawing of van Eyck’s altarpiece, infrared reflectography reveals no specific evidence of mechanical transfer (Tager Stonor Richardson, April 2025, available upon request). Instead, a highly planned and systematic composition is visible, with liquid preliminary contour lines, such as in the Virgin’s left hand, where the artist deviated from van Eyck’s design, shifting the positions of the fingers. It demonstrates how pattern drawings and designs were circulated

between workshops in the rich artistic environment of early sixteenth-century Bruges, often transferred from workshop to workshop as a means of developing compositions, maintaining quality and building a stock of visual tropes that could be adapted and reused. In their rendering of the parrot – a symbol of the Virgin’s innocence and freedom from original sin – the artist appears to have been less systematic, painting it with greater freedom across different iterations of the subject, evidently relishing in the accurate portrayal of its plumage and anatomy.

Several other small-scale variants of the composition exist, none of which match the high quality of this example. Such small panels depicting the Virgin and Child, typically intended for private devotion, catered to an increasing demand on the open market, often sold locally or in Antwerp, but also exported further afield to Italy and Spain. Works by van Eyck were particularly admired abroad and the later generations of Bruges painters are known to have adapted their styles to suit the taste of foreign clientele, thus perpetuating a legacy of artistic excellence.

A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE

In the spring of 1941, Van Beuningen was looking to raise a significant sum of money in cash and began negotiating a sale of a group of works from his collection to Hans Posse for the planned ‘Führermuseum’ in Linz. On 4 July 1941, he accepted Posse's offer of 1.5 million guilders for a group of eighteen pictures that included the Virgin and Child with Parrot and an eclectic range of other works by the likes of Goya, Tintoretto, Strozzi, Sellaio, Lucas van Leyden and Stephan Lochner. The most expensive were the French eighteenth century paintings by Watteau, Lancret and Pater. For a detailed account of the sale see A. Dekker, A Controversial Past – Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and the Second World War, Rotterdam, 2018, pp. 64-66.

All eighteen pictures were returned to the Netherlands by the Allies in 1945 and eventually bought back by Van Beuningen from the Dutch state in 1950. With the exception of this work, they are all today in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen.

Fig. 1 Jan van Eyck, The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, Groeningemuseum, Bruges

PROPERTY OF THE HEIRS OF DANIËL GEORGE VAN BEUNINGEN

(1877-1955)

(LOTS 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 AND 19) *14

PIETER BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER (BRUSSELS 1564-1638 ANTWERP)

Visit to the Farm oil on panel, unframed 15 x 21æ in. (38.1 x 55.3 cm.)

£300,000-500,000

US$410,000-670,000

€360,000-600,000

PROVENANCE:

Stefan von Auspitz (1869-1945), Vienna, by whom consigned in 1931 to the following, with K.W. Bachstitz, The Hague, where acquired by, Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, by 1934, and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

Amsterdam, Kunsthandel P. de Boer, De Helsche en de Fluweelen Brueghel, 10 February-26 March 1934, no. 19 (lent by D.G. van Beuningen).

LITERATURE:

G. Marlier, Pierre Brueghel Le Jeune, Brussels, 1969, p. 260, no. 10.

K. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere (1564-1637/38): Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog, I, Lingen, 1998/2000, p. 485, under no. F484, with current provenance and literature incorrectly attributed to another work.

S. Lillie, 'Stefan Auspitz, Bankier', Was einmal war: Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens, Vienna, 2003, p. 128, no. 878.

This Visit to the Farm is one of the finest examples of a comparatively scarce composition within the oeuvre of Pieter Brueghel the Younger. This scene depicts a well-to-do couple, presumably landlords visiting their tenants on the occasion of the birth of their third child. The wife, dressed in black at right, opens her coin purse before a young boy dressed in a simple white shirt while her husband engages with a man further in the interior. Because the farm interior is unusually well-appointed and the villagers so industrious, it is unlikely that Brueghel intended any sort of social critique in which the rustic dwellers’ mean state would be taken as a cipher for their moral inferiority.

Described as a ‘[b]on exemplaire’ by Georges Marlier (op. cit.), this picture belongs to a group of around sixteen examples that Klaus Ertz considered to be autograph or likely autograph works, some of which he knew only from images of varying quality (op. cit., 1988/1990; Ertz conflated the provenance of this painting with another work offered for sale in Paris in 1986, erroneously viewing them as one and the same). Dated examples are known between the years 1611 and 1635 (at the time of publication, Ertz, op. cit., 1988/1990, questioned the date of 1611 inscribed on his no. E462, though the date was read as such when it subsequently sold at Sotheby’s, London, 9 July 2008, lot 17).

The composition is unusual within the work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger in that no definitive prototype by the artist’s father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is known. Klaus Ertz has, however, suggested that the grisaille in the collection of the Fondation Custodia, Paris, may possibly be the work of the elder artist (see K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625): Kritischer Katalog der Gemälde, III, Lingen, 2008-2010, pp. 1244, 1247, fig. 575/1). A further grisaille by Pieter the Younger's brother, Jan Brueghel the Elder, is in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (inv. no. 645), while a replica in colour and datable to circa 1597 is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (fig. 1). Jan’s colour replica probably served as the direct model for all subsequent versions by the younger Brueghel and his workshop.

The subject enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Southern Lowlands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In addition to the Brueghel family, Marten van Cleve depicted it on several occasions, as did artists in his circle, with a particularly fine signed and dated example by van Cleve from 1572 in the collection of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (inv. no. 1931).

Fig. 1 Jan Brueghel I, The Visit to the Farm Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, © Bridgeman Images

PROPERTY OF THE HEIRS OF DANIËL GEORGE VAN BEUNINGEN (1877-1955) (LOTS 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 AND 19) *15

LUCAS CRANACH THE YOUNGER (WITTENBERG 1515-1586 WEIMAR)

Venus with Cupid the Honey Thief signed with the artist's serpent device with the wings folded (lower right) oil on panel, unframed

19º x 13¡ in. (48.9 x 34 cm.)

inscribed 'DVM PVER ALVEOLO FVRATVR MELLA CVPIDO / FVRANTI DIGITVM CVSPITE FIXIT APIS · / SIC

ETIAM NOBIS BREVIS ET PERITVRA VOLVPTAS / QVAM PETIMVS TRISTI MIXTA DOLORE NOCET ·' (upper left)

£500,000-800,000

PROVENANCE:

Gaston von Mallmann (1860-1917), Blaschkow, Bohemia and Berlin; [sale under Galerie Ritter Gaston von Mallmann], Rudolph Lepke, Berlin, 12 June 1918, lot 59, as 'Lucas Cranach I' (8,700 Mark). with Dr. Curt Benedict, Berlin, 1926. Anonymous sale; Paul Graupe and S.J. Mak van Waay, Amsterdam, 5 November 1935 (=2nd day), lot 158, as 'Lucas Cranach I'.

Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

Bermuda, National Gallery, on loan.

LITERATURE:

H. Voss, 'Die Galerie Gaston von Mallmann in Berlin', Der Cicerone, I, Leipzig, 1909, p. 45.

Kunst und Künstler, XVIII, Berlin, 1918, p. 447.

M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, Die Gemälde van Lucas Cranach, Berlin, 1932, p. 89, no. 321C, as 'eher Lucas Cranach II'.

M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, rev. ed., London, 1978, p. 149, no. 398C, as 'likely to be by Lucas Cranach the Younger'.

M. Hofbauer, Corpus Cranach: Lucas Cranach I und Lucas Cranach II Verzeichnis der Gemälde unter Berücksichtigung von Werkstattumfeld und Epigonen, Heidelberg, 2022, pp. 280, 599 and 616, no. CC-MHM-600-054, as 'C1: Lucas Cranach der Ältere (1472(?) –1553) oder unter seiner Werkstattleitung entstanden'.

Cranach Digital Archive, cat. no. PRIVATE_NONE-P508, accessed 20 January 2025, as 'Lucas Cranach the Younger or follower?'.

US$680,000-1,100,000

€600,000-950,000

Once thievish Love the honeyed hives would rob, When a bee stung him: soon he felt a throb

Through all his finger-tips, and, wild with pain,

Blew on his hands and stamped and jumped in vain.

To Aphroditè then he told his woe:

'How can a thing so tiny hurt one so?'

She smiled and said; 'Why thou'rt a tiny thing,

As is the bee; yet sorely thou canst sting.'

- C.S. Calverley (trans.), ‘Idyll XIX: Love Stealing Honey’, Theocritus, London, 1892, p. 110.

Cranach’s Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief beguiled the imagination of his patrons as one of his most seductive allegories. Taken from a Latin poem ‘The Honeycomb Stealer’, which had erroneously been ascribed to the Greek poet Theocritus (3rd century BC), the subject was seen as an admonition against love’s ‘sweet’ temptation. The design of the theme was first conceived by Lucas Cranach the Elder and would become one of his most successful compositions, painted by both the Elder and Younger Cranach and their workshops in at least 24 known examples (see M. J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, New York, 1978, pp. 118-9).

Influenced by the secular spirit of the Renaissance, the elder Cranach’s search for opportunities to portray the nude resulted in what would become one of his most consequential pictorial inventions. Arriving in Wittenberg in 1505, where he became court painter to Frederick the Wise and the Saxon Electors who succeeded him, he began painting mythological subjects to cater to their humanistic leanings. Theocritus’s work was published in the original Greek at the Venetian press of Aldus Manutius in 1495/6, which may well have been acquired by Cranach’s employers, who sought to obtain works from the Aldine Press. The idyll attributed to the Greek poet was a particular subject of interest, with the source of Cranach’s inscription in this picture variously attributed to Ercole Strozzi, Georg Sabinus and Philip Melanchthon, who would be one of

many to make Latin translations of Theocritus’s text. While the epigram elevates the composition to a moralising allegory of carnal desire, it also exudes an air of playful delectation and humanist wit, which would have appealed to court circles, with the bemused Venus asking ‘Are you, Cupid, not just like the bee, so small yet able to inflict such painful wounds?' Through these ambivalent layers of allusion, Cranach invested Classical themes with Christian virtue, comparable to the moralising elements of his paintings of The Nymph of the Spring (such as the example sold in these Rooms, 7 July 2022, lot 6), which reminded the viewer of the transitory nature of pleasure that can come with both sadness and pain.

Cranach the Elder’s first conception of the theme was borne from his seductive depictions of Venus with Cupid in as early as 1509, both in a woodcut showing the figures in a landscape and in a life-size painting set against a black background like the present (St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum; fig. 1). Notwithstanding the vast tradition of upright nudes that populated sixteenthcentury mythological paintings, Cranach’s Venus represented the artist’s first major depiction of the idealised nude that would form the core of his oeuvre The artist introduced the moralising element to his Venus and Cupid repertoire in his Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief of circa 1526-7 (Schwerin, Staatliches Museum), with other versions of the subject including those in the Borghese Gallery, Rome (1531); the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (1530); the Musées Royaux des Beaux-arts, Brussels (1531); the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (after 1537); and the Germänisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (after 1537).

As was customary in Cranach’s process, no two treatments of the subject were the same, all showing variations in pose, detail and setting. While Cranach the Elder had few visual precedents to rely on for his own interpretation of the subject, the present Venus by Lucas the Younger is similar in design to that in Albrecht Dürer’s print of The Dream of the Doctor of circa 1498 (fig. 2), adopting the same three-quarter-angle contrapposto, outstretched arm and hand holding the diaphanous cloth around her. As with most of Cranach’s

pastoral subjects, he mirrors the curves of Venus’ body in the contours of the nature around her, here reserved to the tree trunk in the absence of the characteristic forests, mountains and valleys that typically fill the backdrop. Dieter Koepplin has observed (after first-hand inspection) that the present composition is unique in its combination of the nebulous black background and the lush turf, rather than the pebble-strewn earth that adorns all the other such variants. And yet, it appears that this was not Cranach the Younger’s original intention, with hints of the original pebbled ground emerging between the blades of grass, offering an insight into the artist’s creative process and his initial conception of the composition. Cupid’s striped wings may also have been the younger Cranach’s invention, appearing in another version of the theme of around 1640 formerly in the collection of Prince Demidoff (sold at Art Rémy Le Fur & Associés, Paris, 29 November 2022, lot 30, €1,100,000).

Infrared reflectography reveals a high level of planning, with clear reserves for the figures, tree and cartellino and minor adjustments made at the painting stage, such as the enlargement of the honeycomb (Tager Stonor Richardson, 4 April 2025, available upon request). As was common practice in the Cranach workshop, the figures were first sketched with liquid, freehand underdrawing, at which stage the artist also painted bold, brushed veins in Venus’ feet and arm so that they would appear beneath the thin, economically applied glazes of the flesh. The final silhouettes were then defined with the carbon black background. This technique can be readily observed in the reflectographs of other versions by Cranach and his workshop, such as that in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg of circa 1537 (see, for example, the Cranach Digital Archive, nos. DE_GNMN_Gm213 and DE_GNMN_Gm1097).

While Cranach’s earliest depictions of Venus and Cupid are more rounded and overtly Italianate, later models such as the present have a doll-like delicacy, with exaggeratedly linear contours that appear to modern eyes as curiously abstracted rather than seductive, comparable to the mannered grace of German small-scale sculpture. With Venus’ customary jewellery and vaporous veil, she here speaks a similar language of artifice to Cranach’s ostentatious images of clothed women. Spotlit against a black backdrop, the smooth sinuousness of both Venus and Cupid, so innocently soft and fanciful, suspends the laws of nature into an artistic idiom of Cranach’s own invention, which Friedländer surmised will have ‘amused and entertained his patrons in rather the same way as the eighteenth century was amused by china dolls’ (M. J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, New York, 1978, p.23).

We are grateful to Dieter Koepplin for proposing the attribution after first-hand inspection.

Fig. 1 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Venus and Cupid, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Bridgeman Images

Fig. 2 Albrecht Dürer, The Dream of the Doctor, engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

PROPERTY OF THE HEIRS OF DANIËL GEORGE VAN BEUNINGEN (1877-1955) (LOTS 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 AND 19) *16

DOMÉNIKOS THEOTOKÓPOULOS, CALLED EL GRECO (CRETE 1541-1614 TOLEDO) AND STUDIO

Christ taking leave of His Mother oil on canvas

41º x 46¡ in. (104.8 x 117.8 cm.)

£600,000-800,000

US$810,000-1,100,000

€720,000-950,000

PROVENANCE:

Colegio de Nuestra Señora del Recuerdo, Madrid. Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, by 1932, and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, Catalogus van de Kersttentoonstelling in het Museum Boymans, 23 December 1932-17 January 1933, no. 18, illustrated, as 'El Greco'. Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, Meesterwerken uit de Verzameling D.G. van Beuningen, 9 July- 9 October 1949, no. 89, as 'El Greco'. Paris, Petit Palais, Chefs-d'Oeuvre de la Collection D.G. van Beuningen, 31 October 1952-15 February 1953, no. 13.

LITERATURE:

M. Gómez-Moreno, 'La despedida de Cristo y la Virgen, cuadro del Greco', Archivo español de arte y arqueología, III, 1927, p. 92, as 'El Greco'.

M. Legendre and A. Hartmann, El Greco, Paris, 1937, p. 167, as 'El Greco'.

A. Busuioceanu, Les tableaux du Greco de la Collection Royale de Roumanie, Brussels, 1937, p. 13, as 'El Greco'.

J. Babelon, El Greco, Paris, 1946, no. 18, illustrated, as 'El Greco'.

D. Hannema, Catalogue of the D.G van Beuningen Collection, Rotterdam, 1949, p. 98, no. 89, pls. 148-150.

J. Camón Aznar, Dominico Greco, Madrid, 1950, pp. 422 and 425, nos. 213 and 214, fig. 304, as 'obra de taller'.

H.E. Wethey, El Greco and his school, II, Princeton, 1962, p. 180, no. X-68, as 'Workshop replica, c. 1585-1590'.

H.E. Wethey, El Greco y su Escuela, rev. ed., Madrid, 1967, p. 195, no. X-68, as a 'Workshop replica of c.1585-90'.

M.B. Cossio, El Greco, Barcelona, 1972, p. 361, no. 57, as 'El Greco'. E. Baccheschi, El Greco: The Complete Paintings, Granada, 1980, p. 42, no. 53c, as a 'version with variations' of the Danielson painting.

M.B. Cossio, El Greco, Madrid, 1981, p. 274, no. 57.

J. Giltaij, D.G. 50 jaar Van Beuningen 1958-2008, online, 2012, accessed 13 May 2025, p. 40.

L. Ruiz Gomez, ‘El reencuentro con un original de El Greco’, Ars magazine: revista de arte y coleccionismo, XIV, 2012, p. 55 and 58, illustrated, as 'obra de calidad pintada hacia 1580-1585'.

L. Ruiz Gomez, El Greco and Modernism, exhibition catalogue, Dusseldorf, 2012, p. 72, as a work 'which has been attributed to the workshop, although...one should not rule out the participation of the master'.

This striking canvas depicting Christ Taking leave of His Mother – a subject rarely seen in Spanish painting – can be dated to 1580-85, soon after El Greco’s arrival in Spain. While revealing the formative influence of his early years in Venice, particularly his admiration for Titian, the picture is charged with the uncompromising spiritual potency that would define El Greco’s revolutionary idiom, securing his reputation as one of the great visionaries of Western art.

Before a celestial sky, Christ is shown facing the Virgin, his left hand interlaced with hers, while pointing heavenwards with his right. The proximity of the half-length figures to the picture plane heightens the drama and intimacy of this devotional scene, representing the moment when Christ bids farewell to the Virgin before his departure for Jerusalem, the canonical 'beginning' of the Passion sequence. This episode, often included in the cycle of the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady, served as both a reminder of Christ's mission as Saviour and his eventual sacrifice upon the cross, while also anticipating their eventual reunion in heaven. Although the scene is not described in the Bible, it appears in both the Franciscan Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ (c.1300) and the Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony's Vita Christi (c.1330s), arguably two of the most significant and widely read devotional guides during this period.

Interestingly, despite its evident popularity in Northern Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century – with subject taken up in the Netherlands by artists like Gerard David and particularly prevalent in German painting, no doubt due to Dürer's woodcuts of the scene – the iconography was popular neither in Italy nor Spain. The paucity of visual sources for El Greco's composition suggest that the subject may have been gleaned from textural examples. The Vita Christi had been translated into Spanish by the Franciscan friar Ambrosio de Montesinos in circa 1502-3 and the Toledo-born theologian Alonso de Villegas (1533-1603) included the episode in his influential Flos Sanctorum (1578), an expanded vernacular version of the famed Golden Legend.

Leticia Ruiz Gómez, to whom we are grateful, has recently inspected the picture at first hand and considers it to be a work by El Greco with considerable workshop assistance, and one of the artist's earliest renditions of the subject. The head of the Virgin is particularly fine, exhibiting the artist’s masterful, flickering brushwork that is characteristic of El Greco’s evolving style from this period, witnessed in some of the artist’s most celebrated works, including the Martyrdom of Saint Maurice (1580-82), his first royal commission, executed for the Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial (Madrid; fig. 1). In terms of the models for the protagonists, the head of Christ compares closely to that of the eponymous Saint in the Escorial altarpiece, while that of his Mother recalls the Virgin in The Disrobing of Christ, the artist's outstanding masterpiece completed in 1579 for the High Altar of the sacristy in Toledo Cathedral (fig. 2).

While there is no direct compositional source for El Greco’s series of pictures showing Christ taking leave of His Mother, both the palette and the figure of Christ betray the legacy of the painter's years in Venice from circa 1568-70. Indeed, El Greco's Christ bears a number of striking resemblances to that in Titian's Tribute Money (London, National Gallery; fig. 3), painted in circa 1560-68 for Philip II of Spain, and it is tempting to imagine that the Cretan encountered the Venetian master's picture, either towards its completion in Venice or after its subsequent arrival in Spain.

Although Manuel Bartolomé Cossío described El Greco's treatment of this theme as ‘extraña y poética’ (‘strange and poetic’) in 1908, scholars of the artist’s work had, until recently, largely overlooked the various versions of this enigmatic composition, no doubt due to their historical inaccessibility. Ruiz Gómez considers the prime version to be that offered at Christie's, London,

Fig. 1 El Greco, Martyrdom of Saint Maurice, Colecciones Reales, Patrimonio Nacional de España

Fig. 2 El Greco, The Disrobing of Christ, Sacristy of Toledo Cathedral, Bridgeman Images

6 July 2017, lot 34 (Private collection), which she dates to circa 1578-80. She believes that it was originally of a format similar to the present work and, like the latter, would have shown Christ and his Mother’s interlacing hands. She further hypothesises that the ex-Christie’s picture was cut down from its original format in the early eighteenth century and placed in the upper register of a retable in the church of San Vicente, Toledo (op. cit., 2012, p. 73). An upright version in the Danielson collection (Groton, Massachusetts, on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago), which she dates to circa 1585-90, previously hung in the Sacristy of the Hieronymite nuns’ convent of San Pablo in Toledo and was described by Harold Wethey as ‘a very impressive and moving work’ (op. cit, no. 70). A related, fully autograph picture of smaller dimensions was formerly in the Royal Collection of Romania. Lastly, a studio rendition, dated to circa 1595, showing the figures in three-quarter-length, is preserved in the Museum

of Santa Cruz, Toledo, but had also been previously housed in the church of San Vicente.

As the number of versions of this composition suggest, El Greco must have had an active workshop, even at this relatively early juncture in his career. However, as is the case with many painters from the period, due to the scarcity of surviving documentary evidence, El Greco’s assistants have remained largely elusive figures, with scholars left to speculate on their identities. The three artists who are securely identified as having occupied this role in the Cretan’s workshop over the course of his career were Francisco Preboste (d.1607), Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli (1578-1631) – the artist’s son – and Luis Tristán (15851624). Preboste was almost certainly El Greco’s main collaborator in Toledo, from at least 1580 until 1607, the probable year of his death.

Fig. 3 Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian, The Tribute Money, The National Gallery, London

PROPERTY OF THE HEIRS OF DANIËL GEORGE VAN BEUNINGEN (1877-1955) (LOTS 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 AND 19) *17

GERRIT DOU (LEIDEN 1613-1675)

A cottage interior with an old woman ('Rembrandt's Mother') delousing a boy's hair signed 'GDOV' (lower left, on the barrel, 'DOV' indistinct) oil on panel 14¬ x 11√ in. (37.3 x 30.2 cm.)

£1,000,000-1,500,000

US$1,400,000-2,000,000

€1,200,000-1,800,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) Acquired by Elector Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria (1662-1726) for his Gallery in Schloss Schleißheim, where certainly by 1776, and by descent in the Bavarian Royal Collections until 1836 (inv. 961), when transferred to the newly-constructed Alte Pinakothek, Munich (inv. no. 579), by whom exchanged with four other works for Jacob Jordaens, Allegorie der Fruchtbarkeit (inv. no. 10411), with Edouard Plietzsch on behalf of the following, with Paul Graupe, Berlin and Paris, where acquired on 22 March 1938 by, Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, and thence by descent.

EXHIBITED:

Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, Meesterwerken uit vier Eeuwen 1400-1800, 25 June-15 October 1938, no. 70.

Paris, Petit Palais, Chefs-d'OEuvre de la Collection D.G. van Beuningen, 31 October 1952-15 February 1953, no. 92. Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, Kunstschatten uit Nederlandse Verzamelingen, 19 June-25 September 1955, no. 60.

LITERATURE:

Königliche Bayerische Gemäldesammlung, 1822, no. 961.

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters..., I, London, 1829, p. 39, no. 115, 'an exquisitely painted picture'. Catalogue des tableaux de la Pinacothèque royale à Munich, Munich, 1853, p. 211, no. 280.

F. von Reber, Catalogue of the Paintings in the Old Pinakothek Munich, Munich, 1890, p. 89, no. 404.

F. von Reber, Katalog der Gemälde-Sammlung der Kgl. älteren Pinakothek in München, Munich, 1899, p. 96, no. 404.

W. Martin, Het leven en de werken van Gerrit Dou, Leiden, 1901, no. 296. Die Meisterwerke der Kgl. Älteren Pinakothek zu München, Munich, 1905, pp. xxii and 220, illustrated.

C. Hofstede de Groot, A catalogue raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch painters of the seventeenth century..., I, London, 1908, p. 389, no. 130.

W. Martin, Gérard Dou: Sa Vie et son Oeuvre: Étude sur la peinture hollandaise et les marchands du dix-septième siècle, Paris, 1911, p. 189, no. 160, illustrated.

W. Martin, Gerard Dou (Klassiker der Kunst), Stuttgart and Berlin, 1913, p. 96. E. Hanfstaengl, Meisterwerke der Älteren Pinakothek in München, I, Munich, 1922, pp. 215 and 323.

D. Hannema, Catalogue of the D.G. van Beuningen Collection, Rotterdam, 1949, p. 57, no. 45, pl. 94.

E.A. Honig, 'Lice and Leiden: Quirijn Brekelenkam's "Huiselijke Zorgen" and the "fijnschilderij" of Leiden', Tableau, II, September 1988, pp. 86-7, fig. 7.

R. Baer, The Paintings of Gerrit Dou, PhD thesis, New York University, 1990, I, no. 49, illustrated.

J. Giltaij, D.G. 50 jaar Van Beuningen 1958-2008, online, 2012, accessed 13 May 2025, pp. 22 and 46.

ENGRAVED:

Johann Fiegel (fl. 1766-1780), 1776.

This painting exemplifies the seductively refined pictorial language and remarkable technique that made Gerrit Dou – much like his master, Rembrandt – one of the most successful Dutch artists of the seventeenth century. Both in his own lifetime and in the centuries that followed, Dou enjoyed the favour of artists and connoisseurs alike and his paintings commanded princely sums.

Some thirty-five years after a visit to the artist’s studio, the painter Joachim von Sandrart described in his Teutsche Academie (1675) how Dou took days to paint the minutest detail and, consequently, required eyeglasses from the age of thirty. Similarly, the painter and theorist Philips Angel praised Dou’s combination of ‘neatness’ and a ‘curious looseness’ in his Lof der Schilder-konst (‘Praise of the Art of Painting') of 1641. For their part, Dou’s patrons – including Cosimo III de’ Medici, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria and the Dutch States General, who acquired three paintings as gifts for Charles II upon his accession to the English throne in 1660 – often paid extraordinary amounts for his painstakingly executed works. Sandrart set the cost of Dou’s small paintings at between 600 and 1000 guilders apiece (several times what a skilled craftsman could expect to earn annually), while Angel relayed how Pieter Spiering, envoy of the Swedish crown to The Hague from 1634 to 1652, paid 500 guilders annually simply for the right of first refusal of his paintings.

Depictions of women combing children’s hair were especially popular representations of maternal duties in Dutch seventeenth-century art. As Wayne Franits has proposed, the task was not only important cosmetically but held hygienic benefits as well (Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in

Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, Cambridge and New York, 1993, p. 124). Combs were used to delouse people of all ages. Such painted depictions of everyday life contained within them a complex pedagogical symbolism that would not have been lost on knowing contemporary viewers. With their focus on the proper rearing of children (among Dou’s favourite themes), these paintings are illustrations of domestic virtue. Ronni Baer, for example, has pointed out how, in his well-read Sinnepoppen of 1614, the great Dutch poet Roemer Visscher included an emblem of a comb (fig. 1), above which is written the Latin motto ‘Purgat et ornat’ (‘it cleanses and beautifies’; see Baer, op. cit., p. 49.2). Similarly, the generation younger Jacob Cats described combs as instruments that purify both the body and spirit on a daily basis in his Spiegel van den ouden en nieuwen Tyt, first published in 1632. In Cats’s time, there was a widespread belief that equated one’s well-groomed external appearance with inner virtue. Whereas most depictions of this theme, like that painted by Caspar Netscher in 1669 (fig. 2), depict a young woman combing a child’s hair, Dou instead shows an elderly woman undertaking this essential task. Elizabeth Honig has suggested that Dou’s choice to have an aged woman groom the child emphasises the aging process and the idea of vanitas (op. cit.), though, as Baer has recently noted (private communication, 19 May 2025), this same idea appears in paintings like the Old woman cutting bread (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), which have no evident connection to the vanitas theme. The seated young boy holds what appears to be a small, round and flat object in his upraised hand. Having recently had the opportunity to study the painting firsthand, Baer has suggested it may be the other button to his overalls (private communication, 19 May 2025).

Fig. 1 Emblem detail from Roemer Vissher, Sinnepoppen, 1614, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 2 Caspar Netscher, Interior with a Mother Combing her Child’s Hair, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Much like the toys strewn across the floor in Netscher’s painting, the boy blowing up the pig’s bladder in the background of Dou’s painting may be taken as a symbol of the foolishness and frivolity of playthings (for further discussion of this, see Franits, op. cit., p. 126). The cultivation of animals required to produce the pig's bladder may equally have conjured in contemporary viewers’ minds a pedagogical metaphor with child rearing and, as Baer has posited, the ‘laying in of provisions for the approaching winter that implies the mother’s foresight’ (op. cit., p. 49.3). The detail may then be understood as a complement to the gathered wood and wheelbarrow with humble vegetables at lower right.

Baer (op. cit., pp. 49.1-49.2), who knew of this painting only from photographs at the time of her dissertation, perceptively drew a comparison between its composition and concept of space and that of the Woman in Prayer at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (fig. 3), a work that, like the present painting, can be dated to the second half of the 1640s. She further described a thematically comparable painting of 1648 by Quiringh van Brekelenkam (fig. 4), which she recognised as ‘a reprise’ of Dou’s composition (op. cit.). More recently, Baer has pointed out that the still-life elements at extreme lower right – faggots tied with a red string, single wooden clog and earthenware pot with broken

lid – are very close to those in one of Dou’s most charming creations, the Dog at rest of 1650 (Promised gift of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, in support of the Center for Netherlandish Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The earthenware pot appears to be identical in both images and must have been based on an actual example.

When John Smith described this painting in his Catalogue Raisonné (1829), his appraisal of it as ‘an exquisitely painted picture’ (op. cit.) channelled the high regard in which it was held, then as today. By the time of writing, the painting had been a fixture of the Bavarian Royal Collections for over half a century and, while it cannot be established with certitude, quite possibly for a length of time before then. The existence of no fewer than three versions of this composition further emphasises its appeal. These include a replica formerly in the Cook collection, Richmond (sold Sotheby’s, London, 25 June 1958, lot 81); a composition with differing details (sold Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 2 December 1899, lot 25); and a copy recorded in the collection of P. Friedrichs in Brilon in 1984.

We are grateful to Dr. Ronni Baer for sharing her perceptive comments on the painting after first-hand inspection of the work.

Fig. 3 Gerard Dou, The spinner’s grace at the table, c. 1645, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen - Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Fig. 4 Quiringh Gerritsz. Van Brekelenkam, Old woman delousing a boy’s hair, Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden

PROPERTY OF THE HEIRS OF DANIËL GEORGE VAN BEUNINGEN (1877-1955)

(LOTS 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 AND 19) *18

ADRIAEN JANSZ. VAN OSTADE (HAARLEM 1610-1685)

A hurdy-gurdy player with a young violinist and four other children in a doorway oil on panel 14¿ x 12º in. (35.9 x 31.1 cm.)

£200,000-300,000

US$270,000-400,000

€240,000-360,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) Cornelis van Dijck; his sale (†), The Hague, 10 May 1713 (=2nd day), lot 14, as 'Een dito [Adriaen van Ostade], zynde een Lierman in de hoogte met fes groote Beelden. van denzelven, zeer konstig en schoon' (190 florins).

Baron Anne Willem Carel van Nagell (1756-1851); his sale, Christie's, London, 21 March 1795, lot 44, as 'The country strolling musician, a very fine and capital picture' (105 gns. to Green).

Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-1896), Bath House, Piccadilly; his sale (†), Christie's, London, 6 February 1897, lot 46, acquired for 110 gns. by the following, with L. Lesser, 123 New Bond Street, London; Christie's, London, 19 March 1904, lot 115, acquired for 720 gns. by the following, with Sir George Donaldson (1845-1925), London, by 1906. August Janssen (1863-1918), Amsterdam, from whose estate acquired in 1919 together with most of the collection (no. CJ 18) by the following, (Probably) with Goudstikker, Amsterdam.

Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Vierhouten, acquired in 1919, from whom acquired in 1930 by the following, with Goudstikker, Amsterdam.

Bernardus Henricus Maria Lips (1878-1950), Dordrecht, by 1938. Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

Amsterdam, Frederik Muller & Co., Exposition des maîtres hollandais organisée en l'honnneur du tercentenaire de Rembrandt, 10 July-15 September 1906, no. 95. Amsterdam, Goudstikker Collection, Catalogue des nouvelles acquisitions de la collection Goudstikker, April-May 1930, no. 38. Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, Meesterwerken uit vier Eeuwen 1400-1800, 25 June-15 October 1938, no. 114 (lent by B.H.M Lips).

LITERATURE:

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters..., I, London, 1829, p. 169, no. 219.

C. Hofstede de Groot, Catalogue Raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century..., III, London, 1910, p. 273, no. 433, and (possibly) p. 275, no. 438a.

Schatten der schilderkunst: reproducties in kleurendruk naar werken uit Nederlandsche en Vlaamsche musea en particuliere verzamelingen, Amsterdam, 1944, not paginated, illustrated.

J. Giltaij, D.G. 50 jaar Van Beuningen 1958-2008, online, 2012 accessed 13 May 2025, pp. 10 and 34.

ENGRAVED: Cornelis Visscher.

When Cornelis Hofstede de Groot catalogued this picture in the third volume of his Catalogue Raisonné, he favourably described it as ‘A fine picture of the good period; warm in tone’ (op. cit.). In the seventeenth century, hurdy-gurdy players were often, as here, roving musicians, having lost some of their prior status as court or cloister musicians in the Renaissance. These travelling minstrels were often from the poorest ranks of society – the blind among them – and their presence in towns and villages was seen by some contemporaries as a nuisance. By the middle of the century, municipalities required travelling musicians to obtain a license authorising them to perform in public.

Adriaen van Ostade’s charming genre scene places the viewer at the threshold of the interior, looking out at the ragtag group through a modest arched wooden doorway. Van Ostade’s use of such an archway to frame his composition was a favoured device among a diverse group of genre painters in the second half of the seventeenth century, among them the Leiden fijnschilders Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris, the Rotterdam-born Jacob Ochtervelt and the peripatetic Eglon van der Neer. The popularity of such images in the period was aided by their wide dissemination in print form, with the present composition having been engraved by Cornelis Visscher, arguably the most talented reproductive engraver of his generation (fig. 1).

Visscher’s engraving was probably made in the first half of the 1650s, as he departed his native Haarlem for Amsterdam in the middle of the decade, and provides a terminus ante quem for van Ostade’s painting.

In part due to the renown spurred on by Visscher’s print, this painting enjoyed a particular appeal in the eighteenth century. It may well have been the painting of this subject that belonged to Cornelis van Dijck, a collector in The Hague, at the beginning of the century. Some decades later, its continued resonance can be seen in works like Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich’s Wandering Musicians of 1745 (fig. 2; London, The National Gallery), which clearly takes van Ostade’s painting as its point of departure.

Fig. 1 Cornelis Visscher, Liereman, engraving, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 2 Ernst Dietrich, Wandering Musicians, The National Gallery, London

(1877-1955)

(LOTS 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 AND 19) *19

BERNARDO BELLOTTO (VENICE 1721-1780 WARSAW)

The Fishermen’s Village at Pirna oil on canvas

19º x 31 ¬ in. (48.9 x 80.4 cm.)

£600,000-800,000

US$810,000-1,100,000

€720,000-950,000

PROVENANCE:

Anonymous sale; Herdtle und Peters, Stuttgart, 28-29 April 1870, lot 129, with erroneous dimensions.

Jacob Klein, Frankfurt am Main; his sale, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 31 October 1911, lot 4.

Stefan von Auspitz (1869-1945), Vienna, by whom consigned in 1931 to the following, with K.W. Bachstitz, The Hague, where acquired in 1932 by, Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, An exhibition of the Von Auspitz Collection of Old Masters by courtesy of Herr Walter Bachstitz, November-December 1932, no. 25. Dresden, Albertinum, Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto in Dresden und Warschau, 8 December 1963-31 August 1964, no. 24c. Venice, Museo Correr; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Bernardo Bellotto and the Capitals of Europe, 2001, no. 71 (entry by Gregor J.M. Weber).

LITERATURE:

Jahrbuch der Bilder- u. Kunstblätterpreise: Band 2. 1911., Vienna, 1912, p. 25. Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto in Dresden und Warschau, exhibition catalogue, 1963, Dresden, p. 87, no. 24c.

S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, Recklinghausen and London, 1972, II, pp. 172 and 174, no. 218, illustrated.

E. Camesasca, L'opera completa del Bellotto, Milan, 1974, pp. 102 and 103, no. 136, illustrated.

A. Rizzi, Bernardo Bellotto: Dresda Vienna Monaco, Venice, 1996, p. 76, no. 55. W. Schmidt, Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto in Pirna und auf der Festung Königstein, Pirna, 2000, p. 86.

D. Succi, Bernardo Bellotto: il Canaletto delle corti europee, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo Sarcinelli, Conegliano, 2011-12, p. 147.

J. Giltaij, D.G. 50 jaar Van Beuningen 1958-2008, online, 2012, accessed 13 May 2025, p. 41.

Bernardo Bellotto’s views of Dresden and its environs constitute one of the most comprehensive portrayals of any city in the eighteenth century and are often seen as the apogee of the art of view painting. Bellotto had moved in 1747 at the age of twenty-five to Dresden, lured by the highest salary ever given to an artist at the Saxon court. In the following year he was appointed Court Painter to Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. Remarkably precocious, he had already established himself as one of the great painters of views of Italy, mainly of Venice but also Florence, Rome, Verona and Turin, even connoisseurs finding it difficult to differentiate his paintings at the age of sixteen from those of his already famous uncle, Canaletto. In fact, Bellotto’s career in Northern Europe was to help to make his uncle’s name even more famous throughout Europe, as Bellotto also used it, with no justification, and he is still to this day better known as ‘Canaletto’ in Germanand Russian-speaking countries.

In the north Bellotto found a clientele keen to record for posterity the appearances of their surroundings, in striking contrast with the inhabitants of Venice. He also found fortuitously the cold light which he had always favoured, less appropriately, in his early years in Venice. He remained in Dresden until 1766, although the Seven Years War forced him to work elsewhere, in Vienna and Munich, in the years 1759-61. For the Elector he painted seventeen views of Dresden, eleven of the village of Pirna and five of the Fortress of Königstein, all of impressive size, all but three measuring approximately 53 x 92 in. (134.6 x 233.7 cm.), one of Sonnenstein even 80 ¼ x 130 ¼ in. (204 x 331 cm.). Most of those, notably except the Königstein views, are among the thirty-five paintings by the artist which remain in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden. He painted a second series of twenty variants of the Dresden and Pirna views, on equally large canvases, for Count Heinrich Brühl, the plenipotentiary Prime Minister, of which fifteen are now in Russia. In this period of intense activity he also produced capricci and allegories, as well as small versions and etchings of his compositions. This was, however, by no means an easy period in his life. On his return to Dresden in 1762, he found that his house and exceptional library had been destroyed in the Prussian bombardment. Both his patrons, Augustus and Brühl, died in 1763, the latter without having paid him for the twenty large canvases delivered. In 1766, he left to travel North and in the following year became court painter at the court of Augustus’s successor as King of Poland, Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski, in Warsaw, where he settled definitively.

Bellotto’s views of Northern Europe have always been praised for their topographical accuracy. The views of Warsaw from the last phase of his career were, indeed, famously used in the reconstruction of the city after the Second World War. By 1753, Bellotto had completed fourteen views of Dresden, most in more than one version. He turned his attention to Pirna, a small town of three or four thousand inhabitants seventeen kilometers up

the River Elbe, with a considerable strategic importance for the Electorate of Saxony. Evidently at least in part to ensure topographical accuracy, the local magistrate Johann Christlieb Crusius was instructed by a decree certified by Count Brühl on 23 April 1753 ‘not to in any way obstruct’ the court painter ‘who has been charged with making drawings of the surroundings of Pirna and further afield’. Bellotto delivered four views of Pirna before mid-1754 and all eleven by the beginning of 1756.

This painting, a version of the large canvas painted for Augustus (Kozakiewicz, op. cit, no. 217; no. 58 in the 2001 exhibition, op. cit.), shows the village of the fishermen and boatmen on a backwater of the Elbe which served as a small harbour to project barges during the winter. The Customs House, the furthest building to the right, still survives, as do many of the houses in Pirna. As with all but one of the views of Pirna, the scene is dominated by the Fortress of Sonnenstein, medieval in origin but brought up to date with bastions for artillery. How literal is the depiction is shown by a comparison with another painting by Bellotto showing the same buildings, Pirna from the Right Bank of the Elbe with the Main Road at Posta (Kozakiewicz, op. cit., no. 193). As Gregor Weber has pointed out, ‘In contrast to the Dresden paintings, the setting for the views of Pirna and Königstein is more bucolic with river valleys and vineyards, meadows and pastures. We encounter more peasants, travellers, carts, and river boats; we come across shepherds with their flocks at the edge of the road, in shallow water and in the fields’ (2001 exhibition, op. cit., p. 23). The artist’s delight in the run-down cottages is evident here, recalling as it does Dutch paintings of the previous century, and his empathy with the peasantry anticipates that in three of his views of Königstein and later many of Poland. It is appropriate that the three cows standing in the water and their herdsman are borrowed, in reverse, from a Dutch pastoral landscape, an engraving by Joseph Wagner after Nicolaes Berchem, entitled Senza pensier sol della Mandra ho cura (‘Untroubled by thought, I only look after my flock’; 2001 exhibition, op. cit., p. 25, fig. 16). The serene atmosphere which pervades this painting was to be shattered soon after by the advent of the Seven Years’ War.

The small versions of Bellotto’s views of Dresden and Pirna are all dated by Kozakiewicz on stylistic grounds to the years 1760-5. A number of them are known in several versions and they vary widely in quality. This painting is exceptional in being the only version apart from the large canvas executed for Augustus. It is one of two Pirna compositions of which no version was made for Count Brühl, who may have found its rustic character not to his taste. It was one of only two small versions of Dresden or Pirna compositions selected on account of their indisputable quality for inclusion in the 2001 monographic exhibition.

Charles Beddington

SELECTIONS FROM THE COLLECTION OF MICKEY CARTIN (LOTS 3, 20, 21 AND 22)

“Mickey Cartin is par excellence a collector”

Luke Syson, ‘An Intensity of Vision’ in Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner Books , New York, 2023.

In this single line, Luke Syson captures the magic of Mickey Cartin’s collection, which has been passionately formed over 40 years, a collection that disregards the traditional boundaries between categories or periods. He was one of the first collectors of contemporary art to begin collecting in this way, and the collection now includes Old Master paintings, modern and contemporary art, work by emerging artists, master prints, illuminated manuscripts, and early printed books.

From Dürer and Rembrandt to Josef Albers, Martín Ramirez, and Vilhelm Hammershøi, “the collection is… carefully calibrated to bring out the marvelous, the exceptional, and the portentous”. The collection portrays Cartin’s incisive lens, establishing links between artists, genres and time periods. It is a collection in which works of art find each other, and wherein we see “the visionary, the illusory, the prophetic, the dreamt, the monstrous, and the miraculous.”

Lots 3, 20, 21 and 22 in this sale, are a microcosm of Cartin’s collection. They speak to the collection’s diversity and magic, and the singular mind behind its creation.

(Quotations taken from Luke Syson, ‘An Intensity of Vision’ in Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner Books, New York, 2023.)

°*20

PEDER BALKE (HELGØYA 1804-1887 CHRISTIANIA)

Fra Nordkapp (From the North Cape)

signed and dated 'Balke 1853' (lower right) oil on paper laid down on board 14 x 20 in. (35.5 x 50.7 cm.)

£200,000-300,000

US$270,000-400,000

€240,000-360,000

PROVENANCE:

Gallery Staffeliet AS, Oslo, 1975; Acquired from the above by Eva and Per Saxegaard, Norway, Acquired from the above by Mr. Aage Wahlstroem, Norway, in 2012, Daxer & Marschall, 2016.

Acquired from the above 2016 by the present owner.

EXHIBITED:

Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg, Norge, Night, 6 February 20019 September 2001.

Krems, Kunsthalle, Peder Balke - Pioneer of Modernity, 7 September 200815 February 2009.

Tromsø, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Peder Balke: Visjon og Revolusjon, 14 June12 October 2014.

London, National Gallery, Paintings by Peder Balke, 12 October 2014-12 April 2015 New York, The Metropolitan Museum, Peder Balke: Painter of Northern Light, 10 April 2017-9 July 2017.

New York, David Zwirner Gallery, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, 2 November-18 December 2021, unpaginated.

LITERATURE:

J. Åke and B. Li, Natten i Norsk Maleri (Night in Norwegian Painting), Oslo, 2001, p. 10, illustrated.

D. Buchhart, M. I Lange, & K. Monrad. Peder Balke : ein Pionier der Moderne Heidelberg, 2008.

M. I. Lange, K. Ljøgodt and C. Riopelle. Peder Balke: Visjon og Revolusjon, Tromsø, 2014.

M. I. Lange, K. Ljøgodt and C. Riopelle, Paintings by Peder Balke, London, 2014 R. Smith, Wild Waves and Quiet Streets: 2 Artists Working From Memory. New York: New York Times, 2017.

E. Gordon & S. Holmes, (ed.) Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection London, 2023, pp. 40, 86-7, 121.

Balke was one of the first artists to venture to the vast, untrodden plains of the North Cape. He visited only once, aged 28 in 1832, but the experience became a touchstone of his imagination for the rest of his life. Almost nothing survives of Balke’s 1832 journey except for a few pencil sketches. Nevertheless, “Henceforth, Balke and his art would be associated with that desolate and hostile realm, as Eugène Delacroix was with North Africa or, later, Paul Gauguin with Tahiti. It would provide him with motifs for his entire painting career, both public and private. It would set him apart’ (C. Riopelle, Paintings by Peder Balke, exh. cat., London 2014, p. 59).

Overwhelmed by the opulent beauty of nature and the dramatic locations, this voyage was of central importance to his artistic development. His subsequent landscapes draw their inspiration from the scenery which he witnessed during this trip. As one of the first artists to travel in this region - when it was thought to be the northernmost point in Europe - his oeuvre would explore recurrent motifs whilst forming a testament to his unique observations.

Balke’s paintings are infused with a magical light inspired by the midnight sun. The power and dramatic quality of his compositions reflects his firsthand experience of extreme weather conditions which he described as 'an impression that did not merely overwhelm me in the violence of the moment but was to exert a decisive influence on my entire later life [...] for in these northerly parts it is the beauties of nature that play the central role whereas nature's living children, human beings, merely occupy a position subordinate to them’ (Buchhardt in Peder Balke. Ein Pionier der Moderne, exh. cat., 2008). Such dramatic scenery can be witnessed in Seascape, 1849 (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), where the sea surges against a steadfast lighthouse and birds are sent into a frenzy. Viewing Fra Nordkapp alongside his stormy scenes accentuates the extreme calmness of the scene. The potential powerful surges of nature are present, but restrained.

The daylight view, The North Cape, 1845 (oil on canvas, 37¡ x 52 in., The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, Norway) is one of Balke’s largest easel paintings, and considered amongst the most accomplished and sophisticated works he made in the descriptive, naturalistic vein of his contemporaries Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857) and Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842). Three years later, in 1848, he visited Dahl in Dresden and painted essentially the same view on an even larger canvas, this time as a night scene, in The North Cape in Moonlight (Peder Balke, North Cape in Moonlight, oil on canvas, 40º x 55 in., Private collection) and in the same year painted The North Cape by Moonlight (244 x 33.7/18 in., MET Museum, New York, fig. 1). By 1852 Balke had returned to Norway after his extensive travels in London and Paris, where King Louis-Philippe had acquired 30 of his paintings. This was a period of confidence and maturity in his brushwork and an indication towards his more abstract rendering of the Northern Cape. The present lot is a confident return to his 1848 composition. When executing this 1853 painting, Balke made small changes, such as the positioning of the boats, but larger changes in his treatment of the light. The clouds have slightly parted and the awe-inspiring moon shines brighter. In response, the boats to the right of the composition are cast into shadow, and the moon, nature, dominates human activity. This could be only moments after the inspiration for the 1848 paintings, but it tells an entirely new story.

By the time Balke executed this work, dated 1853, the North Cape had become a signature image. He employed his materials cannily: the smooth paper support is well suited to the flatly applied, gradated tones of the sky, which is clear, save for the quickly worked clouds that form a dome with the moon as its keystone. The cape’s massif appears as a single broad horizontal stroke of dark grey paint, with visible brush marks that contribute a subtle note of texture. This restraint was abandoned through the use of bolder impasto for the snowy crags and the surface of the water.

Fig. 1 Peder Balke, North Cape by Moonlight, 1848, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

°*21

VILHELM HAMMERSHØI (COPENHAGEN 1864-1916)

Selv-portræt (Self-portrait)

oil on canvas

13º x 11¿ in. (33.7 x 28.2 cm.)

Painted in 1895

£200,000-300,000

US$270,000-400,000

€240,000-360,000

PROVENANCE:

Ida Hammershøi; Peter Olufson, Copenhagen.

Anonymous sale; Kunsthallen, Copenhagen, September 1998, lot 67. Private collection, Denmark.

Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 20 November 2012, lot 106. with Daxer & Marschall, Munich, where acquired by the present owner in 2013.

EXHIBITED:

Copenhagen, Kunstforeningen, Arbejder af Vilhelm Hammershøi (Part I), 9-24 April, 1916, no. 117, lent by Ida Hammershøi.

Modum, Blaafarvevaerket, Den forunderlige stillheten: Ida Lorentzen og Vilhelm Hammershøi, 21 May 21-25 September 2005, no. 37.

New York, Shin Gallery, ‘I Wanna be Me’, 19 February-May 3 2016. New York, David Zwirner Gallery, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection., 2 November-18 December 2021.

Basel, Hauser & Wirth, Vilhelm Hammershøi. Silence, 1 June-13 July 2024.

LITERATURE:

A. Bramsen, Fortegnelse over Vilhelm Hammershøis Arbejder, Copenhagen, 1900, no. 74.

A. Bramsen & S. Michaëlis, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Kunstneren og Hans Vaerk, Copenhagen, 1918, p. 92, no. 144.

S. Meyer-Abich, Vilhelm Hammershøi: Das malerische Werk, Bochum, 1996, p. 148, no. 127, as ‘Selbsporträt’.

Exh. cat. Tone Sinding Steinsvik, Ida Lorentzen, Bente Scavenius, Modums Blaafarveværk. Den forunderlige stillheten: Ida Lorentzen og Vilhelm Hammershøi Oslo: Stiftelsen Modums Blaafarveværk, 2005, p.67, no. 37.

E. Gordon & S. Holmes, (ed.) Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection London, 2023, pp. 25, 38, 73, 113.

Hammershøi’s rare self-portraits give tantalising psychological insights into the artist. It is tempting to seek answers here that might be the key to unlocking the empty room paintings for which he is famed. An early self-portrait dated 1889 (SMK collection, Copenhagen, fig. 1), certainly betrays some of the artist's personality, as Henrik Wivel attests, ‘In the same year that critic Georg Brandes began his groundbreaking lectures on Friedrich Nietzche’s philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, the young Hammershøi depicted himself with aristocratic radicalism. In the chiaroscuro of the painting, the light endows the artist with an extreme intellectualism and self-awareness’. (H. Wivel, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Copenhagen, 1996, p. 4).

Fig. 1. Vilhelm Hammershøi, Self-Portrait, 1890, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Fig. 2 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Self-Portrait, 1891, The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen

The present portrait was owned by the attorney Peter Olufsen Snr., who acquired another Hammershøi self-portrait from Anna Hammershøi’s 1955 auction (fig. 2). The earlier work was painted during the artist’s honeymoon in 1891 and is now in the Hirschsprung collection, Copenhagen. In the portrait, the elegantly attired artist depicted himself wearing a jacket and tie leaning towards the viewer, an inquisitive, ambiguous and inscrutable figure. That work is considered to be a preliminary work for the double portrait of the artist and his wife in the Davids Samling, Copenhagen.

Our self-portrait offers a glimpse of the artist four years on, in 1895, entering his thirties. It was the year that he received a unique commission from his patron, Emil Hjorth. Hjorth was a violin maker in Copenhagen, and among the first to buy pictures from Hammershøi in 1890 (P. Vad, ibid., p. 376). Hammershøi’s paintings are frequently discussed in terms of ‘music and silence,’ and Mr. Hjorth, as an instrument maker, stands alongside some of Hammershøi’s famed musical patrons, such as the concert pianist Leonard Borwick (a favourite pupil of Clara Schumann) and the composer Fini Henriques.

Emil Hjorth owned at least five paintings by Hammershøi which were exhibited together in 1900, including a versatile range of subjects – interiors, landscapes, and his important 1895 large group commission Tre Unge Kviner (Three Young Women) (Ribe Kunstmuseum, Ribe, fig. 3). Hjorth was also the owner of the

landscape Landskab. Sommer. Fra Ryet ved Farumsø which sold in these Rooms in October 2024, achieving £1,250,000. His 1895 commission Tre Unge Kviner depicted the artist’s wife, Ida Hammershøi, flanked symmetrically by her two sisters-in-law, Ingeborg Ilsted (married to the painter Peder Ilsted) and Anna Hammershøi, the artist’s sister. Art historically, the composition of Hjorth ’s commission has been compared to Cézanne’s Card Players (P. Vad, ibid., p. 143). This was an unusual subject for Hammershøi, sitting outside the artist’s oeuvre, and as such gives an insight into the unique relationship between the patron’s unconventional appreciation of art and the artist.

Hammershøi chose not only to complete this important commission, but to record himself in a self-portrait. Just as the 1891 portrait is considered to be a study for a double portrait, Susanne Meyer-Abich suggests that this painting was a pendant piece to a portrait of Ida, the central sitter in Tre Unge Kviner, the same year. Hammershøi’s gaze looks over the viewer’s left shoulder into the middle distance. His smart clothing is composed of his trademark grey tones, which dissipate into a grey-gold coloured background. Indeed, the light ochre tones appear almost as dappled light in his shirt. He is both the subject of the painting, but appears to be pulled into the painting itself.

At the same time, Hammershøi created a drawing which served as a preparatory study for this oil portrait. The reduced-scale preliminary drawing, executed

Fig. 3 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Tre Unge Kviner (Three Young Women), 1895, Ribe Kunstmuseum

Fig. 4 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Self-portrait, 1890, Fondation Custodia/ Collection Frits Lugt,Paris

in black chalk on ochre paper, is held by the Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt (inv. no. 1992-T.50, fig. 4). As Naoko Sato observes, an oil painting following a preparatory pencil drawing ‘is extremely rare for Hammershøi’ (Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Poetry of Silence, exh. cat., The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2008, p. 82). The painting appears fairly faithful in composition to the original drawing, but when viewed together one can see how the figure in the painting is deliberately more weightless, the clothing less formless, the lines surrounding the figure less defined. This appears to be a conscious movement away from being concerned with form, and venturing towards abstractions. It is possible that the ochre paper influenced the artist’s gold-coloured tonal choices in the background and dappled light over the figure.

Four years later, circa 1899, the artist’s brother-in-law, Peder Ilsted, etched one of the most famous depictions of Hammershøi. This etching defined how the artist - in his mid-thirties - would be perceived (fig. 5). The artist is still elegantly attired, but reclines back. His gaze is similarly pitched to his right, but his eyes appear wiser. His hair is more unkempt, but is suggestive of creativity.

In his mid-forties, when in his summer lodging Spurveskjul (Sparrow’s Hole), a thatched cottage in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, Hammershøi returned to the theme of the self-portrait (1911, SMK collection, Copenhagen, fig. 6). This large-scale works presents a story of two halves. Poul Vad observes “though,

formally speaking, the picture is divided in the middle and the two principle motifs are co-ordinated each in its half, the division does not engender a symmetrical harmonizing, with the uniform…closing at the sides, as in….Three young women.” (P. Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish art at the Turn of the Century, Copenhagen, 1992, p.306). Rather, the left half of the picture presents the artist to us as a self-portrait, painted with the aid of a mirror (hence appearing as though his paintbrush is in his left hand). Meanwhile the right half of the painting uses an exquisite grey-tone scale to depict a simple interior. It is in the correlation of the two, and observing Hammershøi as distinctly sitter and as artist, that Vad invites us to find harmony: ‘it would narrow down the experience unreasonably if we did not also see … a symbolic dimension in the self-portrait – but simultaneously one which is inseparable from the pictorial content. In the picture Hammershøi turns his back to the open door and the incident light; but the Hammershøi who painted the picture has given the door and the light just as great importance as his own figure. Again we see an ego with simple, natural dignity, which, far from asserting itself and putting itself in the centre, regards itself with a calm objective eye, side by side with the beauty of insignificant everyday things: a door, a door handle, a bare room.’ (P. Vad., ibid., 307).

Fig. 5 Peter Ilsted, Portrait of Vilhelm Hammershøi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fig. 6 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Self-Portrait, 1911, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

SELECTIONS FROM THE COLLECTION OF MICKEY CARTIN (LOTS 3, 20, 21 AND 22)

° *22

MICHELE PACE DEL CAMPIDOGLIO (VITORCHIANO 1625-1670 ROME)

A hound in a landscape

oil on canvas

55 √ x 62√ in. (141.8 x 159.7 cm.) with the coat of arms of Cardinal Flavio Chigi (centre, on the hound's collar)

£250,000-350,000

US$340,000-470,000

€300,000-410,000

PROVENANCE:

Cardinal Flavio Chigi (1631-1693), Rome. (Presumably) acquired by Arthur Gore, 6th Earl of Arran (1868-1958), Castle Gore, Ballina, and by descent to the following, Anonymous sale [The Property of a Noble Family]; Christie's, London, 6 July 2010, lot 9. with Fabrizio Moretti, London, where acquired by the present owner.

EXHIBITED:

New York, David Zwirner Gallery, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, 4 November-18 December 2021, unpaginated.

LITERATURE:

L. Trezzani, 'La natura morta romana nelle foto di Federico Zeri', La Natura morta di Federico Zeri, Bologna, 2015, pp. 192-3, fig. 21.

F. Petrucci, 'Iconologia e iconografia canina', in Cani in posa: Dall'antichità ad oggi, Milan, 2018, p. 46, fig. 44.

E. Gordon and S. Holmes, ed., Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, London, 2023, pp. 73 and 140.

Proudly delineated against a rolling landscape that resembles the Roman campagna, this magnificent hound was clearly highly prized by Cardinal Flavio Chigi, whose coat of arms is visible on the dog’s collar. This is not just a realistic portrayal of a beloved pet: the dog, whose vivid presence is here conveyed on a monumental scale, should be seen as a status symbol.

Born in Siena, Chigi moved to Rome in 1657, having been elected a cardinal by his uncle Fabio, who had become Pope Alexander VII in 1655. The eternal city offered huge scope to the highly educated cardinal to expand his patronage of the arts. The Chigi estate included the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, just outside Rome, which Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his pupil Carlo Fontana rebuilt for the family between 1664 and 1672. Flavio’s apartments on the ground floor of this sumptuous palace contained four further portraits of his greyhounds commissioned from Pace, which remain there to this day (see I. Faldi, 'I dipinti chigiani di Michelangelo Pace', Arte Antica e Moderna, 1966, pp. 144-8, nos. 346). In addition, the cardinal's accounts of 1665 and 1666 show payments made to Pace for no fewer than 12 canvases, with two greyhounds each, to be sent to his villa Versaglia in Formello.

The decoration of this country seat, inspired by the time Chigi had spent at Versailles at the court of Louis XIV in 1664, reflected the cardinal’s passion for hunting. Further portraits of dogs painted for the Chigi houses are listed and known, although none can be firmly identified with the present work (see, for instance, F. Petrucci, Le Stanze del Cardinale, exhibition catalogue, Ariccia/ Rome, 2003, pp. 94-7 and 150-2; F. Petrucci, Le collezioni berniane di Flavio Chigi, tra il Casino alle Quattro Fontane e la Villa Versaglia in C. Benocci, I Giardini Chigi, Siena, 2005, pp. 191-208).

Although the tradition of including pets, especially dogs, as a symbol of fidelity in portraiture extends back to the fifteenth century (a perfect example being the charming wire-haired terrier standing proudly between the couple in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 in the National Gallery, London), standalone canine portraiture did not flourish as a genre until the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Jacopo Bassano’s majestic Two hunting dogs tied to a stump (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. RF 1994 23), executed for count Antonio Zentani in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, stands as a cornerstone of the genre. A direct precedent, which may have been known to Pace, is Guercino's The Aldovrandi Dog (c.1625; Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum) which, as here, includes the coat of arms of the patron, Count Filippo Aldovrandi of Bologna, on the dog's collar. One of the most famous proponents of serial canine portraiture of the type commissioned by Cardinal Chigi was Louis XIV, though the latter's significantly post-date those of the former. Louis XIV's series of royal hunting dogs by Alexandre Desportes, the king's hunting painter, including works such as Diane and Blonde or the delightfully named Bonne, Nonne and Ponne (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. nos. 3911 and 3912), dates to the turn of the eighteenth century.

We are grateful to Prof. Francesco Petrucci, who endorsed the attribution to Pace prior to the painting's last appearance at auction in 2010, for his assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.

The present lot in its frame

GEORGE STUBBS, A.R.A. (LIVERPOOL 1724-1806 LONDON)

A prancing horse with two dogs, in a landscape signed 'Geo: Stubbs / pinxit 1791' (lower centre)

oil on canvas

40 x 49æ in. (101.6 x 126.7 cm.)

£800,000-1,200,000

US$1,100,000-1,600,000

€960,000-1,400,000

PROVENANCE:

with Arthur Ackermann and Son, London, by 1946. Walter Hutchinson (1887-1950); his sale (†), Christie's, London, 20 July 1951, lot 127, where acquired for 2,000 gns. by the following, with Leggatt Brothers, London, presumably from whom acquired by, The Viscounts Wimborne, Ashby St Ledgers Manor, Northamptonshire, and by descent to the present owner.

EXHIBITED:

London, Hutchinson House, National Gallery of British Sports and Pastimes, 1947, no. 141.

LITERATURE:

'Auctions', Die Weltkunst, XXI, 1 August 1951, p. 5.

T.P. Greig, 'In the Auction Rooms', The Connoisseur, CXXVIII, October 1952, p. 128.

B. Taylor, Animal Painting in England: from Barlow to Landseer, Baltimore, 1955, p. 64, pl. 21, as location unknown.

R. Fountain and A. Gates, Stubbs' Dogs: The Hounds and Domestic Dogs of the Eighteenth Century as seen through the Paintings of George Stubbs, London, 1984, pp. 103-4, no. 92, fig. 64.

J. Egerton, George Stubbs, Painter: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 635, under untraced paintings.

This imposing canvas showing a horse with two dogs in a landscape is a fine example of Stubbs' work from the early 1790s, a period of intense artistic activity in which he received a succession of important commissions from the Prince of Wales, later King George IV. These royal works - all executed on the same scale as the present canvas - witnessed some of the artist's most sophisticated compositions and did much for cementing his reputation as the leading animal painter of the age. Inaccessible to recent scholars of the artist’s work, the present picture has not appeared on the open market since the celebrated Hutchinson sale of sporting art at Christie’s in 1951.

Stubbs' highly engaging, almost rococo-like composition balances dynamism with the quiet atmosphere of rural peace and coexistence that marks his finest animal ‘conversation pieces’. The prancing horse and two dogs, executed with characteristic precision, are in deliberate contrast to the vaporous landscape, in which a stretch of water and distant hills lie beneath a great expanse of sky, the horizon line of which is punctuated only by the protagonist and an extravagant group of burdock leaves.

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The dog on the right of the composition, known in the eighteenth-century as a Pomeranian fox, is a breed that Stubbs had evidently studied carefully, no doubt largely prompted by the commissions he received from the Prince of Wales at the start of this decade. The Prince Regent, who was painted by Stubbs in the same year as the present canvas – riding along the bank of the Serpentine River in Hyde Park (London, Royal Collection; Egerton, op. cit., p. 536, no. 300) – inherited a passion for the spitz breed from his mother, Queen Charlotte. The future King ordered a picture of his favourite dog, Fino, a magnificent and immaculately groomed black and white Pomeranian, who completely upstages the accompanying King Charles Spaniel – appositely named Tiny – in the eponymous double portrait in the Royal Collection (Egerton, op. cit., p. 530, no. 295). In her entry for the double portrait, exhibited by Stubbs at the Royal Academy in 1791, Judy Egerton notes that the bleak mountainous backdrop, not unlike that in the present work, possibly alludes to the northern origins of the Spitz breed (ibid.). Fino would later reappear leaping up on his hind legs towards a startled coach horse in Stubbs' 1793 canvas The Prince of Wales' Phaeton (London, Royal Collection; Egerton, op. cit., p. 544, no. 306). It is surely no coincidence that Mary Robinson (1758-1800), the celebrated actress and writer, is shown with a Pomeranian in Gainsborough’s sumptuous fulllength (London, Wallace Collection; fig. 1), commissioned in 1781 by the Prince of Wales, with whom the sitter had a notoriously public affair. The breed’s popularity during this period is further attested to by Gainsborough’s earlier canvas depicting a Pomeranian Bitch and Puppy, painted in circa 1777 (London, Tate Britain).

Basil Taylor described this moment for Stubbs as ‘an Indian summer… comparable with the early years in London, when there must have always been a commissioned work in progress on his easel’ (Stubbs, London, 1971, p. 22). Taylor drew a further parallel with this formative period in the context of the artist’s ‘tone, colour and drawing’ at the start of the 1790s which, as with his output from the 1760s, betrays the influence of his practice in enamel, a technique

that became something of an obsession for Stubbs and, in turn, the source of an irreconcilable feud with the Royal Academy (ibid.). Indeed, it was in 1791 that Stubbs painted two oval portraits in that medium, executed on Wedgwood ceramic tablet, of the much maligned former Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings (1732-1818; Egerton, nos. 281 & 282), both of which were preceded that year by a version in oil (no. 280).

Judy Egerton was unable to inspect the present picture in preparation for her 2007 catalogue and, as a result, listed it in a section entitled 'Paintings by Stubbs reliably recorded but now untraced' (op. cit.) However, the picture had been included and reproduced in Animal Painting in England - From Barlow to Landseer, published in 1955 by Basil Taylor, the art historian who did more than any individual to revive Stubbs' reputation, culminating in his seminal 1971 catalogue of the artist's work. In 1959, Taylor met Paul Mellon, with whom he shared a deep passion for Stubbs and whose first acquisition, in 1936, had been the artist's Pumpkin with a Stable-Lad (1774; Egerton, no. 159), a work Mellon later described as 'still my favourite British Painting' (Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 1992, p. 280). Taylor would become Mellon's principal advisor in the formation of the latter's collection of British pictures, which includes the constellation of masterpieces by Stubbs now at the Yale Center for British Art (fig. 2).

The picture was bought by Walter Hutchinson, who founded the National Gallery of British Sports and Pastimes a year before his death in 1950. A publisher and printer, Hutchinson formed a remarkable collection of British and sporting pictures that were dispersed in a sale at Christie's in 1951. This included no fewer than twelve works by Stubbs, including the artist’s outstanding masterpiece Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath (c. 1765; Private collection), which fetched the exceptional sum of 12,000 guineas and subsequently sold in these Rooms, 5 July 2011, lot 12, for £22,441,250. In addition to an impressive number of works by Munnings, Hutchinson's sale also included portraits by both William Hogarth and Johann Zoffany, as well as Constable’s celebrated Stratford Mill (1820), now in the National Gallery, London.

Fig. 2 George Stubbs, Study for the Self-Portrait in Enamel, graphite on paper, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Fig. 1 Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs Mary Robinson, The Wallace Collection, London

MICHELE MARIESCHI (VENICE 1710-1743)

Venice: The Grand Canal with the Church of San Stae, with gilded gondolas in the foreground

oil on canvas

22¡ x 33Ω in. (56.8 x 85.1 cm.)

£150,000-250,000

US$210,000-340,000

€180,000-300,000

PROVENANCE:

with Leonard Koetser, London, from whom acquired on 7 November 1944 by the following, with Thomas Agnew & Sons, London, where acquired on 21 November 1944 by, The Viscounts Wimborne, Ashby St Ledgers Manor, Northamptonshire, and by descent to the present owner.

A younger contemporary of Canaletto, Marieschi is thought to have trained and practised as a set-designer before turning his attentions to capriccios and vedute, inspired by the example of Marco Ricci, Luca Carlevarijs and most notably Canaletto. He had established a reputation as a view painter by the mid1730s, adding lustre to the genre with his lively use of brushwork. His paintings are distinguished from those of Canaletto by their exaggerated perspective and more atmospheric palette. Few of his view pictures have early recorded provenance, with his only known patron being the great collector Field Marshall Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg (1661-1747).

This view on the Grand Canal is dominated at the centre by the white marble façade of the church of Sant’Eustachio (San Stae in local Venetian dialect), designed by Domenico Rossi and richly decorated with statuary by Giuseppe Torretto, Antonio Tarsia, Pietro Baratta and Antonio Corradini, which is flanked to the left by Palazzo Foscarini-Giovanelli and to the right by Palazzo Giustinian, then Contarini.

The composition relates closely to a painting in a private collection in Paris, which includes the same three magnificently gilded and decorated gondolas in the same positions in the water. When cataloguing the Paris picture, Ralph Toledano identified the two-headed eagle adorning the felze (cabin) as corresponding to the Giustinian coat of arms (Michele Marieschi: Catalogo ragionato, 2nd ed., Milan, 1995, p. 118, no. V. 41). A similar view with a wider perspective, also incorporating the gondolas, but this time in different positions, was offered for sale in Paris in 1912 and is now in a private collection (ibid. p. 120, no. V. 42). Toledano dated these works to the last phase of the artist’s life. When Filippo Pedrocco came to catalogue these same two works, he pointed out that the double-headed eagle was in fact the symbol of the imperial ambassador to Venice and that these works therefore likely commemorated the ‘entrance’ of the patriarch Francesco Antonio Correr in February 1735 (Michele Marieschi: La vita, l’ambiente, l’opera, Milan, 1999, pp. 239-40, nos. 19 and 20). Pedrocco linked these two works with two other paintings by Marieschi featuring the same golden gondolas – a view of the Rialto Bridge at Claydon House, National Trust (ibid., no. 17) and a view of the Bacino di San Marco in a private collection (ibid., no. 18) – believing them all to date to the same early moment of 1735.

Marieschi focused his energies exclusively on painting landscape and architecture, working in tandem with a number of different figure painters to complete the staffage in his vedute, including Gaspare Diziani, Francesco Simonini and Giovanni Antonio Guardi.

JACOPO NEGRETTI, CALLED PALMA IL VECCHIO (SERINA, NEAR BERGAMO C.1480-1528 VENICE)

Portrait of a Lady, bust-length, in a white shirt and red dress, holding a piece of fruit oil on canvas

23√ x 20¿ in. (60.7 x 51.2 cm.)

£70,000-100,000

US$95,000-130,000

€83,000-120,000

PROVENANCE:

(Probably) Recorded in the artist's studio at the time of his death in 1529, 'I quareto de un retrato de una d. de q. 2 in ca., con vesta de veludocremesin con un pomo in man [13]' (see Rylands 1992, op. cit., p. 350, no. 13).

Girolamo Manfrin (1742-1801), Venice, as 'Paris Bordone', and by descent to his son, Pietro Manfrin (d. 1833), as 'Paris Bordone', and by inheritance to his sister, Marchesa Giulia-Giovanna Manfrin-Plattis (d. 1848), as 'Paris Bordone', and by descent, acquired in 1868 by, Ivor Bertie Guest, 1st Baron Wimborne (1835-1914), and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

London, Royal Academy, Italian Art and Britain, 1960, no. 66, erroneously catalogued as on panel.

LITERATURE:

(Probably) P. Edwards, Inventario della Galleria Manfrin, 1794, MS.1032.18, SPV, no. 30, as 'Paris Bordone Ritratto, si crede del detto autore'.

Inventario e stima della Galleria Manfrin, 23 March 1834, MS. ASVe, Conservatoria del registro e tasse, Venice, no. 11, as 'Tela Paris Bordone, Ritratto di donna, 500,000'.

Inventory and Valuation of Pictures made from the Manfrin Collection at Venice, 1851, MS. NG72/48/2, National Gallery, London, no. 11, as 'Paris Bordone Ritratto di Donne', listed in 'Stanza Segnata B'.

Catalogo dei Quadri esistenti nella Galleria Manfrin in Venezia, Venice, 1856, no. 93, as 'idem [Ritratto] di Donna, Paris Bordone, Tela, 50 x 59'.

F. Zanotto, Nuovissima Guida di Venezia e delle Isole della sua Laguna, Venice, 1856, p. 343, as 'Ritratto della Violante figlia del Palma Vecchio - di Paris Bordone'.

A Catalogue of the Pictures at Canford Manor, Dorchester, 1888, p. 10, no. 17, as 'Paris Bordone'.

Masters in Art, Venetian School: Palma Vecchio, Boston, 1905, p. 41.

P. Rylands, Palma Il Vecchio: L'opera completa, Milan, 1988, pp. 41 and 213, no. 36, erroneously catalogued as on panel and in a private collection, Paris.

P. Rylands, Palma Vecchio, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 98 and 178, illustrated, erroneously catalogued as on panel and in a private collection, Paris.

G. Pavanello, ed., Gli Inventari di Pietro Edwards nella Biblioteca del Seminario Patriarcale di Venezia, Verona, 2006, p. 77.

P. Benussi, 'Documenti', in L. Borean, ed., La Galleria Manfrin a Venezia: L'ultima collezione d'arte della Serenissima, Udine, 2018, pp. 92, 106 and 128.

It is a testament to Palma il Vecchio’s assimilation of Venetian colorito that Vasari calls him ‘Venetian’, though he was in fact born near Bergamo on the terraferma. By March 1510, Palma was in Venice, where he must have studied works by Giovanni Bellini with close attention, likely with Bellini’s own student Andrea Previtali. His style subsequently evolved to challenge the young Titian who, after the death of Giorgione later that year and the departure of Sebastiano del Piombo for Rome in 1511, was the unrivalled painter of the younger generation in the city. Palma himself gained a considerable clientele in Venice and founded an artistic dynasty that survived for over a century.

The present painting is suffused with the sensuous sfumato so characteristic of Palma’s portraits. The golden apple in the sitter’s grasp associates her with Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty who won this object in the famed Judgement of Paris. The slightly knowing gleam in her eye hints at the divine irony of this moment of exchange which would ignite the Trojan War.

Though the sitter has sometimes been identified as the artist’s daughter Violante (Zanotto, op. cit., 1856), she is a type to which Palma often returned and which responds to the beauty standards of the period. Her long golden hair, fair skin, thinly arched brows, rounded dark eyes, small mouth, dimpled chin, plump white hands, broad shoulders and gently curving bosom were identified as prized features of beauty in the 1548 Delle bellezze delle donne (On the Beauty of Women) by the humanist Agnolo Firenzuola.

This picture is thought to have been in Palma’s studio at the time of his death. Though there is some discrepancy with the size of the work there recorded, that both the sumptuous red velvet of her dress and the apple in her hand are mentioned in the catalogue of his studio provides persuasive evidence to the presence of this work there (Rylands, op. cit., 1992). It later formed part of the renowned collection of more than 450 paintings amassed by the financier and tobacco magnate, Marchese Girolamo Manfrin, after he purchased Palazzo Venier (renamed Palazzo Manfrin) in Venice in 1787. Manfrin was advised by Giovanni Battista Mingardi and Pietro Edwards: the latter's manuscript list of the paintings compiled in 1794 includes a portrait tentatively attributed to Paris Bordone which is most likely identifiable with the present work (see Provenance and Literature). The collection passed by descent into the family until 1851, when a manuscript catalogue was prepared and negotiations began to sell it in its entirety. A group of works were sold five years later, but this portrait remained in the Manfrin Collection until 1868, when it was purchased by an ancestor of the present owner.

JACOPO BELLINI (VENICE 1400-1470/71)

Saint Benedict (?); and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: panels from a polyptych tempera and gold on panel 34¬ x 11º in. (87.9 x 28.6 cm.) a pair (2)

£800,000-1,200,000

US$1,100,000-1,600,000

€960,000-1,400,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) The Cistercian Monastery of San Tommaso, Torcello (please see entry). Private Collection, France.

Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, Monaco, 19 June 1994, lot 433, where acquired after the sale by the following, with Piero Corsini, New York and Monaco, where acquired in 2007 by the present owner.

LITERATURE:

A. Galli, 'L'"Annunciazione" in Sant'Alessandro e il problema degli inizi di Jacopo Bellini', in U. Spini, ed., Museo Bresciana: Studi e notizie dai Musei civici d'arte e storia (19911993), V, Brescia, 1995, p. 107, under note 1.

M. Boskovits and G. Fossaluzza, eds., La collezione Cagnola: i dipinti del XIII al XIX secolo, I, Busto Arsizio, 1998, p. 114.

M. Boskovits, Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Washington, 2003, pp. 90 and 93, no. 38.

M. Minardi, in M. Boskovits, ed., The Alana Collection, Newark, Delaware: Italian Paintings and Sculpture from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century, II, Florence, 2011, pp. 72-78, no. 11, illustrated.

The present lots showing the uncropped edges

The present lot showing the painted surfaces

Jacopo Bellini had an epicentral place in the development of painting in the mid-fifteenth century in north-eastern Italy. A pupil of Gentile da Fabriano, he was a very distinguished painter and a prodigious draughtsman in his own right and the father of both Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, who were both deeply indebted to him, as was his son-in-law, Andrea Mantegna. While only a couple of dozen pictures by him survive, almost three hundred compositional drawings of exceptional originality and distinction are divided between the Louvre and the British Museum. Venetian by birth, he received significant commissions there and in the major cities on the Venetian terraferma, Padua, Verona and Brescia, also working for the d’Este of Ferrara.

As was recognised by Everett Fahy when these panels surfaced in 1994, they are from the same altarpiece as three others in the Frances Lehman Loeb Centre at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York (fig. 1), which were correctly attributed to Jacopo Bellini by Miklós Boskovits in 1985 (M. Boskovits, 'Per Jacopo Bellini (postilla ad un colloquio)', Paragone, XXXVI, nos. 419-23, pp. 118-20). Colin Eisler (The Genius of Jacopo Bellini, New York, 1989, p. 518) considered that ‘the generalised, rather cursory treatment of many areas, especially the hands, suggests a workshop production’, but also admitted that such pictures ‘may have had some effect on Mantegna’s youthful works’ (ibid., p. 43). Fahy, whose connoisseurship was impeccable, endorsed Boskovits’ attribution. The taller of the three Poughkeepsie panels, Saint Jerome, was clearly the central element of the complex, with the flanking panels representing Saints Francis of Assisi and Anthony Abbot: all five saints stand on a continuous polychrome tiled floor, the foreshortening of which demonstrates that the Saints Benedict and Bernard were the lateral elements. Minardi (op. cit., 2011) plausibly suggests that there would have been an upper register with busts of saints flanking a Marian image, as in the Saint Jerome triptych by Giovanni d'Alemagna and Antonio Vivarini of 1441 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). He reasonably supposes that the

presence of the Saint Bernard, with his direct glance to the spectator, point to the altarpiece being a Cistercian commission. Mauro Minardi proposes San Tommaso dei Borgognoni at Torcello, a monastery of that order, the abbot of which was (from 1428 until 1472) Girolamo Trevisan – of a prominent Venetian family with strong links to the neighbouring island of Murano. Trevisan undertook a significant restoration of the abbey from 1442 onwards, which would hypothetically explain why his name saint had the central place in the altarpiece.

Jacopo Bellini’s interest in and understanding of perspective is expressed not only in the treatment of the pavement, but in the way the feet, and in some cases, the drapery of the saints project beyond the frontal step. Boskovits considered that the compositional layout recalls both Donatello’s altarpiece in the Basilica of Sant’ Antonio at Padua and Mantegna’s Saint Luke polyptych of 1453-4 in Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, and anticipated that of the four triptychs from Santa Maria della Carità (Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia), which he believes were commissioned from Jacopo Bellini between 1460 and 1464 and largely executed by his younger son, Giovanni. He considered that these panels and those at Poughkeepsie date ‘not too far distant from mid-century’ (Boskovits, op. cit., 2003, p. 90). Minardi observes that ‘the expressive delicacy and softness of modelling, the gracefulness with which the hands support their attributes, and the jagged articulation of the folds of the mantles’ are close to those of Jacopo’s Madonna and Child in the Brera, which is dated 1448; for him a date ‘not much later than 1450 is the most plausible’ (ibid., p. 76). What is remarkable about these and the associated panels is that although the patron evidently wished to have an altarpiece of a rather traditional kind, Jacopo Bellini endowed his saints with a physical plausibility that transcends the format of the trefoil-headed panels and anticipated in some respects the artistic priorities of his celebrated sons.

Fig. 1 Reconstruction of a dispersed altarpiece by Jacopo Bellini, St. Benedict (?), the present lot; St. Francis, St. Jerome and St. Anthony Abbot, Poughkeepsie (N.Y.), Vassar College Art Gallery, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center; St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the present lot

MATTIA PRETI (CALABRIA 1613-1699 VALLETTA)

Samuel anointing David oil on canvas

85¬ x 123 in. (217.5 x 312.5 cm.)

£600,000-800,000

US$810,000-1,100,000

€720,000-950,000

PROVENANCE:

Church of las Carmelitas Descalzos, Madrid, by 1772, until sold in 1786. Private collection, by 1987.

Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, New York, 12 January 1989, lot 101.

Anonymous sale [From a Private Collection, Miami]; Christie's, London, 6 July 1990, lot 64, where acquired by the present owner.

EXHIBITED:

New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery; Sarasota, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, A Taste for Angels: Neapolitan Painting in North America, 29 September 1987 - 13 March 1988, no. 4.

LITERATURE:

A. de Colmenares y Orgaz, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, Madrid, 1933, p. 44.

A. Ponz, Viaje de España: Seguido de los dos tomos del Viaje Fuera de España, 1772, Madrid, 1947, p. 483.

A. Perez Sanchez, Pintura italiana del siglo XVII en España, Madrid, 1965, p. 422.

A. Pelaggi, Mattia Preti ed il Seicento italiano col catalogo delle opere, Catanzaro, 1972, p. 71.

J. Colton, A Taste for Angels: Neapolitan Paintings in North America 1650-1750, New Haven, 1987, pp. 102-4, no. 4, illustrated.

M. Utili, Mattia Preti tra Roma, Napoli e Malta, exhibition catalogue, Naples, 1999, p. 53, illustrated.

J.T. Spike, Mattia Preti: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Florence, 1999, p. 371, no. 312.

K. Sciberras, Mattia Preti: Life and Works, Valletta, 2020, p. 306, no. 447.

This monumental canvas is a mature work by the great Italian Baroque painter, Mattia Preti, most likely datable to the first half of the 1670s once the artist had settled in Malta. Its subject is taken from the Old Testament (1 Samuel 16: 1-13) and depicts the prophet Samuel anointing David. According to the biblical account, the prophet had been tasked with finding a new king of Israel from among the seven sons of Jesse of Bethlehem. As Jesse’s sons were presented to Samuel, they were each rejected one by one. Finally, when the last had been cast aside, Samuel asked Jesse whether he had indeed seen all of his sons, '"There is still the youngest,” Jesse answered. “He is tending the sheep.”’ David was brought to Samuel, ‘He was glowing with health and had a fine appearance and handsome features. Then the Lord said, “Rise and anoint him; this is the one.”’ The young David kneels at the centre of the composition here, leaning towards Samuel who bends over slightly and pours oil from a horn upon the boy's head. David is dressed in ragged clothes with a simple sheepskin tied across his torso, indicating his humble status as a shepherd. Though David's arms are muscular and his body strong from manual labour, his soft features and rounded cheeks indicate his youth.

As observed by James Clifton at the time of this painting’s exhibition in 1987 (op. cit.), Preti must have encountered Paolo Veronese’s treatment of this subject, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (fig. 1). Veronese’s composition is harmonious and distinctly classical in style, with figures set out across the picture plane as if part of a classical frieze, and the view is more expansive, incorporating ancient ruins and an Arcadian landscape beyond. Preti’s representation, by contrast, is characteristically dynamic and tense, with life-size figures filling the entire picture field and leaving little room for an architectural or landscape setting. The varied, lively cast of characters fill the stage and are lit dramatically from above. The figure of Samuel appears to tower over David and the low viewpoint adopted by Preti in this picture places us - as viewers - on the stone floor alongside other kneeling and seated figures, as if we too are witnesses of the young shepherd's anointment. This effect is further enhanced by the repoussoir figures in the lower corners, the muscular man lower left gesturing inwards and the young mother lower right, her hand placed protectively on her child's shoulder, turning her back to us and leading our gaze inwards to David.

In an almost identically sized canvas formerly with Matthiesen Gallery, London and now in a private collection (Sotheby’s, New York, 24 January 2008, lot 104), Preti represented another scene from the life of the young king in his David playing the harp before Saul (fig. 2). In spite of their corresponding dimensions and related subject matter, the two paintings do not appear to have been conceived as pendants. David playing the harp before Saul has been dated to around 1668 by Spike, who places the present work slightly later in the first half of the 1670s (op. cit.). Keith Sciberras, to whom we are grateful, believes the work could date either from the late 1660s or early 1670s (private communication, May 2025). Spike compares the Samuel anointing David with Preti’s Canonization of Saint Catherine commissioned by a Maltese knight of the Piccolomini family for their chapel in the church of San Francesco, Siena, in 1672 (ibid., pp. 279-280, no. 216).

The success of the Piccolomini Saint Catherine led almost immediately to another prestigious Sienese commission – also stylistically comparable to the present canvas – this time for the city’s Duomo. In 1675, Preti’s altarpiece Saint Bernardino of Siena preaching was delivered from Malta and installed in the second altar of the Duomo’s right-hand transept (ibid., pp. 278-279, no. 215). Spike also links Samuel anointing David with the artist’s Death of Sophonisba of a similar date, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon (ibid. pp. 165-166, no. 80), which likewise bears the influence of Veronese.

Though born in Calabria, Mattia Preti is traditionally associated with the city of Naples and is celebrated as one of the most spirited painters of the Italian baroque. In reality, he spent much of his career beyond Naples but proliferated the Neapolitan style of painting wherever he worked. Around 1630, at the age of seventeen, the artist moved to Rome where he shared a room with his brother Gregorio, who is thought to have been Preti’s principal teacher. Initially, in the 1630s and 1640s, like many painters of that period, his style was deeply influenced by that of Caravaggio. Yet, by the time he returned to Naples in 1653, his work had absorbed the influence of the Venetian masters and he intertwined the theatrical grandeur of painters such as Veronese and Tintoretto with the intense chiaroscuro and dramatic naturalism of his earlier Caravaggesque works. He became a Knight of Grace in the Order of Saint John and moved to Malta around 1660. There he painted a spectacular cycle of paintings for Valletta’s Saint John’s Co-Cathedral, depicting scenes from the life and martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist (ibid., pp. 312-326, no. 255). He painted prolifically, receiving prestigious commissions from across Europe and remained in Malta until his death in 1699.

Fig. 1 Paolo Caliari, il Veronese, The Anointment of David, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 2 Mattia Preti, David playing the harp before Saul, Private collection

ATTRIBUTED TO MICHAELINA WAUTIER (MONS 1604-C. 1689 BRUSSELS)

Portrait of a gentleman, half-length, in a black cloak oil on canvas

27 x 23º in. (68.5 x 59 cm.)

£60,000-80,000

US$81,000-110,000

€72,000-95,000

PROVENANCE:

An English or American owner for whom Gustav Glück supplied a certificate in English as by Anthony van Dyck, 4 February 1933 (copy available upon request). with Paul Larsen, by December 1941.

Acquired by the father of the present owner in circa 1955, as 'Anthony van Dyck'.

LITERATURE:

G. Bernard Hughes, ‘Sir Anthony Vandyck’, Apollo, XXXIV, December 1941, p. 151, illustrated, as by ‘Sir Anthony van Dyck’.

This impressive Portrait of a gentleman testifies to the consummate skill of one of the most exceptional female painters of the seventeenth century — Michaelina Wautier — an artist whose oeuvre has only recently begun to receive the attention it so rightly deserves. Though Wautier turned her brush to all genres, including history painting and still life, it is in her portraits and genre scenes that the artist's lively freshness and observational accuracy find their fullest expression. Her powerful depictions invite comparisons with some of the most outstanding seventeenth-century painters, including Anthony van Dyck, to whom the present work was previously misattributed. Indeed, the infrequent

references to Michaelina in subsequent centuries note her particular talent as a portrait painter. The nineteenth-century German art historian Georg Kasper Nagler, for example, wrote that she ‘made herself known…through portraits’ (Neues Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, XXII, Munich, 1852, p. 101). As far as can be discerned from the historical record, the production of portraits formed an integral part of Wautier’s activity as an artist from the beginning of her career, with her earliest identifiable work being the Portrait of Andrea Cantelmo, known today exclusively through a 1643 engraving by Paulus Pontius, and her first extant signed and dated painting, the Portrait of a Commander in the Spanish Army from 1646 (Brussels, Les Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts).

The present painting showcases Wautier’s remarkable talent for capturing the personality of her sitters and can be dated to the latter 1650s, when the artist showed evident engagement with the works of van Dyck and Rubens. Our sitter’s introspective gaze, directed away from the viewer, imbues him with a noble dignity, despite his status remaining elusive. With his mane of auburn hair and pose against the horizon of a cloud-filled sky, the portrait also finds semblance in a work by Michaelina’s elder brother Charles: the Portrait of a man of 1656 (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium; fig. 1), similar in both composition and pensive tenor. Yet, as Katlijne van der Stighelen has noted, they could not have been painted by the same artist, finding the present sitter’s heroic expression and pose very typical of Michaelina, together with the handling of the physiognomy and the costume (after first-hand inspection; private communication, September 2004).

Wautier lavished evident attention on rendering the nuances of the sitter’s skin and features with exceptionally free brushwork, with the versatile handling of paint speaking to a wide range of influences on her practice. Nothing specific is known about her training. Newly discovered archival documents show that she was born and baptised in Mons in 1604; as an unmarried woman, it is likely that she remained there to care for her parents, at least until her mother’s death in 1638. There is evidence of her being active as a painter in Brussels from circa 1640 onwards, an opportunity that was open to her thanks to her brother, Charles, who was then living and working in the town. However, given the lack of contemporary documentary sources, Wautier’s works provide the only clues regarding her artistic training. While she may well have obtained some degree of tutoring training from her brother, it is clear that she equally drew eclectically from sources as disparate as sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian paintings and Michael Sweerts, who had set up a drawing academy in Brussels in 1656 following his return from Rome. Indeed, echoes can be found in the present portrait of Sweerts's Self-Portrait of circa 1656 (Oberlin, Allen Memorial Art Museum). By this time, Michaelina must have already established herself as one of Brussels' leading painters: the 1659 inventory of the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who, as Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, was resident in Brussels between 1647 and 1656, includes four paintings by the artist (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), the only works by a female painter included in this illustrious collection.

We are grateful to Professor Katlijne Van der Stighelen for her assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.

Fig.1 Charles Wautier, Portrait of a man, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

PIETER HERMANSZ. VERELST (DORDRECHT 1618-C. 1678 ?)

Head of a boy

signed with initials and dated 'P.VE. : 1648' (lower left, 'VE' in ligature) oil on panel

14Ω x 13 in. (36.5 x 33 cm.)

£150,000-250,000

PROVENANCE:

Anonymous sale; Lepke, Berlin, 29 March 1927, lot 55. Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 13 December 2000, lot 49, where acquired on behalf of the present owner (£212,750).

US$210,000-340,000

€180,000-300,000

This hitherto unpublished panel occupies a unique place in the oeuvre of Pieter Verelst, whose output largely consisted of Dutch and Italianate genre scenes and more formal single-figure portraits inspired by Rembrandt's work of the 1630s. Verelst studied in Dordrecht, perhaps under Benjamin Gerritsz. Cuyp, and is recorded there as a pupil in the guild in 1638. In 1643, he moved to The Hague, where he was to remain for the next twenty years before falling into debt and seemingly abandoning painting in circa 1670.

During the seventeenth century, artists increasingly sought to capture the youthful features of children studied from life, rather than to define their sitters through the conventions of adult portraiture. This engaging, perceptively painted portrait of a young boy is a beautiful example of the care and sensitivity that emerged in the genre of child portraiture during this period. The tender observation of the boy's features and the intimacy of the scale suggest that the painting may have held a deep personal significance for the artist, with the spontaneity and naturalness of its rendering intimating that he was painted from life.

While the boy’s hair and clothes are painted with the swift, summary strokes of a sketch, the features of his face are more focused and drawn in greater detail, emitting the great psychological complexity of a finished portrait. Verelst captures the tones of his skin in smooth brushstrokes, as if endeavouring to record an exact moment in time, with a tenderness that suggests a true affection for his subject. While the boy’s identity is unknown, his age may accord with that of Verelst’s eldest son, Herman, who, born in 1641, could have been depicted here in 1648 at the age of seven (and who, together with his brothers Simon Pietersz. and Johannes, went on to become painters themselves). The sitter also bears a strong resemblance to a similarly conceived picture dated 1643 (sold in these Rooms, 2 July 2013, lot 8), raising the possibility that the two pictures are of the same boy, painted five years apart. No other such studies by the artist are known.

BALTHASAR VAN DER AST (MIDDELBURG 1593/4-1657 DELFT)

Irises, roses, fritillaries and forget-me-nots in a Wanli vase with two shells and a beetle on a ledge signed and dated '·B·vander·Ast·1622·' (lower right, on the ledge, strengthened) oil on copper

9¡ x 6√ in. (23.6 x 17.4 cm.)

£200,000-300,000

US$270,000-400,000

€240,000-360,000

PROVENANCE: with Leonard Koetser, London, 1957. Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 12 December 1980, lot 27. with Galerie De Jonckheere, Paris and Brussels, by 1981, where acquired by the present owner in circa 1987.

Balthasar van der Ast was the pupil and brother-in-law of Ambrosius Bosschaert I, who, following his arrival in Middelburg in circa 1585, introduced the Flemish tradition of still-life painting into Dutch art. Having absorbed the influences of his master, van der Ast broadened Bosschaert’s pictorial repertoire to incorporate a more diverse range of objects, including a greater number and variety of shells and insects, as exemplified by the present painting.

A bouquet of three irises, a pair of roses and two snakeshead fritillaries with forget-me-nots in a blue and white vase of the Wanli period, named after the Ming Dynasty Emperor who ruled China from 1572 to 1620, fitted with gilt mounts sits between a beetle and two shells on a simple wooden ledge. Such a fragile and costly piece of porcelain would have been imported to the Netherlands by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), whose second largest chamber was in Middelburg, where van der Ast was born and lived until 1615. The artist employed a vase with comparable, though not identical, motifs in several further works datable to the same year as the present painting, including one last seen with Galerie De Jonckheere in 1994 (see S. Segal, ‘Still-life Painting in Middelburg’, Masters of Middelburg, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1984, p. 53, fig. 20) and another dated 1622 in the P. & N. de Boer Foundation, Amsterdam.

As with so much in van der Ast’s work, the artist appears to have adopted this motif from his master, with paintings like the still life of circa 1619-20 formerly in the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty (sold Christie’s, New York, 18 October 2023, lot 84 for $529,200) likely serving as inspiration. Similarly, the use of the central iris at the top of the longitudinal axis and the dragonfly who deftly sits atop it recur in Bosschaert’s work, including in a painting formerly in the collection of Ferdinand Stuyck in Antwerp (see L.J. Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty: Painters of flowers and fruit, Leigh-on-Sea, 1960, p. 61, no. 18, plate 12). However, the use of three different varieties of irises in one bouquet does not readily find parallels in the elder artist’s oeuvre and confirms the degree to which van der Ast mediated and expounded upon his master’s designs.

TIZIANO VECELLIO, CALLED TITIAN (PIEVE DI CADORE C. 1485/90-1576 VENICE)

Portrait of a nobleman, seated before a window signed 'TITIANI / OPVS' and 'TICIANVS F' (centre left, the latter now indistinct) oil on canvas

47¡ x 38º in. (120.3 x 97.2 cm.)

£3,000,000-5,000,000

US$4,100,000-6,700,000

€3,600,000-6,000,000

PROVENANCE:

Anonymous sale [The Property of a Gentleman]; Sotheby's, London, 24 March 1976, lot 64.

Anonymous sale [The Property of a Gentleman]; Sotheby's, London, 8 April 1981, lot 60. with Colnaghi, New York, by 1982. with Harari & Johns Ltd, London, by 1989. Private collection.

with Hall & Knight Ltd., New York, from whom acquired in 1998 by, James O. Fairfax AC (1933–2017), New South Wales, from whom acquired privately through Christie's in 2018 by the present owner.

EXHIBITED:

Sydney, National Gallery of New South Wales, long-term loan (lent by James Fairfax).

LITERATURE:

R. Beresford and P. Raissis, The James Fairfax Collection of Old Master Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Sydney, 2003, pp. 194-197, no. 57, illustrated. P. Humfrey, Titian: The Complete Paintings, London, 2007, p. 269, no. 202, illustrated, as Titian, with possible workshop collaboration.

Titian was arguably the greatest portrait painter of the sixteenth century and unquestionably the most influential: he had an indelible influence on Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Diego Velázquez, and his works helped establish a tradition of grand portraiture that endured at least until the generation of John Singer Sargent. Notwithstanding Titian's success in painting religious and mythological subjects, portraiture makes up about a third of his oeuvre. Harold Wethey, author of the 1971 catalogue raisonné, classified over 100 portraits as autograph works by Titian, though we know from written sources and copies of lost originals that this number was originally much higher. The artist was responsible for creating prototypes for official court portraits, but he also presented his sitters with humanity. Titian's keen sense of observation and sensitive portrayal of a subject's physiognomy and personality led him to being highly sought-after as a portraitist.

This distinguished signed portrait was unknown until its discovery in 1976, when it first appeared at auction. The sitter's identity remains elusive but he was clearly a person of considerable wealth, for Titian commanded high prices for his pictures, even early on in his career. The young man’s understated elegance and seated pose, typically the preserve of popes, ecclesiastics or rulers, point to the subject’s apparent status. He has a lively expression and Titian animates the seated pose by turning the man’s head towards someone or something outside of the picture space. The dantesca chair on which he sits – with its fringed dark-green velvet seat and back-rest secured by large gold studs – may have been a prop in Titian’s workshop, for it appears in several other portraits by the artist dating from the early 1550s; see, for example, his Portrait of Lodovico Beccadelli (fig. 1; Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi) and Portrait of Filippo Archinto, Archbishop of Milan (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), both of which have similarly carved rosettes in the volute hand-pieces of the chair’s curved arms.

A concrete identification for the nobleman in this portrait has yet to be found, despite Titian providing us with visual clues. The inclusion of a ship in full sail on choppy waters, visible through the window aperture, must surely refer to the sitter’s occupation or source of wealth. By the sixteenth century, Venice had reached its apogee as one of the leading mercantile powers in Europe, emerging as a leading producer of luxury goods such as fabrics, metalwork and glassware. The Venetian Republic had, from its early history, maintained close connections with the East and these established trade routes allowed the city to become the point for goods to pass between Western Europe and the Middle and Far East (though by the beginning of the century, the spice trade, which had previously been one of the Republic’s most lucrative, had begun to wane with the restrictions imposed by the Ottoman Empire). The inclusion of the galleon in Titian’s portrait therefore indicates that the sitter was involved in the Republic’s mercantile affairs. Over an embroidered black-velvet doublet with slashed sleeves he wears a black silk over-gown trimmed with brown fur. The jewelled gold ring on the young man's little finger is seen in other male portraits by Titian, such as the Portrait of Daniele Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquileia (c. 1545; Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado) or his much earlier Portrait of an Elderly Man (c. 1511; Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst). The ring, together with the crumpled handkerchief on his lap, may indicate the sitter’s connection to a woman; perhaps he is in mourning, and his sidelong glance could also be significant.

This portrait shares a number of compositional similarities with Titian’s Portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere, Duchess of Urbino (c. 1536-37; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; fig. 2), in particular the placement of the sitter within the picture space. In both portraits, Titian places his subject in threequarter-length pointing left (though the young man’s head pivots to the right),

Fig. 2 Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian, Portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Luisa Ricciarini / Bridgeman Images

Fig. 1 Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian, Portrait of Bishop Ludovico Beccadelli, 1552, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Bridgeman Images

The present lot in its frame

seated in a dantesca chair before a plain wall. To the left, a window breaks the uniformity of the background and gives a receding view of a landscape or, in the case of the Portrait of a Nobleman, a seascape. The portrait of the Duchess of Urbino incorporates a more conspicuous number of details, including a small, ornately-crafted clock and a spaniel resting on a draped table beneath the window frame. She is also luxuriously dressed, as is to be expected of the wife of a ruler. The young man here cuts a stylish figure in clothing that is both expensive and restrained. His portrait is less square in format than that of the Duchess of Urbino and is more tightly cropped around the figure, focusing our attention on the sitter himself. An old x-ray reveals that Titian had originally planned a draped curtain before the window opening – sweeping diagonal lines are visible in the underlayers to the right, behind the figure – and, by removing it, the artist placed greater emphasis on the sitter’s lifelike head (fig. 3; reproduction from Beresford and Raissis, op. cit., p. 196).

The picture’s fine state of preservation allows the viewer to appreciate Titian's painterly technique and the contrasting levels of finish across the canvas. The sitter’s head and hands are confidently painted, with the flesh tones built up through deftly applied highlights and shadows. The bridge of the sitter’s nose is defined by a few assured strokes of white paint and the near eye enlivened by dabs of thick white impastoed paint. Similarly, the black costume – so characteristic of the artist – is carefully described with the depiction of the different textures and weights of fabrics: the sheen of the black silk over-gown is juxtaposed with the softer, duller black of the embroidered velvet sleeves of the doublet beneath. The rich stitching of both sleeves is central in defining the spatial depth of the design and the proportions of the sitter’s arms. The fine lace of the white cuffs is deliberately offset by the brilliantly free handling of the handkerchief, accentuated against the black of the young man's overgown. Here, the artist employs a looser style of painting, using freer and more expressive brushwork, anticipating the painterly elegance of his later style. These qualities of prestezza (quickness) and non finito became increasingly popular among cultivated patrons, collectors and connoisseurs as a painterly representation of the gentlemanly virtue of sprezzatura (a kind of studied carelessness and effortless ease), as described by Baldassare Castiglione in his influential Book of the Courtier published in 1528 (see J. Dunkerton and M. Spring, ‘Titian after 1540: Technique and Style in his Later Works’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XXXVI, 2015, p. 29). The walls are broadly painted and the seascape demonstrates the same lightness of touch as that in Titian’s Portrait of Doge Francesco Venier (1554-56; Madrid, Museo ThyssenBornemisza), where a boat appears to be burning in the distance.

As with much of Titian’s oeuvre, there has been some discussion as to the portrait’s dating and the extent to which the studio might have participated. Peter Humfrey, author of the 2007 monograph on the artist, was only able to see the portrait in the original in 2017 and considers the work to be autograph, with some studio assistance in the lesser areas (private communication, 2017 and 2025). Others who have examined the painting at first hand include the following: Paul Joannides, who previously believed that the portrait may have been painted around 1540 and reworked later - an opinion he subsequently revised to the picture being ‘substantially’ by Titian in or around 1550, though he is inclined to ascribe the setting and seascape to the studio (private communication, 2017); Antonio Mazzotta, for whom the portrait is entirely autograph, compares the nobleman’s head to some of the portraits in The Vendramin Family venerating a Relic of the True Cross (c.1540-45; London, National Gallery) and thus dates it to the mid-1540s, though he does not exclude the possibility that it may have been painted around 1550 (private communication, May 2025); Giorgio Tagliaferro, who endorses the attribution and proposes a date in the 1540s, notes that – though somewhat uneven in quality – the accomplished highlights on the eyes and hands are characteristic of Titian (private communication, 2017 and May 2025); and Nicholas Penny, who accepts the autograph status of the head, hands and the seascape, believes that much of the rest is by the studio (private communication, 2017

and May 2025). Even with studio assistance in the lesser parts of the picture, there is no question that the portrait would have left Titian’s studio as an autograph work. The presence of two signatures also attests to this: an earlier one, ‘TICIANVS F’ (remnants of which are visible beneath the window’s framing element), is in the form the artist habitually used and was likely suppressed by Titian following his alteration of the wall. The signature that is visible today, ‘TITIANI/OPVS’, is unusual in form but appears on another picture by Titian, the Portrait of Fabritius Salvaresio (1558; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), suggesting perhaps that this Portrait of a Nobleman was made at a similar date.

This portrait was in the collection of James Oswald Fairfax AC (1933–2017), a passionate and discerning connoisseur, whose interest in the fine and decorative arts spanned eras, cultures and continents. The great-grandson of the founder of the Sydney Morning Herald and Chairman of publishers John Fairfax Ltd. for a decade (from 1977 to 1987), James was educated in Sydney, Melbourne, and then at Balliol College, Oxford. His kindness and generosity extended to artists, collectors and amateurs, and not least to public institutions: among his many generous bequests to Australian museums were important works by Rubens, Ingres, Canaletto and Watteau, given to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Fig. 3 X-ray of the present lot, reproduction from Beresford and Raissis, op. cit., p. 196.

TADDEO GADDI

(FLORENCE C. 1320-1366)

Saint Matthew - pinnacle to the San Giovanni Fuorcivitas Polyptych

tempera on gold ground panel, shaped top, in an engaged frame 24¿ x 10 in. (61.3 x 25.5 cm.)

£400,000-600,000

US$540,000-810,000

€480,000-710,000

PROVENANCE:

Commissioned as part of a polyptych for the church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Pistoia. Private collection, America, from whom acquired in 1949 by, Willard B. Golovin (1882-1974), New York; (†), Sotheby's, New York, 23 January 2003, lot 61, when acquired by the present owner.

LITERATURE:

R. Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, Section IV: Andrea di Cione, I, New York, 1962, p. v, no. 16.

K. Steinweg, 'Zwei Predellen Tafeln des Taddeo Gaddi', Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XI, 1963, pp. 194-6 and 200, fig. 1.

M. Cämmerer-George, Die Rahmung der Toskanischen Altarbilder im Trecento, Strasbourg, 1966, pp. 114 and 115.

P.P. Donati, Taddeo Gaddi, Florence, 1966, p. 38.

M. Chiarini, ed., Dipinti Restaurati della Diocesi di Pistoia, Florence, 1968, pp. 4, 5 and 7.

R. Offner, in H.B.J. Maginnis, ed., A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. Supplement: A Legacy of Attributions, New York, 1981, p. 70.

F. Zeri and M. Natale, Dipinti toscani e oggetti d'arte dalla collezione Vittorio Cini, Vicenza, 1984, p. 7.

A. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné, Columbia and London, 1982, pp. 5, 159-161 and 166, fig. 19-13, illustrated.

E.S. Skaug, Punch marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico: Attribution, Chronology and Workshop Relationships in Tuscan Panel Painting with Particular Consideration to Florence, c. 1330-1340, Oslo, 1994, I, p. 93; II, punch chart 5.2.

M.S. Frinta, Punched Decoration on Late Medieval Panel and Miniature Painting, I, Prague, 1998, pp. 131 and 517.

S. Chiodo, 'Una tavola ritrovata e qualche proposta per Taddeo Gaddi,' Arte Cristiana, LXXXIX, 2001, pp. 249 and 252-254, fig. 6.

A. Labriola, in M. Boskovits, ed., The Alana Collection, Newark, Delaware, USA: Italian Paintings from the 13th to 15th Century, Florence, 2009, I, pp. 199-204, no. 35.

Taddeo Gaddi’s Saint Matthew originally formed part of the uppermost register of a polyptych commissioned for the high altar of the church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Pistoia. Shortly after 1348, the Pistoian church’s operaii made their first payment for the altar to the Florentine painter, Alesso d’Andrea, but the artist disappeared from all records shortly thereafter, presumably having been claimed by the Black Death (A. Labriola, op. cit., p. 200). Seeking a new artist, the church drew up a list of the foremost painters in all of Florence and Siena. First among those listed was Taddeo Gaddi, who was swiftly engaged to execute the ambitious commission (A. Chiappelli, ‘Di una tavola dipinta da Taddeo Gaddi…’, Bullettino storico pistoiese, II, 1990, pp.1-6; U. Procacci, ‘Buonaccorso di Cino…’, Giotto e il suo tempo, Florence, 1971, pp. 360-66; A. Ladis, op. cit., p. 257). Payments to Gaddi are recorded until 1353, by which time it seems likely the altarpiece had been completed and installed.

Gaddi depicted Saint Matthew seated on a modest wooden stool, dressed in a shimmering, golden tunic and purple mantle that falls heavily over his knees, folding over at the shoulder to reveal a crimson lining and fine, golden trim. Before him kneels his attribute, the angel, upon whose outstretched wings rests the open book in which the saint writes. In his right hand he holds a pen and in his left a scraper for scratching errors from the parchment. Though his hands are poised as if mid-sentence, the saint looks up from his writing, presumably towards the Madonna and Christ Child in the central panel. The figure is set neatly within a trefoil arch, with a band of six-petalled rosettes on a granulated gold ground and rows of tiny round punches along its interior border. The shoulders of the panel, along with its pointed Gothic gable, are decorated with rows of small roundels with a circular punch in the centre and with delicate leaves, scrolling on a granulated ground. Erling S. Skaug notes that decoration of this kind on granulated ground is characteristic of works from Gaddi’s full maturity (op. cit.).

Modified from Alesso d’Andrea’s initial designs, Taddeo Gaddi’s finished altarpiece comprised a central Madonna and Child enthroned with cherubim, flanked at left by Saints James the Greater (patron of Pistoia) and John the Evangelist (the church’s eponymous saint) and at right by Saints Peter and John the Baptist. Atop the principal panels were two upper registers: above the central Madonna (which stands head and shoulders above the lateral panels) is an Annunciation which was in turn surmounted by a Crucifixion; immediately above the four lateral saints were double busts of the Apostles which in turn were surmounted by pinnacles depicting the four Evangelists. A predella made up of five panels then ran the length of the altarpiece beneath. The principal panels and their first upper register today remain in situ in the church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas (fig. 1), but the predella and the uppermost gables – the present Saint Matthew included – were removed at some point and separated from the rest of the complex. The direction of the present subject’s gaze suggests the Matthew pinnacle would have surmounted the leftmost panel, sitting atop the full-length standing image of Saint James the Greater.

Richard Offner offered a first attempt at reconstructing the original altarpiece in 1921, identifying the Saint John the Evangelist, at that time in the Philip J. Gentner collection, Worcester, MA and now in an Italian private collection, as one of the missing pinnacles and dating the complex as a whole to 1350 (R. Offner, ‘Un San Giovanni Evangelista nella collezione Gentner’, L’Arte, XXIV, 1921, pp. 118-122). Saint John the Evangelist mirrors this Saint Matthew

in composition, with the saint similarly using the outstretched wings of his attribute - in this case an eagle - as a lectern, and looking inward and down at the same angle, but facing left. The Saint John would in that case have surmounted the rightmost panel, directly above the full-length standing image of Saint John the Baptist. Unlike the present panel, however, Saint John the Evangelist is missing its original gabled framing element with its beautiful punch work.

In 1962, Offner reunited the present Saint Matthew, then in the Golovin collection, New York, with the rest of the altarpiece, and proposed that the central pinnacle might have been a God the Father or Trinity (op. cit.). In 1964, Klara Steinweg then proposed that two panels in the Fondazione Cini collection, Venice, representing Saint John the Evangelist and the poisoned chalice and Saint John the Evangelist taken up into heaven, may have formed the rightmost panels of the predella (op. cit.). While Andrew Ladis questioned the relationship of the Cini panels to the Pistoia polyptych, Offner and Steinweg’s partial reconstruction has been accepted by most scholars; Pier Paolo Donati, Monika Cämerer-George, Alessandro Conti, Federico Zeri, Mauro Natale and Sonia Chiodo among them (op. cit.). Returning to the polyptych’s reconstruction in 2001 (op. cit.), Chiodo identified a Crucifixion in a private collection as the missing pinnacle to the central panel of the complex. The gables depicting the Evangelists Mark and Luke and three panels of the predella remain unaccounted for and have yet to be identified.

Fig. 1 Taddeo Gaddi, Virgin and Child with Saints, the principal panels of the polyptych in the Chiesa di San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Pistoia © Bridgeman Images

CORNELIS JOHNSON VAN CEULEN I (LONDON 1593-1661 UTRECHT)

Portrait of King Charles I (1600-1649), bust-length, in a painted oval signed and dated ‘C. J. / fecit 1632.’ (lower right) oil on panel

30Ω x 24º in. (77.4 x 61.5 cm.)

£100,000-150,000

US$140,000-200,000

€120,000-180,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) Painted for Edward Barrett, 1st Lord Barrett of Newburgh (1581-1645), of Belhus, Aveley, Essex and Smithfield, London, and by descent to, Sir Thomas Barrett Lennard (1853-1923), Belhus, Aveley, Essex; his sale, Alfred Savill & Sons, on the premises, 15 May 1923 (=6th day), lot 879, where acquired by the grandmother of the present owner, and by descent.

EXHIBITED:

Birmingham, Museum and Art Gallery, Catalogue (with notes) of the Collection of Paintings in Oil and Watercolours by Living and Deceased Artists, 1888, no. 169 (lent by Sir Thomas Barrett Lennard).

Brighton, Public Art Galleries, Loan Collection of Paintings in oil and watercolours, 1902, no. 151 (lent by Sir Thomas Barrett-Lennard).

LITERATURE:

T. Barrett-Lennard, An account of the families of Lennard and Barrett, Compiled largely from original documents, Printed for Private circulation, 1908, p. 593.

A. J. Finberg, ‘A Chronological List of Portraits by Cornelius Johnson, or Jonson’, The Tenth Volume of the Walpole Society, Oxford, 1922, p. 23, no. 56, pl. XL, incorrectly catalogued as dated ‘1633’.

K. Hearn, Cornelius Johnson, London, 2015, p. 24.

This dignified portrait on panel is one of only two signed life-size likenesses of the King painted by Cornelis Johnson. Testament to the rich culture of artistic exchange that occurred at the court of Charles I, it was created against the backdrop of one of the most thrilling chapters of English portraiture.

Following a successful career in London, Johnson was appointed ‘picturedrawer’ to the King in 1632, the same year this portrait was completed. Also in 1632, Anthony van Dyck returned to London and was employed as ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary’ to Charles I, initiating an explosive shift in the visual culture and patronage of the Stuart court. Van Dyck absorbed the majority of royal commissions, in lieu of Johnson and his contemporary Daniel Mytens, who had previously been called upon for portraits of the King and his family. Van Dyck’s first commission following his appointment was a group portrait. This monumental work, known as ‘The Greate Peece’, hung prominently at Whitehall Palace (Windsor Castle, Royal Collection) and was one of a group of paintings by the artist that revolutionised portraiture in England, combining an age-old visual statement on the power and lineage of the royal family with a novel and informal domesticity (see fig. 1 for a Studio variant). In response, Johnson adopted elements of van Dyck’s painterly models to create his own original and distinguished portraits of the royal family.

The present work appears to have been directly modelled on the King’s likeness in ‘The Great Peece’. Although not painted from life, this portrait is not a straightforward copy. Johnson appropriates the general design of the head, but departs from van Dyck's painting to delicately describe the detail of the sitter's hair and adapt the costume, where we see his hand clearly in the characteristic meticulousness of the lace collar and black satin doublet, framed by a feigned oval. Close analysis reveals that the blue ribbon with Lesser George and Star of the Order of the Garter were added later, possibly by the artist himself. Without these conspicuous trappings of royalty, the portrait would have appeared more intimate and human. This was possibly at the request of the presumed patron, Sir Edward Barrett, a friend of the King’s favourite, The Duke of Buckingham. Barrett was knighted by James I in 1608, and given a Scottish Peerage by Charles I in 1627. A year later, in 1628, he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, and from 1629 until his death in 1644, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

This is not an isolated example of Johnson assimilating van Dyck; the latter’s influence on a small-scale group of portraits of the royal family painted by Johnson in the 1630s has been previously noted (Hearn, op. cit., pp. 22-29), including a painting of Charles II, which also draws on the composition of ‘The Great Peece’. In each case, Johnson appears to have sought initial inspiration for the design of his painting from van Dyck, adapting it to suit his own style. It is interesting to note that this exchange of inspiration appears to have travelled both ways; as Karen Hearn has indicated, van Dyck adopted conceits from Johnson’s work in his own portraiture (op. cit., p. 33). The other known life-size portrait of Charles I by Johnson is a full-length, signed and dated 1631 (Derbyshire, Chatsworth). It is clearly based on a type by Mytens, providing further evidence of the artistic collaborations and cross-pollination at the Stuart court (see O. Millar, ‘An Attribution to Cornelius Johnson Reinstated’, The Burlington Magazine, XC, November 1948, pp. 322-323).

We are grateful to Karen Hearn for her assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.

Fig. 1 Studio of Anthony van Dyck, The Great Peece, The Royal Hospital Chelsea, London

JAN BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER (ANTWERP 1601-1678)

Roses, parrot tulips, narcissi, a lily, a delphinium, borage, moss roses, forget-me-nots, viola and other flowers in a pewter vase, with a strawberry sprig and a fly on a wooden ledge

oil on panel

18æ x 14º in. (47.8 x 36 cm.)

£250,000-350,000

US$340,000-470,000

€300,000-420,000

PROVENANCE:

Käthe Ostner (according to an inscription on the reverse). Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 6 December 1989, lot 83. with Galerie de Jonckheere, Paris, by 1990, where acquired by the present owner in circa 1995.

EXHIBITED:

Osaka, Nabio Museum of Art; Tokyo, Tokyo Station Gallery; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, 20 April-28 October 1990, no. 45 (entry by Sam Segal).

The eldest son of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Jan the Younger was born in Antwerp in 1601 and taught to paint by his father. He went to Italy in 1622 but returned to Antwerp in 1625 following the sudden death of his father and three sisters from a cholera outbreak. Much of Jan the Younger’s work continued the tradition established by his father, though he also made paintings that, to a greater or lesser degree, had shaken off his father’s influence. After 1651, he spent long periods in Paris, where his work was in great demand. He died in Antwerp in 1678.

Though the composition appears to be entirely of Jan Brueghel the Younger’s design, the present bouquet nevertheless draws upon the work of Jan the Elder by reusing several flowers found in his still lifes. The red and yellow striated tulip at upper right appears in the elder artist’s bouquet of after 1608 in a Swiss private collection (K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere: die Gemälde, III, Lingen, 2008-2010, pp. 898, 900, no. 423, illustrated). Similarly, the group of eight Raceme Narcissi in this painting appear in nearly identical fashion in a painting by Jan the Elder in the Ambrosiana, Milan (Ertz, op. cit., no. 431), and, to a somewhat lesser degree, a painting in a private collection and another formerly on the German art market (Ertz, op. cit., nos. 426 and 427). Sam Segal additionally suggested that ‘seven flowers are identical with those in a flower piece of 1605’ in a private collection in The Hague (Ertz, op. cit., no. 433, where dated to circa 1607; see Segal, op. cit., p. 204), though, aside from the close proximity of the Red Turban Cup Lily in the two paintings, the visual evidence does not support this claim.

This painting is a more elaborate take on a still life in a glass vase, formerly given to Jan the Elder, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WA1940.2.17).

The pink and white striated tulip, Red Turban Cup Lily, White Iris and red and yellow striated tulip are identical in both works, while further analogues appear in flowers like the tulip at middle left, the White and Batavian Roses at lower center and the use of a pair of Kingcups (Marsh Marigolds) to define the bouquet’s bottom edge.

Segal dated this picture to the 1640s, noting that its character is ‘far too pronounced for an earlier dating (op. cit., p. 205). On account of the consummate rendering of the various still-life elements – including the chased metal vase, on which appears the reflection of the studio window – he concluded that the painting stands as ‘one of the major works of its kind’ (op. cit.).

BARTHOLOMEUS VAN DER HELST (HAARLEM C. 1613-1670 AMSTERDAM)

Portrait of David Rijckaert (1614-1680), bust-length, wearing a hat signed and dated 'B.vnder.helst / 1643' (upper right) oil on canvas 29√ x 24¡ in. (76 x 62 cm.)

£100,000-150,000

US$140,000-200,000

€120,000-180,000

PROVENANCE:

Commissioned by the sitter David Rijckaert (1614-1680), Amsterdam, and by inheritance in the Roëll and de Geer families to the present owner (for complete lines of descent, please see online catalogue entry).

EXHIBITED:

The Hague, Tentoonstelling van schilderijen van oude meesters in de zalen van het Gothische paleis in het Noordeinde te 's-Gravenhage, 1881, no. 157, with the date erroneously catalogued as '1645'.

Brussels, Exposition néerlandaise de beaux-arts organisée au bénéfice de la société néerlandaise de bienfaisance à Bruxelles, 1882, no. 96.

Utrecht, Centraal Museum, Tentoonstelling van oude kunst uit particulier bezit in stad en provincie, 2 July-15 September 1938, no. 120. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Drie eeuwen portret in Nederland 1500-1800, 29 June5 October 1952 ('buiten catalogus', according to van Gent, op. cit.).

LITERATURE:

E.W. Moes, Iconographia Batava: Beredeneerde lijst van geschilderde en gebeeldhouwde portretten van Noord-Nederlanders in vorige eeuwen, II, Amsterdam, 1905, p. 305, no. 6671.

J.J. de Gelder, Bartholomeus van der Helst: Een studie van zijn werk, zijn levensgeschiedenis, een beschrijvende catalogus van zijn oeuvre, een register en 41 afbeeldingen naar schilderijen, Rotterdam, 1921, p. 187, no. 248, with the date erroneously catalogued as '1645'.

J. Foucart and O. H. Oursel, Trésors des musées du Nord de France I: Peinture Hollandaise, exhibition catalogue, Lille, 1972, p. 62, under no. 32. J. van Gent, Bartholomeus van der Helst (ca. 1613-1670): Een studie naar zijn leven en werk, Zwolle, 2011, pp. 41, 55, 165, no. 12, illustrated.

This portrait, which has descended from the sitter in the Roëll and de Geer families and is appearing on the market for the first time, belongs to the early period of Bartholomeus van der Helst’s career, one in which very few paintings remain in private hands. Around the time van der Helst painted this portrait, he was establishing himself as the most important and fashionable portraitist in Amsterdam, favoured by sitters from many of the city’s wealthiest and most politically connected families. Indeed, only one year earlier did the artist receive a series of important commissions from several members of the Bicker family, while in 1645 he was called to paint the portraits of the extraordinarily wealthy merchant Joan Coymans and his wife Sophia Trip.

Born in Haarlem, van der Helst most likely trained in the Amsterdam studio of Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy (1588-1653/6), the city’s leading portraitist before Rembrandt’s arrival in 1631. Van der Helst’s earliest works, like the 1637 group portrait of The Regents of the Walenweeshuis (Amsterdam, Stichting Hospice Wallon) and the monumental depiction of the Amsterdam Kloveniersdoelen (Musketeers’ Hall): The Civic Guard Company of Capt. Roelof Bicker and Lt. Jan Michielsz. Blaeuw (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) painted circa 1643, already display the painter’s prodigious talents. The sophistication and grace of his portraits catered perfectly to the tastes of patrons living in Amsterdam at a moment when Rembrandt, the preeminent portraitist for the city’s elite during the 1630s, was turning progressively toward more incisive and introspective subjects, using an increasingly free technique somewhat at odds with the smooth modelling and clarity demanded by Amsterdam’s wealthy consumers.

Comparatively little is known about the painting’s sitter, David Rijckaert. He was born in Amsterdam in 1614 to Andries Rijckaert (1569-1639) and his second wife Susanna Merchijs (1581-1633), who feature in a pair of anonymous portraits dated 1628 (figs. 1 and 2; being offered at Christie’s, London, 2 July 2025). Andries’s elder brother, Johannes (1609-1679), would subsequently sit for a portrait by Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen in 1649 (see the following lot). His sister, Maria, married Daniel Bernard (1594-1681), whose first marriage produced a son of the same name who coincidentally sat for a late portrait by van der Helst in 1669 (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen). At the time of his death, Rijckaert, who remained a lifelong bachelor, was living on the Leidsegracht.

Van der Helst portrayed his sitter with characteristic elegance and refinement, amply displayed by his sophisticated and technically superb depiction of fabrics, particularly the subtle modulation of seemingly innumerable shades of black. The sitter is staged against a neutral background and occupies the entirety of the pictorial space, lending the painting an almost monumental quality. His beautifully foreshortened projecting left hand testifies to the artist’s consummate abilities. Van der Helst would deploy this device in similar fashion in at least one other portrait, the Portrait of a man, identified as Wijnand van Diest of 1644, a painting that likewise descended in the family of the sitter until its sale in these Rooms on 7 December 2018.

Fig. 1 Circle of Cornelis van der Voort, Portrait of Andries Rijckaert (1569-1639) and Portrait of Susanna Merchijs (1581-1633), being offered at Christie’s, London, 2 July 2025

CORNELIS JOHNSON VAN CEULEN I (LONDON 1593-1661 UTRECHT)

Portrait of Johannes Rijckaert (1609-1679), half-length, holding a pair of gloves signed and dated 'C.J.V.C. / fec[it] 1649' (centre left) oil on canvas

33¿ x 27Ω in. (84 x 69.9 cm.)

£40,000-60,000

US$54,000-81,000

€48,000-71,000

PROVENANCE:

Commissioned by the sitter Johannes Rijckaert (1609-1679), Amsterdam, and by inheritance in the Roëll and de Geer families to the present owner (for complete lines of descent, please see online catalogue entry).

LITERATURE:

E.W. Moes, Iconographia Batava, beredeneerde lijst van geschilderde en gebeeldhouwde portretten van Noord-Nederlanders in vorige eeuwen, Amsterdam, 1905, II, p. 305, no. 6672, as 'Bartholomeus van der Helst'.

Johannes (Hans) Rijckaert was born in Amsterdam on 11 June 1609 and died in the same city on 12 November 1679 (see ‘Familie-aantekeningen Rijckaert,’ De Nederlandsche Leeuw, XLV, 1927, columns 153 and 182; for full genealogical information regarding parentage and siblings, see the preceding lot). On 20 June 1634, Johannes married Cornelia Merchijs (1614-1694), with whom he had two children, Susanna Rijckaert (b. 1635) and Andries Rijckaert (1636-1716), who sat to Isaack Luttichuys for a pair of portraits in 1666 (sold Christie’s, New York, 30 January 2014, lot 219). In 1658, he was an elder in the Amsterdam Reformed Church.

Cornelis Johnson van Ceulen was born in London to a Flemish family from Antwerp who had emigrated to escape religious persecution. His grandfather originally came from Cologne, hence the frequent addition of ‘van Ceulen’ to his surname. Following the outbreak of the English Civil War and the resulting decrease in court patronage, in 1643, Johnson and his family departed for Middelburg. He subsequently settled in Amsterdam and worked in The Hague before returning to Middelburg in the summer of 1649 and, ultimately, settling in Utrecht in the early 1650s. Johnson was the first British-born artist to habitually sign his paintings, frequently dating them as well.

This portrait dates to the final year of Johnson’s residence in Amsterdam, and his re-emergence in the records of the English church in Middelburg on 30 June 1649 likely provides a terminus ante quem for its production. Johnson’s reputation as a leading portrait painter was by this point beyond doubt: it was in this year that he featured in Jan Meyssens’s Images de divers homes d’esprit sublime…, a portfolio of around one hundred engraved portraits of the most renowned artists of the period (fig. 1).

Johnson’s success as a portraitist was due in no small part to the consistently high quality of his portraits – hallmarks of which included his precise handling of dress and distinctive approach to depicting sitters’ eyes with large, round irises and deep, curving eyelids – and the limited range of poses he applied to his sitters. Johnson employed a similar pose in which the sitter’s proper right hand is placed across his chest in a sign of avowal in works like his 1644 portrait of the Middelburg burgomaster Apolonius Veth (1603-1653), now in the Tate museum in London. Veth may also have been the conduit by which Rijckaert came into contact with the artist. On 31 December 1639, Veth served as a witness at the baptism of Rijckaert’s son, Jan. Johnson conveyed his sitter’s social position not only through his costly black satin dress but the pair of leather gloves held in his left hand. Such items were indicators of rank and prosperity in the seventeenth century and were often given as gifts at betrothals or weddings, though no such pendant is known for the present work.

This painting has descended from the sitter in the Roëll and de Geer families and is appearing on the market for the first time.

We are grateful to Karen Hearn for her assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.

Fig. 1 Coenraet Waumans, Portrait of Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen I, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

ATTRIBUTED TO LUCAS CRANACH THE ELDER (KRONACH 1472-1553 WEIMAR)

Charity

signed with the artist's winged serpent device (lower right) oil on panel, unframed

47¬ x 29º in. (121 x 74.2 cm.)

£150,000-250,000

US$210,000-340,000

€180,000-300,000

PROVENANCE:

(Probably) Anonymous sale; Kölner Kunst und Auktionshaus, Cologne, 14 October 1919, lot 3, as 'Lucas Cranach the Elder', illustrated, with incorrect dimensions. Astoldi Collection, 1945.

Anonymous sale; Christie's, Rome, 20 March 1986, lot 49, as 'Attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder'.

LITERATURE:

M. Hofbauer, Corpus Cranach, Heidelberg, 2022, p. 237, no. CC-MHM-050-004, as 'C1: Lucas Cranach the Elder or under his workshop management'. Cranach Digital Archive, online, cat. no. PRIVATE_NONE-P616, as 'Lucas Cranach the Elder or copy after Lucas Cranach the Elder' (accessed 26 January 2025).

Around a dozen representations of Charity by Cranach and his workshop are known. Dating from 1529 onwards, the theme focused on the image of maternal love and the strength of the mother figure as she tends to the needs of others, with the number of children typically at three, but varying across versions from one to seven. Dieter Koepplin has argued that these paintings should be read in connection to Martin Luther’s reinterpretation of the concept of Charity as love arising from faith in the grace of God, which should naturally extend to loving one’s neighbours. He notes that the setting beneath an apple tree was also indebted to Luther, who in 1533 compared the Bible to a fruit tree and its fruits as gifts of God (see D. Koepplin, 'Cranach's Paintings of Charity in the Theological and Humanist Spirit of Luther and Melanchthon', Cranach, exhibition catalogue, London 2007, pp. 65-68). While the message is a virtuous one, the subject once again gave Cranach the opportunity to depict the female nude in a Christian moralising context.

As was customary in Cranach’s workshop, no two treatments of the subject were the same. The present unique composition is the largest known iteration of the subject in the Cranach corpus. Featuring four children, it relates closely to a smaller picture in Nivågård’s Malerisamling, Nivå, dated 1535, in which the mother’s legs are similarly positioned (fig. 1). The figure is also directly comparable with the version, on approximately the same scale, in Weimar (Klassik Stiftung Weimar, inv. no. G20). Although the present work is less well preserved than these museum examples, and consequently more difficult to judge (with the paint surface having suffered a degree of abrasion), it is no less ambitious. On stylistic grounds, a date in the late 1530s or early '40s is most likely and is in line with the configuration of the signature, with the device of a serpent with folded wings, which was used from 1537 onwards, coinciding with the premature death of Cranach’s son Hans. Furthermore, the transparent veil worn over the mother’s head (still clearly discernible), is a motif not seen in Cranach before 1535.

The primacy of this version is further attested to by infrared reflectography, which reveals the artist’s lively, carbon-based underdrawing (Tager Stonor Richardson, 8 December 2022, available upon request). The high level of planning, with clear reserves used for the compositional elements and loosely drawn contours of the bodies, are typical of Cranach’s technique. Dieter Koepplin, to whom we are grateful, on the basis of photographs considers the work ‘entweder für eine kopie nach Caranch oder (wahrschinlicher) fur ein erk von Lucas Cranach dem Älteren, das von einem Restaurator total überarbeitet ist’ (‘either a copy after Cranach or (more likely) a work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, totally reworked by a restorer’; private communication, 30 March 2023).

Fig. 1 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Caritas, Nivågård’s Malerisamling, Nivå

THE MASTER OF THE FIGDOR SAINT EUSTACE (ACTIVE CIRCA 1490)

The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian oil on panel, laid down on panel 34æ x 25æ in. (88.2 x 65.2 cm.)

£150,000-250,000

US$210,000-340,000

€180,000-300,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) Private collection, Naples, 1930s (according to Benati, op. cit., p. 272). Private collection, London.

Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 6 December 2017, lot 14, where acquired by the present owner.

EXHIBITED:

Forlì, Musei San Domenico, Marco Palmezzano, il Rinascimento nelle Romagne, 4 December 2005-30 April 2006, no. 5, as 'Pittore melozzesco (Maestro del Sant' Eustachio Figdor)'.

LITERATURE:

S. Tumidei, in M. Foschi and L. Prati, eds., Melozzo da Forlì, La sua città e il suo tempo, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1994, pp. 60, 66 and 67, illustrated, as 'Circle of Melozzo da Forlì, possibly a Roman artist'.

Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Gesamtverzeichnis, Berlin, 1996, p. 122, under no. 2143, as 'Umbro-Roman, end of the 15th century'.

A. Tambini, in N. Ceroni, ed., Pinacoteca comunale di Ravenna, Museo d'Arte della Cittá, La Collezione Antica, Ravenna, 2001, p. 52, as 'possibly Marco Palmezzano, under the influence of Melozzo da Forlì'.

A. Tambini, 'Postille al Palmezzano,' Romagna Arte e Storia, XXIII, January-April 2003, p. 32, no. 10, as 'possibly Marco Palmezzano, under the influence of Melozzo da Forlì'. S. Tumidei, in A. Paolucci, L. Prati and S. Tumidei, ed., Marco Palmezzano, il Rinascimento nelle Romagne, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2005, pp. 184-185, no. 5, illustrated, as 'Pittore melozzesco (Maestro del Sant' Eustachio Figdor)'.

S. Tumidei, Studi sulla pittura in Emilia e in Romagna: Da Melozzo a Federico Zuccari, 1987-2008, Trento, 2011, pp. 115-117, fig. 47.

D. Benati, in, D. Benati, M. Natale and A. Paolucci, eds., Melozzo da Forlì. L'umana bellezza tra Piero della Francesca e Raffaello, Milan, 2011, pp. 272-5, no. 70, as 'Collaboratore di Melozzo da Forlì ("Maestro del Sant' Eustachio Figdor")'.

This unnamed master’s moniker derives from a panel depicting the vision of Saint Eustace, formerly in the collection of Austrian banker and collector Albert Figdor and now in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie (fig. 1). Several preeminent scholars of the twentieth century, including Roberto Longhi, Carlo Volpe and Federico Zeri, considered the Berlin panel to be by Melozzo da Forlí, who worked primarily in Rome in the service of Pope Sixtus IV, but was also engaged in projects in Urbino and Loreto.

More recent research by Anna Tambini and Vittorio Sgarbi (op. cit.) proposed the involvement of Melozzo’s principal pupil, Marco Palmezzano, but Stefano Tumidei (op. cit.) favours an attribution to another unnamed artist in Melozzo’s orbit, rather than Palmezzano himself. He draws connections between this master and Melozzo when the latter was working in Loreto in the early 1480s, his least-documented period. Tumidei posits that the master may even have directly collaborated with Melozzo, citing his use of sharp foreshortening and stylistic similarities between Saint Sebastian’s hair and that of the putti and angels in Melozzo’s Loreto frescoes.

Tumidei’s proposed dating of the work to circa 1490 casts it as a very early and intriguing example of dramatic and distorted perspective, which is here deployed to great success. Melozzo’s own experiments in forced perspective are indebted to Andrea Mantegna, and the artist of the present work has inherited this debt but goes further than his predecessors: multifaceted shapes and undulating lines interlock to create a complex, vertiginous backdrop, the landscape beyond glimpsed only through a narrow valley between high towers and steep cliffs. The landscape in the Berlin Saint Eustace is treated in an identical fashion, the cliff faces carved and shaved into geometric shapes and painted in contrasting colours. The three archers in the immediate foreground are reminiscent of their counterparts in Andrea Mantegna’s painting of the same subject in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, but here they are paid more attention and inhabit their own space. The head of the central archer, seen in profile and looking upwards, is strongly reminiscent of that of Saint Eustace in the Berlin painting. The artist subtly shifts the viewer’s focus away from the figure of Saint Sebastian which is bound to a column, guiding our eye towards the landscape beneath, with its colourfully dressed, idiosyncratic figures, and the steep drop to the river running its course below.

Fig. 1 The Master of the Figdor Saint Eustace, Saint Eustace, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Jörg P. Anders

PAOLO CALIARI, CALLED PAOLO VERONESE (VERONA 1528-1588 VENICE)

Saint Anthony Abbot oil on canvas

33º x 13æ in. (84.5 x 35 cm.)

£100,000-150,000

US$140,000-200,000

€120,000-180,000

PROVENANCE:

Private collection, Naples, 1700s. Private collection, Florence, by 1960. with Moretti Fine Art, London, where acquired in 2011 by the present owner.

LITERATURE:

M. Gregori, Mostra dei tesori segreti delle case fiorentine, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1960, p. 28, under nos. 55 and 56, as part of a series that certainly came out of Veronese’s workshop (those exhibited, Risen Christ and Saint Peter, as ‘attributed to Paolo Veronese’).

P. Marini, 'Un’aggiunta al catalogo di Paolo Veronese,' Verona Illustrata, XVIII, 2005, pp. 37-40, noting the varying quality of pictures within the series and naming Saint Anthony Abbot among the four best canvases likely painted by Veronese himself. C. Falciani, in, C. Falciani and P. Curie, eds., La Collection Alana, Chefs-d’oeuvre de la peinture italienne, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2019, p. 192, under nos. 69 and 70.

The early Christian hermit saint, Anthony Abbot (A.D. 251–356), is regarded as the founder of monasticism in the West. Around the age of twenty he renounced all of his earthly goods and retired to the Egyptian desert, where he embraced a solitary life of chastity, penance, and prayer. Anthony is identified in the present canvas by two of his standard attributes: the crutch, an allusion

to his advanced age, and the rosary featuring a small skull, which would have encouraged his contemplation of the brevity of life on earth. The saint wears a brown monastic robe, with a small pouch fashioned from straw suspended from its belt, perhaps a reference to the alms collecting conducted by the order of Hospitallers founded in Anthony Abbot’s honor.

This canvas by Paolo Veronese originally belonged to a group of paintings depicting saints and the Risen Christ, all standing in identical fictive architectural niches, first connected together by Mina Gregori in 1960, when two of the canvases were exhibited at the Circolo Borghese e della Stampa in Florence The paintings seem to have formed part of a two-tiered altarpiece, the reconstruction of which was proposed by Paola Marini in 2005 (op. cit.). Although the altarpiece is not documented and its original location remains an open question, it might have been intended for a church in the artist’s native Verona. The archaic two-tiered format persisted there well into the sixteenth century, as can be seen in an altarpiece of 1552 by Veronese’s master, Antonio Badile, for the confraternity of SS. Quattro Coronati in San Pietro Incarnario, the surviving elements of which are in the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona. Other canvases belonging to Veronese's altarpiece complex include Saints Gregory the Great and Jerome in Zurich, Kunsthaus (figs. 1 and 2), which have slightly smaller dimensions and may have been cropped; Saints Peter and Paul (Alana Collection), and Saints Ambrose, Augustine and the Risen Christ (all untraced) Except for the two paintings now in Zurich, which were seen by Gustav Waagen in the W.E. Lake collection and were exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1895, the paintings were in the same Neapolitan collection in the eighteenth century and subsequently remained together in a private collection, Florence.

Although there are variations in quality among paintings in the set, Saint Anthony Abbot is attributable to Paolo Veronese himself. Saints Ambrose and Augustine appear to be by a hand in the workshop of Veronese and these, together with the Risen Christ which would have occupied a central place in the upper tier of the altarpiece, have been ascribed to his son Carlo Caliari, called Carletto Veronese (see Marini and Falciani, op. cit.). Noting the higher quality of the paintings now in Zurich, Saints Peter and Paul and the present canvas, Marini suggested that this group of works was completed by Veronese before his death in 1588 and would have constituted the lower tier of the altarpiece. Marini further argued that the other canvases coming from Veronese’s workshop formed the upper tier, and might have been executed following the master’s death. Carl Strehlke has suggested an alternative reconstruction (private communication), noting that it is more likely that the four Doctors of the Church would have been grouped together – whether in the upper or lower tier would have been determined by the dedication of the church or chapel in which the altarpiece was placed – while the other tier would have consisted of, from left to right, a missing saint, Saints Peter, Paul and Anthony Abbot. The Risen Christ presumably stood at the centre of the upper tier, flanked by pairs from one or the other of the groups of saints, while the missing central canvas of the lower tier remains unidentified. Strehlke further notes that each section of the altarpiece would have been painted separately and then the pictures would have been assembled into the framing of the complex, regardless of when or by whom the individual canvases were painted.

We are grateful to Xavier F. Salomon for endorsing the attribution to Paolo Veronese, based on first-hand knowledge of this and the other pictures from the series (private communication, May 2025).

Fig 1. Veronese, Papa Gregorio Magno, Kunsthaus, Zürich © The Betty and David Koetser Foundation, 1986

Fig 2. Veronese, San Girolamo, Kunsthaus, Zürich © The Betty and David Koetser Foundation, 1986

BERNARDO BELLOTTO (VENICE 1721-1780 WARSAW)

Venice, The Grand Canal looking South-East from the Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi oil on canvas

18¡ x 30¡ in. (46.7 x 77.2 cm.)

£500,000-800,000

US$680,000-1,100,000

€600,000-950,000

PROVENANCE:

Madame Dubernet Douine (1857-1945), Château de la Boissière; her sale (†), Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 11 April 1946 (=1st day), lot 15, as 'Bernardo Bellotto', where acquired by the father of the seller at the following, Anonymous sale [The Property of a Gentleman]; Christie's, London, 4 July 1997, lot 390, as 'Studio of Canaletto'.

This wonderfully atmospheric view of the Grand Canal is one of the earliest pictures by the young Bernardo Bellotto and is testament to his precocious talent. Although best known today for his views of northern European cities –Dresden, Munich, Vienna and Warsaw – it was in Venice that Bellotto received his earliest training from his uncle, the celebrated view painter Canaletto. This view of The Grand Canal looking South East from the Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi dates from Bellotto’s time in Canaletto’s studio in Venice. It can be dated to around 1738, the year in which Bellotto was enrolled at the age of sixteen in the Fraglia dei pittori, the Venetian painters’ guild. He had probably been in Canaletto’s studio for some time already and was evidently an accomplished draughtsman: his pen-and-ink drawing of the Venetian canal of Santa Chiara in Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, can be dated with certainty to before June 1736 (S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto. Volume II. Catalogue, Recklinghausen, 1972, II, p. 19, no. 20, p. 21, illustrated; B.A. Kowalczyk, ‘Il Bellotto veneziano nei documenti’, Arte Veneta, XLVII, 1995, p. 70, fig. 2). Under Canaletto’s tutelage, Bellotto learnt the rudiments of drawing, how to paint light and shadow and describe the different surface textures of buildings, as well as depicting reflections and ripple effects in water.

This view was correctly given to Bellotto when it was sold from the Château de la Boissière almost a century ago (op. cit.) but was subsequently described as by the ‘studio of Canaletto’ in the 1997 sale, at which it was acquired by the present owner. This ‘demotion’ was largely due to the confusion surrounding Bellotto’s early output during his time in Canaletto’s studio. Considerable progress has been made over the last 25 years - by Charles Beddington and Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, in particular - in establishing Bellotto’s artistic development during his formative years in Venice, from which he has emerged as a personality quite distinct from that of his uncle.

The Grand Canal looking South East from the Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi is based on a painting by Canaletto from the ‘Harvey Series’, a set of twenty-one views of similar size painted in the mid1730s for Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of Marlborough, formerly in the Harvey collection at Langley Park, Buckinghamshire (W.G. Constable, Canaletto,

Oxford, 1976, I, pl. 50; II, p. 306, no. 241). Bellotto’s canvas is identical in size to Canaletto’s prototype and, although boats and figures are arranged differently, it corresponds closely in topography and in the cloud formations, with the latter being also different to those in Antonio Visentini’s related engraving for the 1742 edition of his Prospectus Magni Canalis Venetiarum (for which a drawing by Visentini exists in the British Museum, London, inv. no. 1948,0704.24). The picture’s dependence on Canaletto’s painting – rather than Visentini’s engraving – suggests that Bellotto must have produced it while in his uncle’s studio, before the prototype left Venice for England. Small differences between the two paintings include a red cloth hanging from the top balcony of the Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne at far left (rather than from the piano nobile, as in Canaletto’s painting and Visentini’s engraving), Bellotto omitting the flowerpots on the top balustrade of the small house immediately beyond, and the inclusion of flowerpots on the windowsills of the Fabbriche Nuove di Rialto at right, which are not present in Canaletto's painting.

Bellotto’s topographical precision – following Canaletto’s model – allows for an accurate identification of a number of palazzi in the present view. At far left is the Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne, with the Palazzo Michiel del Brusa beyond. The fourth house on the left, immediately before the Rio dei Santi Apostoli, of which only a corner is visible, is the Palazzo Mangilli Valmarana. Remodelled in the 1740s by Visentini to serve as the residence of Consul Joseph Smith (c. 1674–1770), Canaletto’s principal agent in Venice, the palazzo inevitably became a necessary stop for all British travellers wishing to commission a memento of their Grand Tour. At right, the Fabbriche Nuove, designed by Jacopo Sansovino, are shown sharply foreshortened with their long frontage seen at an oblique angle.

Despite the picture’s dependence on Canaletto’s composition, its handling is entirely characteristic of the young Bellotto. This is particularly evident in the richly textured surface of the sky, with his use of creamy impasto for the highlights in the clouds and the warm ground layer showing through in places. His grasp of architecture is in evidence, with the palazzi lining the Grand Canal drawn precisely and accurately, and the painted reflections of the buildings in the water are remarkably sophisticated. The painting can be closely compared to one of Bellotto’s earliest works executed in Venice, The Grand Canal facing Santa Croce of about 1738 in the National Gallery, London (fig. 1). There too the view is taken from the water, with the Grand Canal curving gently to the right to reveal a stunning and varied array of palazzi on the northern (left) bank. In the present view, the Fabbriche Nuove are seen in sharp recession on the right, the building’s arcade and windows precisely drawn, its towering façade with pinkish

upper storeys dominating the right foreground; a compositional motif strikingly similar to the pink façade of Santa Croce in the National Gallery painting. The strong directional light in both pictures leads to a sharp diagonal shadow cutting across the façade of both the Fabbriche Nuove and Santa Croce. The paved waterfront in the right foreground provides a ‘stage’ on which figures move about, animating the scene and bringing these views of Venice vividly to life. In both pictures, gondolas appear to glide across the surface of the water and, lower left, Bellotto includes the same burchiello – a decorated barge that carried goods and passengers up the Brenta Canal – though only half of it is shown here, parallel to the picture plane.

A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE

This painting was previously in the celebrated collection of the French patron of the arts and philanthropist, Madame Dubernet Douine (18571945; fig. 2). Born Anne-Marie Dubernet, known as Cyprienne, her life story echoes that of Denise in Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames she was born the daughter of a wool-spinner and started life selling corsets in the Grands Magasins du Louvre. In 1887, she married the director-proprietor Olympe Hériot (1833-1899), who was twenty-five years her senior, and had four children with him, including Virginie Hériot (1890–1932), the celebrated yachtswoman and wife of Viscount François de Saint-Senoch. The Hériots moved to a hôtel particulier on the rue Euler in Paris in 1894, but Cyprienne was widowed shortly thereafter in 1899. She thus inherited her husband's fortune, with which she commissioned a new and extravagant hôtel on the rue de la Faisanderie, built by the architect Georges Tersling, who had already worked for Olympe Hériot at his country estate, the château de la Boissière near Rambouillet, in circa 1890. She married Roger Hippolyte Douine (d. 1925) in 1907, thereafter going by the surname Dubernet Douine. Her collection included Impressionist paintings, Old Masters and eighteenth-century furniture and tapestries, all of which graced her many homes in Paris and the country. Towards the end of her life, her collection was concentrated at the château de la Boissière, and was sold after her death in a sale in Paris in 1946.

Fig. 1 Bernardo Bellotto, Venice: The Grand Canal facing Santa Croce, The National Gallery, London

Fig. 2 Théobald Chartran, Portrait of Madame Olympe Hériot, born Cyprienne Dubernet (1857–1945), 1891, Musée Carnavalet, Paris

GEORGE STUBBS, A.R.A. (LIVERPOOL 1724-1806 LONDON)

A dun hunter on the south bank of the River Humber, Lincolnshire

signed and dated 'Geo: Stubbs / pinxit 1792' (lower right) oil on canvas

35.5 x 47Ω in. (90.2 x 120.7 cm.)

£150,000-250,000

US$210,000-340,000

€180,000-300,000

PROVENANCE:

(Possibly) Painted for Robert Vyner M.P. (1717-1799), Gautby, Lincolnshire. with Partridge Fine Art, London and New York, where acquired by, Kathleen Sarah Harbord, née Vestey (1909-1983) in 1942, and by descent.

LITERATURE:

J. Egerton, George Stubbs, Painter. Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 532 and 533, no. 297, illustrated.

Dated 1792, this painting of a dun hunter dramatically silhouetted against stormy skies, dates from Stubbs’ maturity. With over thirty years of experience to draw upon, Stubbs continued to innovate and command important commissions in his sixties, not least from the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, consolidating his reputation as Britain’s leading sporting artist. This painting has never before been offered for sale at auction and has been in the same private collection for over eighty years.

Located on the banks of the Humber in North Lincolnshire, looking from South Ferriby to North Ferriby, this scene is situated very close to where Stubbs had undertaken his intense study of equine anatomy in the mid-1750s through gruelling anatomical dissections in a farmhouse at Horkstow. The results of this research, which were published in The Anatomy of the Horse in 1766, had enabled him to paint living horses with a level of accuracy that was completely unprecedented and greatly enhanced his career. Stubbs remained preoccupied with experimental studies and knowledge based on empirical evidence throughout his life, yet this pursuit was always combined with a deep empathy for his subjects, as exemplified in this painting: the dun’s meticulously rendered anatomy and signature yellow coat are set off against a dark, brooding sky, enhancing the horse’s presence and stature.

The inscription on the frame, perhaps dating to when the painting was on the market in the early 1940s, which reads ‘from the collection at Gumby Hall, Barton-on-Humber’, is likely to be a misreading of ‘Gautby’, about ten miles east of Lincoln, where the Vyner family had an estate in the eighteenth century. Judy Egerton, in her catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works, proposed that this painting may have been commissioned by either Robert Vyner, M.P. (1717-1799) who sat in the House of Commons from 1754-1796, successively for Okehampton, Lincoln and Thirsk; or his son, Robert (1753-1804), for whom Stubbs painted Foxhound and Bitch, also in 1792 (op. cit.). Egerton further pointed out that the inclusion of merchant shipping may reflect the patron’s interests, since the inclusion of such a contemporary detail was otherwise quite unusual within Stubbs’ oeuvre

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. (LONDON 1775-1851)

Lake Brienz, with the setting Moon pencil and watercolour with scratching out on paper 9æ x 14º in. (24.7 x 36.6 cm).

£600,000-800,000

US$810,000-1,100,000

€720,000-950,000

PROVENANCE:

Possibly Mrs Sophia Booth. with Ernest Gambart, London. with Agnew's, London, October 1865, where purchased by John Fleming; Christie’s, 22 March 1879, lot 58 (as 'Como') (100 gns to Agnew's). with Agnew's, London, as 'Como', where purchased by W. Trotter.

Catherine, Countess of Portsmouth, née Fortescue (1786-1854), and wapparently by descent.

with Richard Green, London, 2002, where purchased by Baron and Baroness Guy Ullens; Sotheby's, London, 4 July 2007, lot 10. with Andrew Clayton-Payne, London, by 2013. The Clode Collection, by 2019. Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, New York, 27 January 2021, lot 69, where purchased by the present owner.

EXHIBITED:

Lucerne, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Turner: The Sea and The Alps, 6 July-13 October 2019, no catalogue number.

LITERATURE:

A. Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, Fribourg, 1979, p.476, see no.1470.

E. Shanes, unpublished notes on ‘Lake Lucerne at Dusk’, c.2017.

D. Blayney Brown, Turner: The Sea and the Alps, Lucerne, 2019, pp.110-111, as ‘Lucerne, c.1842’

D. Hill, ‘In Turner’s Footsteps between Lucerne and Thun: no.25 At Brienz’, Sublime Sites online resource, 18 January 2023, as ‘Lake of Brienz from near Kienholz, sunrise, c.1841’.

This is one of a pair of especially evocative watercolours in which Turner recorded or recreated the passing moments of dawn at the eastern end of the lake of Brienz (or Brienzer See) near the village of Kienholz. The related work is in the collection of Manchester Art Gallery (fig. 1), having been bequeathed to the institution in 1917 by James Thomas Blair (1863-1917), a Manchester-based cotton exporter, who left the institution 27 watercolours by Turner (Wilton, op. cit., no. 1470, as ‘Lucerne’; see Melva Croal in Turner Watercolors from Manchester, 1997, p. 19; and p. 111, no. 72).

Tracing the history of that work back to the nineteenth century, the earliest owner was previously thought to be Albert Wood, from whose collection it was sold as ‘Lake of Lucerne’ in May 1872 for £278 (W. Thornbury, Life and Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner, London 1877, p. 619). However, Mr Wood only appears to have acquired the watercolour now at Manchester from Agnew’s on 27 October 1870. The firm had bought it just a fortnight earlier from James Price (stock number 446, as ‘Lucerne’). Even further back, it had passed to Price from Agnew’s on 25 November 1865, which was also the date it became separated from its pair. Both works had been sold to Agnew by the dealer Ernest Gambart (1814-1902) with the same title for each of them - ‘Lake Como’ - but in the Agnew’s ledger that topographical identification was also supplemented with the word ‘Lucerne’ in brackets (stock numbers 7243 and 7244).

Seeing the works together, as they were in a recent exhibition, apparently for the first time since 1865, confirmed very tangibly the idea that Turner was attempting in his late watercolours of Switzerland to seize and preserve his experience of the changing nuances of fading light, much as Claude Monet would later attempt to capture his own engagement with the distinctive envelope of light at certain times of day.

Unlike the watercolour at Manchester, which thereafter generally retained the Agnew’s association with Lucerne, the title for this watercolour initially reverted to Como for its next owner, John Fleming, and remained described as such until it was acquired by a Mr Trotter in 1879. The uncertainties of its history after that date make it difficult to chart precisely, despite an apparent period in the collection of Lady Catherine Fortescue (1786-1854), latterly Countess of Portsmouth.

More certainly, the two views of Lake Brienz are part of a batch of late watercolours of Switzerland on delicate sheets with the same distinctive dimensions - 9 ¾ x 14 ¼ inches, or 24.9 x 36.7 cms - and painted using a similar palette range. Other sheets from this group include views at Lucerne, such as that recently acquired by the Kunstmuseum in that city, as well as various views of Thun and its neighbouring lake (i.e., National Galleries of Scotland and the watercolours sold in these Rooms on 3 January 2024, lot 78 (fig. 2), and on 3 July 2024, lot 238).

Another view of Brienz from this series (now apparently untraced) was in the collection of John Edward Taylor (1830-1905), indisputably the foremost of Manchester’s competitive Turner enthusiasts. Lot 74 in his legendary 1912 sale of around 100 Turner watercolours at Christie’s was described as ‘Brienz, The Lake extends to the Alps, seen in the distance’, with measurements almost identical to the present work. It was clearly a notable watercolour because it achieved one of the ten highest sums in the sale, and was bought by Agnew’s. Curiously, after passing to another dealer, it thereafter disappeared. It seems unlikely to be the work afterwards bequeathed to the Manchester Art Gallery, whose history is better documented. But perhaps the present work should be considered as a strong candidate, unless further evidence comes to light to contradict this supposition.

Curiously, Taylor’s correct recognition of Lake Brienz and the Bernese Alps as the subject of Turner’s sketching activities in the work he owned remained an isolated perception. By contrast, when this watercolour reappeared in the 21st century it was associated with Lake Lucerne, possibly reflecting the popularity of the scenes Turner had painted on that lake at Brunnen, or Fluelen, and looking across its waters towards Mount Rigi (see Christie’s, 5 June 2006, lot 53). By 2002 alternative locations had been suggested on Lake Thun and Lake

Brienz. In confirming the identity of the scene as a view near Brienz, David Hill has provided a rich survey of Turner’s responses to the small town and its surroundings at the eastern end of the lake, both in the 1840s and much earlier on his first perambulation of the Alps in 1802 (see op. cit.).

Compared with its pair in Manchester, this watercolour has a much greater range of tones, indicative of the gaining strength of daylight between the two images. In the Manchester scene, the lower slopes on the right side (below the pyramidal tip of the Niesen) are lost in shadow, even as the peaks above glow warmly. Similarly, on the left side in that work the sombre shadows limit the detail of what can be seen. Here in the related view, however, the light plays across the craggy mountainside, suggesting a deep recession of forests clinging to the rocky outcrops. And now that the sun is higher, over on the right side, the band of obscuring darkness has retreated towards the water, where the reflections are made up of tiny parallel brush marks.

The most telling difference between the interconnected images is, of course, the position of the moon, which, as it sinks down towards the mountains in the second of the two watercolours, introduces a sense of the passage of time, and the animation of a new day. As well as reserving areas of unpainted paper in planning each image, he also gave emphasis to the long reflections of the moon with the aid of bodycolour highlights or scratching. Whether Turner actually painted both works on the spot to this level of detail is debatable. More likely he blocked out the essence of each composition and enriched the painted surface at his leisure. There is also a feeling in this work of him moving away from the lake to introduce the foreshore and a wider area of shallows around the jetty, with the skeletal outline of perhaps a boat or a cart near the water’s edge.

We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.

Fig. 1 J.M.W. Turner, A Swiss Lake © Manchester Art Gallery / Bridgeman Images Fig. 2

J.M.W. Turner, The River Aare at Thun, looking towards Lake Thun, with the Niesen and the Bernese Alps beyond, sold Christie’s, New York, 31 January 2024, lot 78

Highlights from OLD MASTERS TO MODERN

DAY SALE: PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, SCULPTURE

AUCTION

Wednesday 2 July 2025 at 11.00 am

8 King Street, St. James’s London SW1Y 6QT

VIEWING

Thursday 26 June 10.00 am - 5.00 pm

Friday 27 June 9.00 am - 5.00 pm

Saturday 28 June 12.00 pm - 5.00 pm

Sunday 29 June 12.00 pm - 5.00 pm

Monday 30 June 9.00 am - 5.00 pm

Tuesday 1 July 9.00 am - 3.00 pm

AUCTIONEERS

Olivia Ghosh, Sarah Reynolds, Zack Boutwood and Peter Flory

AUCTION CODE AND NUMBER

In sending absentee bids or making enquiries, this sale should be referred to as HELENA-23860

ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS

Tel: +44 (0)20 7389 2658 Fax: +44 (0)20 7930 8870

CONDITIONS OF SALE

The sale of each lot is subject to the Conditions of Sale, Important Notices and Explanation of Cataloguing Practice, which are set out in this catalogue and on christies.com.

Please note that the symbols and cataloguing for some lots may change before the auction. For the most up to date sale information for a lot, please see the full lot description, which can be accessed through the sale landing page on christies.com.

BUYER’S PREMIUM

In addition to the hammer price, a Buyer’s Premium (plus VAT) is payable. Other taxes and/or an Artist Resale Royalty fee are also payable if the lot has a tax or λ symbol.

Check Section D of the Conditions of Sale at the back of this catalogue. Estimates in a currency other than pounds sterling are approximate and for illustration purposes only.

PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN LUCA GIORDANO (NAPLES 1634-1705) A Philosopher

oil on canvas

47Ω x 37 in. (120.6 x 94 cm.)

£80,000-120,000

US$110,000-160,000

€96,000-140,000

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION

MASTER OF THE APOLLO AND DAPHNE LEGEND (ACTIVE FLORENCE, CIRCA 1480-1510)

The Madonna and Child Enthroned with the Magdalene, Saints Peter Martyr, Francis, John the Baptist, Catherine of Siena, Thomas Aquinas, Dominic and Jerome with Saint George in Prayer in a landscape inscribed 'TIM / ETE / DEV / M.' (center right, on the book) oil and tempera on panel

23 x 25æ in. (58.2 x 65.5 cm.)

£80,000-120,000

US$110,000-160,000

€96,000-140,000

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE UK COLLECTION RICHARD WESTALL, R.A. (HERTFORD 1765-1836 LONDON)

The Grecian Wedding oil on panel

47¿ x 71æ in. (119.7 x 182.2 cm.)

£80,000-120,000

US$110,000-160,000

€96,000-140,000

JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT (PARIS 1796-1875)

Martin au bord du lac. Un passeur barque et deux paysannes

signed 'COROT' (lower right)

oil on canvas

16⅞ x 24⅛in. (42.9 x 61.3cm.)

Painted circa 1870.

£150,000-250,000

US$210,000-340,000

€180,000-300,000 PROPERTY

SIR ALFRED JAMES MUNNINGS, P.R.A., R.W.S. (MENDHAM, SUFFOLK 1878-1959

DEDHAM, ESSEX)

Brown Jack

bronze horse; inscribed, signed and dated to the base 'BROWN JACK / A.J. Munnings, 1935'; with two paper labels to the underside, inscribed 'ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS / DIPLOMA GALLERY, 1956 / Ser. No. 354 / Title / Brown Jack - bronze / Owner AJM' and 'BROWN JACK / PROPERTY OF:- / THE SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS ART MUSEUM / CASTLE HOUSE, DEDHAM, COLCHESTER, / ESSEX.'

21º in. (54 cm.) high, 27Ω in. (70 cm.) wide, 6æ in. (17 cm.) deep

£200,000-300,000

US$270,000-400,000

€240,000-360,000

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. (LONDON 1775-1851)

Brooke House, Hackney, London: Dr Monro's private Asylum, circa 1794

pencil and watercolour on paper

9 x 7 in. (22.8 x 17.8 cm.)

£15,000-25,000

US$21,000-34,000

€18,000-30,000

*

EMILIAN SCHOOL, SECOND HALF OF THE 14TH CENTURY

Christ as the Man of Sorrows

tempera on gold ground panel, in its original engaged frame

12º x 8√ in. (31.3 x 22.6 cm.)

with its original painted reverse

£30,000-50,000

US$41,000-67,000

€36,000-60,000

ANGLO-DUTCH SCHOOL, 1623-25

Portrait of a young boy, possibly Ralph Delaval (16221691), full-length, holding redcurrants and a pear, with a monkey

oil on panel

42Ω x 31/5.8 in. (108 x 80.2 cm.)

inscribed 'Ætatis. 3. 1623. / R.D.' (upper right) and with inscription 'SIR RALPH DELAVAL.' (lower right)

£60,000-80,000

US$81,000-110,000

€72,000-95,000

*

ISAAK SOREAU (HANAU 1604-1644/45 FRANKFURT)

Tulips, peonies, roses, crown imperial, lilies, anemones, irises, carnations, sneak's head fritillary, forget-me-not, lily-of-the-valley, love-in-a-mist, cyclamen and other flowers in a terracotta vase, on a ledge with a butterfly and other insects

oil on panel

52¡ x 35æ in. (133 x 90.7 cm.)

£60,000-80,000

US$81,000-110,000

€72,000-95,000

SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE, P.R.A. (BRISTOL 1769-1830 LONDON)

Portrait of Charlotte Augusta Oom, née Papendiek (17831854), half-length, in a white dress with a lyre-shaped brooch

oil on canvas

30º x 25¿ in. (76.9 x 63.8 cm.)

£50,000-80,000

US$68,000-110,000

€60,000-95,000

SIR EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES, BT.,

A.R.A., R.W.S. (BIRMINGHAM 1833-1898

LONDON)

Portrait of Philip Comyns Carr (b.1874), looking down, aged 7: a study for a chorister in 'King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid'

signed with initials 'EB.J.' (lower left)

black, white and red chalk on buff paper

15 x 12 in. (38.1 x 30.5 cm.)

£30,000-50,000

US$41,000-67,000

€36,000-60,000 *

FEDERICO ZANDOMENEGHI

(VENICE 1841-1917 PARIS)

La Modiste

signed 'Zandomeneghi' (upper right)

oil on canvas

21æ x 18º in. (55.3 x 46.2 cm.)

Painted circa 1895 – 1910.

£30,000-50,000

US$41,000-67,000

€36,000-60,000

JEAN-BAPTISTE CARPEAUX (FRENCH 1827-1875)

'Le Chinois' ('The Chinese Man')

bronze bust, greenish-brown patina; signed 'JBte Carpeaux' to back of the proper left shoulder, inscribed to the proper right side of the base 'Susse Frs Edts / Paris / Cire

Perdue;' and with three Susse foundry marks to the reverse inscribed 'SUSSE FRES / PARIS / CIRE PERDUE', 'SUSSE FRES ÉDITEURS / PARIS' and 'SUSSE FRERES / ÉDITEURS/ PARIS'

25Ω in. (64.8 cm.) high

Original model executed in 1868.

This cast circa 1914.

£40,000-60,000

US$54,000-81,000

€48,000-71,000

THE PROPERTY OF THE PAISLEY ART INSTITUTE WILFRID GABRIEL DE GLEHN, R.A., N.E.A.C. (LONDON 1870-1951 STRATFORDTONY, WILTSHIRE)

Summer Morning

signed 'W.G. de Glehn.' (lower right)

oil on canvas

25º x 30º in. (64.1 x 76.8 cm.)

£70,000-100,000

US$95,000-130,000

€84,000-120,000

Highlights from OLD MASTERS, 19TH CENTURY

PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS

FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION: SELLING WITHOUT RESERVE

AUCTION

Wednesday 2 July 2025 at 4.00 pm

8 King Street, St. James’s London SW1Y 6QT

VIEWING

Thursday 26 June 10.00 am - 5.00 pm

Friday 27 June 9.00 am - 5.00 pm

Saturday 28 June 12.00 pm - 5.00 pm

Sunday 29 June 12.00 pm - 5.00 pm

Monday 30 June 9.00 am - 5.00 pm

Tuesday 1 July 9.00 am - 3.00 pm

AUCTIONEERS

Henry Pettifer and Clementine Sinclair

AUCTION CODE AND NUMBER

In sending absentee bids or making enquiries, this sale should be referred to as MIA-24290

ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS

Tel: +44 (0)20 7389 2658 Fax: +44 (0)20 7930 8870

CONDITIONS OF SALE

The sale of each lot is subject to the Conditions of Sale, Important Notices and Explanation of Cataloguing Practice, which are set out in this catalogue and on christies.com.

Please note that the symbols and cataloguing for some lots may change before the auction. For the most up to date sale information for a lot, please see the full lot description, which can be accessed through the sale landing page on christies.com.

BUYER’S PREMIUM

In addition to the hammer price, a Buyer’s Premium (plus VAT) is payable. Other taxes and/or an Artist Resale Royalty fee are also payable if the lot has a tax or λ symbol.

Check Section D of the Conditions of Sale at the back of this catalogue. Estimates in a currency other than pounds sterling are approximate and for illustration purposes only.

•*

JOHN MARTIN (HAYDON BRIDGE 1789-1854 DOUGLAS, ISLE OF MAN)

Carisbrooke Castle

signed 'J. Martin' (lower right) oil on canvas

12 x 18 in. (30.5 x 45.8 cm.)

£30,000-50,000

US$41,000-67,000 €36,000-60,000

AUGUST STRINDBERG (STOCKHOLM, 1849-1912)

Apple trees in blossom (Blommande äppelträd)

Painted in 1907. oil on board

6√ x 5Ω in. (17.5 x 13.7 cm.)

£40,000-60,000

US$55,000-81,000 €48,000-71,000

VINCENT MALÒ I (CAMBRAI C.1602/06-1644 ROME)

Drunken Silenus and his retinue oil on canvas

77 x 96¬ in. (195.5 x 245.4 cm.)

£40,000-60,000

US$54,000-81,000

€48,000-71,000

•*

JOHN RUSKIN (LONDON 1819-1900 BRANTWOOD)

The Chateau of Amboise

pencil, pen and blue ink and watercolour, heightened with touches of white and with scratching out, on duplex paper

17Ω x 11Ω in. (44.4 x 29.1 cm.)

£30,000-50,000

US$41,000-67,000

€36,000-60,000 *

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. (LONDON 1775-1851)

Pendennis Castle and the entrance to Falmouth Harbour, Cornwall: Scene after a Wreck pencil and watercolour, heightened with bodycolour, and with scratching out on paper 6¿ x 9¿ in. (15.4 x 23.4 cm.)

£60,000-100,000

US$81,000-130,000

€72,000-120,000

VILHELM HAMMERSHØI (COPENHAGEN 1864-1916)

Portrait of Miss Else Aagesen

signed and dated 'V.H. 1913' (upper left) oil on canvas

36 x 27 in. (91.5 x 68.7 cm.)

£120,000-180,000

US$170,000-240,000

€150,000-210,000

CONDITIONS OF SALE • BUYING AT CHRISTIE’S

CONDITIONS OF SALE

These Conditions of Sale and the Important Notices and Explanation of Cataloguing Practice set out the terms on which we offer the lots listed in this catalogue for sale. By registering to bid and/or by bidding at auction you agree to these terms, so you should read them carefully before doing so. You will find a glossary at the end explaining the meaning of the words and expressions coloured in bold. As well as these Conditions of Sale, lots in which we offer Non-Fungible Tokens for sale are governed by the Additional Conditions of Sale – NonFungible Tokens, which can be found at Appendix A to these Conditions of Sale. For the sale of Non-Fungible Tokens, to the extent there is a conflict between the “London Conditions of Sale Buying at Christie’s” and “Additional Conditions of Sale – Non-Fungible Tokens”, the latter controls.

Unless we own a lot ( symbol), Christie’s acts as agent for the seller. This means that we are providing services to the seller to help them sell their lot and that Christie’s is concluding the contract for the sale of the lot on behalf of the seller. When Christie’s is the agent of the seller, the contract of sale which is created by any successful bid by you for a lot will be directly between you and the seller, and not between you and Christie’s.

• BEFORE THE SALE

A

1

• DESCRIPTION OF LOTS

(a) Certain words used in the catalogue description have special meanings. You can find details of these on the page headed ‘Important Notices and Explanation of Cataloguing Practice’ which forms part of these terms. You can find a key to the Symbols found next to certain catalogue entries under the section of the catalogue called ‘Symbols Used in this Catalogue’.

(b) Our description of any lot in the catalogue, any condition report and any other statement made by us (whether orally or in writing) about any lot including about its nature or condition artist, period, materials, approximate dimensions or provenance are our opinion and not to be relied upon as a statement of fact. We do not carry out in-depth research of the sort carried out by professional historians and scholars. All dimensions and weights are approximate only.

2

• OUR RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR DESCRIPTION OF LOTS

We do not provide any guarantee in relation to the nature of a lot apart from our authenticity warranty contained in paragraph E2 and to the extent provided in paragraph I below.

• CONDITION

3

(a) The condition of lots sold in our auctions can vary widely due to factors such as age, previous damage, restoration, repair and wear and tear. Their nature means that they will rarely be in perfect condition Lots are sold ‘as is’, in the condition they are in at the time of the sale, without any representation or warranty or assumption of liability of any kind as to condition by Christie’s or by the seller.

(b) Any reference to condition in a catalogue entry or in a condition report will not amount to a full description of condition, and images may not show a lot clearly. Colours and shades may look different in print or on screen to how they look on physical inspection. Condition reports may be available to help you evaluate the condition of a lot Condition reports are provided free of charge as a convenience to our buyers and are for guidance only. They offer our opinion but they may not refer to all faults, inherent defects, restoration, alteration or adaptation because our staff are not professional restorers or conservators. For that reason they are not an alternative to examining a lot in person or taking your own professional advice. It is your responsibility to ensure that you have requested, received and considered any condition report.

• VIEWING LOTS PRE-AUCTION

4

(a) If you are planning to bid on a lot, you should inspect it personally or through a knowledgeable representative before you make a bid to make sure that you accept the description and its condition. We recommend you get your own advice from a restorer or other professional adviser.

(b) Pre-auction viewings are open to the public free of charge. Our specialists may be available to answer questions at pre-auction viewings or by appointment.

5

• ESTIMATES

Estimates are based on the condition, rarity, quality and provenance of the lots and on prices recently paid at auction for similar property. Estimates can change. Neither you, nor anyone else, may rely on any estimates as a prediction or guarantee of the actual selling price of a lot or its value for any other purpose. Estimates do not include the buyer’s premium or any applicable taxes.

• WITHDRAWAL

6

Christie’s may, at its option, withdraw any lot at any time prior to or during the sale of the lot. Christie’s has no liability to you for any decision to withdraw.

7 • JEWELLERY

(a) Coloured gemstones (such as rubies, sapphires and emeralds) may have been treated to improve their look, through methods such as heating and oiling. These methods are accepted by the international jewellery trade but may make the gemstone less strong and/or require special care over time.

(b) It will not be apparent to us whether a diamond is naturally or synthetically formed unless it has been tested by a gemmological laboratory. Where the diamond has been tested, a gemmological report will be available.

(c) All types of gemstones may have been improved by some method. You may request a gemmological report for any item which does not have a report if the request is made to us at least three weeks before the date of the auction and you pay the fee for the report.

(d) Certain weights in the catalogue description are provided for guidance purposes only as they have been estimated through measurement and, as such, should not be relied upon as exact.

(e) We do not obtain a gemmological report for every gemstone sold in our auctions. Where we do get gemmological reports from internationally accepted gemmological laboratories, such reports will be described in the catalogue. Reports from American gemmological laboratories will

describe any improvement or treatment to the gemstone. Reports from European gemmological laboratories will describe any improvement or treatment only if we request that they do so, but will confirm when no improvement or treatment has been made. Because of differences in approach and technology, laboratories may not agree whether a particular gemstone has been treated, the amount of treatment or whether treatment is permanent. The gemmological laboratories will only report on the improvements or treatments known to the laboratories at the date of the report. We do not guarantee nor are we responsible for any report or certificate from a gemmological laboratory that may accompany a lot

(f) For jewellery sales, estimates are based on the information in any gemmological report or, if no report is available, assume that the gemstones may have been treated or enhanced.

8 • WATCHES & CLOCKS

(a) Almost all clocks and watches are repaired in their lifetime and may include parts which are not original. We do not give a warranty that any individual component part of any watch or clock is authentic Watchbands described as ‘associated’ are not part of the original watch and may not be authentic. Clocks may be sold without pendulums, weights or keys.

(b) As collectors’ watches and clocks often have very fine and complex mechanisms, a general service, change of battery or further repair work may be necessary, for which you are responsible. We do not give a warranty that any watch or clock is in good working order. Certificates are not available unless described in the catalogue.

(c) Most watches have been opened to find out the type and quality of movement. For that reason, watches with water resistant cases may not be waterproof and we recommend you have them checked by a competent watchmaker before use. Important information about the sale, transport and shipping of watches and watchbands can be found in paragraph H2(g).

B • REGISTERING TO BID

1 • NEW BIDDERS

(a) If this is your first time bidding at Christie’s or you are a returning bidder who has not bought anything from any of our salerooms within the last two years you must register at least 48 hours before an auction to give us enough time to process and approve your registration. We may, at our option, decline to permit you to register as a bidder. You will be asked for the following:

(i) for individuals: Photo identification (driving licence, national identity card or passport) and, if not shown on the ID document, proof of your current address (for example, a current utility bill or bank statement).

(ii) for corporate clients: Your Certificate of Incorporation or equivalent document(s) showing your name and registered address together with documentary proof of directors and beneficial owners; and (iii) for trusts, partnerships, offshore companies and other business structures, please contact us in advance to discuss our requirements.

(b) We may also ask you to give us a financial reference and/or a deposit as a condition of allowing you to bid. For help, please contact our Credit Department on +44 (0)20 7839 9060.

2

• RETURNING BIDDERS

We may at our option ask you for current identification as described in paragraph B1(a) above, a financial reference or a deposit as a condition of allowing you to bid. If you have not bought anything from any of our salerooms in the last two years or if you want to spend more than on previous occasions, please contact our Credit Department on +44 (0)20 7839 9060.

• IF YOU FAIL TO PROVIDE THE RIGHT DOCUMENTS

3

If in our opinion you do not satisfy our bidder identification and registration procedures including, but not limited to completing any anti-money laundering and/or anti-terrorism financing checks we may require to our satisfaction, we may refuse to register you to bid, and if you make a successful bid, we may cancel the contract for sale between you and the seller.

• BIDDING ON BEHALF OF ANOTHER PERSON

4

(a) As authorised bidder. If you are bidding on behalf of another person who will pay Christie’s directly, that person will need to complete the registration requirements above before you can bid, and supply a signed letter authorising you to bid for them.

(b) As agent for a principal: If you register in your own name but are acting as agent for someone else (the “ultimate buyer(s)”) who will put you in funds before you pay us, you accept personal liability to pay the purchase price and all other sums due. We will require you to disclose the identity of the ultimate buyer(s) and may require you to provide documents to verify their identity in accordance with paragraph E3(b).

5

• BIDDING IN PERSON

If you wish to bid in the saleroom you must register for a numbered bidding paddle at least 30 minutes before the auction. You may register online at www.christies.com or in person. For help, please contact the Credit Department on +44 (0)20 7839 9060.

• BIDDING SERVICES

6

The bidding services described below are a free service offered as a convenience to our clients and Christie’s is not responsible for any error (human or otherwise), omission or breakdown in providing these services.

(a) Phone Bids

Your request for this service must be made no later than 24 hours prior to the auction. We will accept bids by telephone for lots only if our staff are available to take the bids. If you need to bid in a language other than in English, you must arrange this well before the auction. We may record telephone bids. By bidding on the telephone, you are agreeing to us recording your conversations. You also agree that your telephone bids are governed by these Conditions of Sale.

(b) Internet Bids on Christie’s LIVE™

For certain auctions we will accept bids over the Internet. For more information, please visit www.christies.com/register-and-bid As well as these Conditions of Sale, internet bids are governed by the Christie’s LIVE™ Terms of Use which are available at www.christies.com/christieslive-terms

c) Written Bids

You can find a Written Bid Form at any Christie’s office or by choosing the sale and viewing the lots online at www.christies.com. We must receive your completed Written Bid at least 24 hours before the auction. Bids must be placed in the currency of the saleroom. The auctioneer will take reasonable steps to carry out written bids at the lowest possible price, taking into account the reserve. If you make a written bid on a lot which does not have a reserve and there is no higher bid than yours, we will bid on your behalf at around 50% of the low estimate or, if lower, the amount of your bid. If we receive written bids on a lot for identical amounts, and at the auction these are the highest bids on the lot, we will sell the lot to the bidder whose written bid we received first.

• CONDUCTING THE SALE

C

1

• WHO CAN ENTER THE AUCTION

We may, at our option, refuse admission to our premises or decline to permit participation in any auction or to reject any bid.

• RESERVES

2

Unless otherwise indicated, all lots are subject to a reserve. We identify lots that are offered without reserve with the symbol • next to the lot number. The reserve cannot be more than the lot’s low estimate, unless the lot is subject to a third party guarantee and the irrevocable bid exceeds the printed low estimate. In that case, the reserve will be set at the amount of the irrevocable bid. Lots which are subject to a third party guarantee arrangement are identified in the catalogue with the symbol º♦

3 • AUCTIONEER’S DISCRETION

The auctioneer can at their sole option:

(a) refuse any bid; (b) move the bidding backwards or forwards in any way they may decide, or change the order of the lots; (c) withdraw any lot; (d) divide any lot or combine any two or more lots; (e) reopen or continue the bidding even after the hammer has fallen; and (f) in the case of error or dispute related to bidding and whether during or after the auction, to continue the bidding, determine the successful bidder, cancel the sale of the lot, or reoffer and resell any lot. If you believe that the auctioneer has accepted the successful bid in error, you must provide a written notice detailing your claim within 3 business days of the date of the auction. The auctioneer will consider such claim in good faith. If the auctioneer in the exercise of their discretion under this paragraph, decides after the auction is complete, to cancel the sale of a lot, or reoffer and resell a lot, they will notify the successful bidder no later than by the end of the 7th calendar day following the date of the auction. The auctioneer’s decision in exercise of this discretion is final. This paragraph does not in any way prejudice Christie’s ability to cancel the sale of a lot under any other applicable provision of these Conditions of Sale, including the rights of cancellation set forth in section B(3), E(2)(i), F(4) and J(1).

4

• BIDDING

The auctioneer accepts bids from: (a) bidders in the saleroom; (b) telephone bidders, and internet bidders through ‘Christie’s LIVE™ (as shown above in Section B6); and (c) written bids (also known as absentee bids or commission bids) left with us by a bidder before the auction.

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• BIDDING ON BEHALF OF THE SELLER

The auctioneer may, at their sole option, bid on behalf of the seller up to but not including the amount of the reserve either by making consecutive bids or by making bids in response to other bidders. The auctioneer will not identify these as bids made on behalf of the seller and will not make any bid on behalf of the seller at or above the reserve If lots are offered without reserve, the auctioneer will generally decide to open the bidding at 50% of the low estimate for the lot If no bid is made at that level, the auctioneer may decide to go backwards at their sole option until a bid is made, and then continue up from that amount. In the event that there are no bids on a lot the auctioneer may deem such lot unsold.

6 • BID INCREMENTS

Bidding generally starts below the low estimate and increases in steps (bid increments). The auctioneer will decide at their sole option where the bidding should start and the bid increments.

7 • CURRENCY CONVERTER

The saleroom video screens (and Christies LIVE™) may show bids in some other major currencies as well as sterling. Any conversion is for guidance only and we cannot be bound by any rate of exchange used. Christie’s is not responsible for any error (human or otherwise), omission or breakdown in providing these services.

8 • SUCCESSFUL BIDS

Unless the auctioneer decides to use their discretion as set out in paragraph C3 above, when the auctioneer’s hammer strikes, we have accepted the last bid. This means a contract for sale has been formed between the seller and the successful bidder. We will issue an invoice only to the registered bidder who made the successful bid. While we send out invoices by post and/or email after the auction, we do not accept responsibility for telling you whether or not your bid was successful. If you have bid by written bid, you should contact us by telephone or in person as soon as possible after the auction to get details of the outcome of your bid to avoid having to pay unnecessary storage charges.

• LOCAL BIDDING LAWS

9

You agree that when bidding in any of our sales that you will strictly comply with all local laws and regulations in force at the time of the sale for the relevant sale site.

D • THE BUYER’S PREMIUM, TAXES AND ARTIST’S RESALE ROYALTY

1 • THE BUYER’S PREMIUM

In addition to the hammer price, the successful bidder agrees to pay us a buyer’s premium on the hammer price of each lot sold. On all lots we charge 26% of the hammer price up to and including £800,000, 21% on that part of the hammer price over £800,000 and up to and including £4,500,000, and 15.0% of that part of the hammer price above £4,500,000. VAT will be added to the buyer’s premium and is payable by you. For lots offered under the VAT Margin Scheme or Temporary Admission VAT rules, the VAT may not be shown separately on our invoice because of tax laws. You may be eligible to have a VAT refund in certain circumstances if the lot is exported. Please see the “VAT refunds: what can I reclaim?” section of ‘VAT Symbols and Explanation’ for further information.

2 • TAXES

The successful bidder is responsible for all applicable tax including any VAT, GST, sales or compensating use tax or equivalent tax wherever such taxes may arise on the hammer price and the buyer’s premium VAT charges and refunds depend on the particular circumstances of the buyer. It is the buyer’s responsibility to ascertain and pay all taxes due. VAT is payable on the buyer’s premium and, for some lots, VAT is payable on the hammer price. Following the departure of the UK from the EU (Brexit), UK VAT and Customs rules will apply only. For lots Christie’s ships or delivers to the United States, sales or use tax may be due on the hammer price, buyer’s premium and/or any other charges related to the lot, regardless of the nationality or citizenship of the purchaser. Christie’s will collect sales tax where legally required.

The applicable sales tax rate will be determined based upon the state, county, or locale to which the lot will be shipped or delivered. Successful bidders claiming an exemption from sales tax must provide appropriate documentation to Christie’s prior to the release of the lot. For shipments/deliveries to those states for which Christie’s is not required to collect sales tax, a successful bidder may be required to remit use tax to that state’s taxing authorities. Christie’s recommends you obtain your own independent tax advice with further questions.

For lots Christie’s ships or delivers to Jersey (Channel Islands), GST at a rate of 5% will be due on the hammer price, buyer’s premium, freight charges (as set out on your Shipping Quote Acceptance Form) and any applicable customs duty. Christie’s will collect GST from you, where legally required to do so.

For lots purchased by a successful bidder with a registered address in India and who has bid via Christie’s LIVE™, an Indian Equalisation Levy Tax at a rate of 2% will be due on the hammer price and buyer’s premium (exclusive of any applicable VAT) Christie’s will collect the Indian Equalisation Levy Tax from you, where required to do so.

• ARTIST’S RESALE ROYALTY

3

In certain countries, local laws entitle the artist or the artist’s estate to a royalty known as ‘artist’s resale right’ when any lot created by the artist is sold. We identify these lots with the λ symbol next to the lot number. If these laws apply to a lot, you must pay us an extra amount equal to the royalty. We will pay the royalty to the appropriate authority on the seller’s behalf.

The artist’s resale royalty applies if the hammer price of the lot is 1,000 GBP or more if located in the United Kingdom at the time of sale. The total royalty for any lot cannot be more than 12,500 GBP. We work out the amount owed as follows:

Royalty for the portion of the hammer price (in Pound Sterling)

4% up to 50,000

3% between 50,000.01 and 200,000

1% between 200,000.01 and 350,000

0.50% between 350,000.01 and 500,000 over 500,000, the lower of 0.25% and 12,500 GBP.

E • WARRANTIES

1

• SELLER’S WARRANTIES

For each lot, the seller gives a warranty that the seller:

(a) is the owner of the lot or a joint owner of the lot acting with the permission of the other co-owners or, if the seller is not the owner or a joint owner of the lot, has the permission of the owner to sell the lot, or the right to do so in law; and

(b) has the right to transfer ownership of the lot to the buyer without any restrictions or claims by anyone else.

If one or more of the above warranties are incorrect, the seller shall not have to pay more than the purchase price (as defined in paragraph F1(a) below) paid by you to us. The seller will not be responsible to you for any reason for loss of profits or business, expected savings, loss of opportunity or interest, costs, damages, other damages or expenses. The seller gives no warranty in relation to any lot other than as set out above and, as far as the seller is allowed by law, all warranties from the seller to you, and all other obligations upon the seller which may be added to this agreement by law, are excluded.

• OUR AUTHENTICITY WARRANTY

2

We warrant, subject to the terms below, that the lots in our sales are authentic (our ‘authenticity warranty’). If, within five years of the date of the auction, you give notice to us that your lot is not authentic, subject to the terms below, we will refund the purchase price paid by you. The meaning of authentic can be found in the glossary at the end of these Conditions of Sale. The terms of the authenticity warranty are as follows:

(a) It will be honoured for claims notified within a period of five years from the date of the auction. After such time, we will not be obligated to honour the authenticity warranty

(b) It is given only for information shown in UPPERCASE type in the first line of the catalogue description (the ‘Heading’). It does not apply to any information other than in the Heading even if shown in UPPERCASE type

(c) The authenticity warranty does not apply to any Heading or part of a Heading which is qualified Qualified means limited by a clarification in a lot’s catalogue description or by the use in a Heading of one of the terms listed in the section titled Qualified Headings on the page of the catalogue headed ‘Important Notices and Explanation of Cataloguing Practice’. For example, use of the term ‘ATTRIBUTED TO…’ in a Heading means that the lot is in Christie’s opinion probably a work by the named artist but no warranty is provided that the lot is the work of the named artist. Please read the full list of Qualified Headings and a lot’s full catalogue description before bidding.

(d) The authenticity warranty applies to the Heading as amended by any Saleroom notice

(e) The authenticity warranty does not apply where scholarship has developed since the auction leading to a change in generally accepted opinion. Further, it does not apply if the Heading either matched the generally accepted opinion of experts at the date of the sale or drew attention to any conflict of opinion.

(f) The authenticity warranty does not apply if the lot can only be shown not to be authentic by a scientific process which, on the date we published the catalogue, was not available or generally accepted for use, or which was unreasonably expensive or impractical, or which was likely to have damaged the lot

(g) The benefit of the authenticity warranty is only available to the original buyer shown on the invoice for the lot issued at the time of the sale and only if, on the date of the notice of claim, the original buyer is the full owner of the lot and the lot is free from any claim, interest or restriction by anyone else. The benefit of this authenticity warranty may not be transferred to anyone else.

(h) In order to claim under the authenticity warranty, you must:

(i) give us written notice of your claim within five years of the date of the auction. We may require full details and supporting evidence of any such claim;

(ii) at Christie’s option, we may require you to provide the written opinions of two recognised experts in the field of the lot mutually agreed by you and us in advance confirming that the lot is not authentic. If we have any doubts, we reserve the right to obtain additional opinions at our expense; and

(iii) return the lot at your expense to the saleroom from which you bought it in the condition it was in at the time of sale.

(i) Your only right under this authenticity warranty is to cancel the sale and receive a refund of the purchase price paid by you to us. We will not, in any circumstances, be required to pay you more than the purchase price nor will we be liable for any loss of profits or business, loss of opportunity or value, expected savings or interest, costs, damages, other damages or expenses.

(j) Books Where the lot is a book, we give an additional warranty for 14 days from the date of the sale that if on collation any lot is defective in text or illustration, we will refund your purchase price, subject to the following terms:

(i) This additional warranty does not apply to:

(a) the absence of blanks, half titles, tissue guards or advertisements, damage in respect of bindings, stains, spotting, marginal tears or other defects not affecting completeness of the text or illustration;

(b) drawings, autographs, letters or manuscripts, signed photographs, music, atlases, maps or periodicals;

(c) books not identified by title;

(d) lots sold without a printed estimate;

(e) books which are described in the catalogue as sold not subject to return; or (f) defects stated in any condition report or announced at the time of sale.

(ii) To make a claim under this paragraph you must give written details of the defect and return the lot to the sale room at which you bought it in the same condition as at the time of sale, within 14 days of the date of the sale.

(K) South East Asian Modern and Contemporary Art and Chinese Calligraphy and Painting.

In these categories, the authenticity warranty does not apply because current scholarship does not permit the making of definitive statements. Christie’s does, however, agree to cancel a sale in either of these two categories of art where it has been proven the lot is a forgery. Christie’s will refund to the original buyer the purchase price in accordance with the terms of Christie’s authenticity warranty, provided that the original buyer notifies us with full supporting evidence documenting the forgery claim within twelve (12) months of the date of the auction. Such evidence must be satisfactory to us that the lot is a forgery in accordance with paragraph E2(h)(ii) above and the lot must be returned to us in accordance with E2h(iii) above. Paragraphs E2(b), (c), (d), (e), (f) and (g) and (i) also apply to a claim under these categories.

(l) Chinese, Japanese and Korean artefacts (excluding Chinese, Japanese and Korean calligraphy, paintings, prints, drawings and jewellery).

In these categories, paragraph E2 (b) – (e) above shall be amended so that where no maker or artist is identified, the authenticity warranty is given not only for the Heading but also for information regarding date or period shown in UPPERCASE type in the second line of the catalogue description (the “SubHeading”). Accordingly, all references to the Heading in paragraph E2 (b) – (e) above shall be read as references to both the Heading and the SubHeading

3 • YOUR WARRANTIES

(a) You warrant that the funds used for settlement are not connected with any criminal activity, including tax evasion, and you are neither under investigation, nor have you been charged with or convicted of money laundering, terrorist activities or other crimes.

(b) Where you are bidding as agent on behalf of any ultimate buyer(s) who will put you in funds before you pay Christie’s for the lot(s), you warrant that:

(i) you have conducted appropriate customer due diligence on the ultimate buyer(s) and have complied with all applicable anti-money laundering, counter terrorist financing and sanctions laws;

(ii) you will disclose to us the identity of the ultimate buyer(s) (including any officers and beneficial owner(s) of the ultimate buyer(s) and any persons acting on its behalf) and on our request, provide documents to verify their identity;

(iii) the arrangements between you and the ultimate buyer(s) in relation to the lot or otherwise do not, in whole or in part, facilitate tax crimes;

(iv) you do not know, and have no reason to suspect that the ultimate buyer(s) (or its officers, beneficial owners or any persons acting on its behalf) are on a sanctions list, are under investigation for, charged with or convicted of money laundering, terrorist activities or other crimes, or that the funds used for settlement are connected with the proceeds of any criminal activity, including tax evasion; and

(v) where you are a regulated person who is supervised for anti-money laundering purposes under the laws of the EEA or another jurisdiction with requirements equivalent to the EU 4th Money Laundering Directive, and we do not request documents to verify the ultimate buyer’s identity at the time of registration, you consent to us relying on your due diligence on the ultimate buyer, and will retain their identification and verification documents for a period of not less than 5 years from the date of the transaction. You will make such documentation available for immediate inspection on our request.

• PAYMENT

F

1

• HOW TO PAY

(a) Immediately following the auction, you must pay the purchase price being:

(i) the hammer price; and

(ii) the buyer’s premium; and

(iii) any amounts due under section D3 above; and

(iv) any duties, goods, sales, use, compensating or service tax or VAT.

Payment is due no later than by the end of the seventh calendar day following the date of the auction, or no later than 24 hours after we issue you with an invoice in the case of payment made in cryptocurrency, as the case may be (the ‘due date’).

(b) We will only accept payment from the registered bidder. Once issued, we cannot change the buyer’s name on an invoice or re-issue the invoice in a different name. You must pay immediately even if you want to export the lot and you need an export licence.

(c) You must pay for lots bought at Christie’s in the United Kingdom in the currency stated on the invoice in one of the following ways:

(i) Wire transfer

You must make payments to: Lloyds Bank Plc, City Office, PO Box 217, 72 Lombard Street, London EC3P 3BT. Account number: 00172710, sort code: 30-00-02 Swift code: LOYDGB2LCTY. IBAN (international bank account number): GB81 LOYD 3000 0200 1727 10.

(ii) Credit Card

We accept most major credit cards subject to certain conditions. You may make payment via credit card in person. You may also make a ‘cardholder not present’ (CNP) payment by calling Christie’s Post-Sale Services Department on +44 (0)20 7752 3200 or for some sales, by logging into your MyChristie’s account by going to: www.christies. com/mychristies. Details of the conditions and restrictions applicable to credit card payments are available from our Post-Sale Services Department, whose details are set out in paragraph (e) below.

If you pay for your purchase using a credit card issued outside the region of the sale, depending on the type of credit card and account you hold, the payment may incur a cross-border transaction fee. If you think this may apply to, you, please check with your credit card issuer before making the payment.

Please note that for sales that permit online payment, certain transactions will be ineligible for credit card payment.

(iii) Cash

We accept cash subject to a maximum of £5,000 per buyer per year at our Cashier’s Department only (subject to conditions).

(iv) Banker’s draft

You must make these payable to Christie’s and there may be conditions.

(v) Cheque

You must make cheques payable to Christie’s. Cheques must be from accounts in pounds sterling (GBP) from a United Kingdom bank.

(vi) Cryptocurrency

With the exception of clients resident in Mainland China, payment for a lot marked with the symbol may be made in a cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies of our choosing. Such cryptocurrency payments must be made in accordance with the Terms for Payment by Buyers in Cryptocurrency set out at Appendix B in these Conditions of Sale.

(d) You must quote the sale number, lot number(s), your invoice number and Christie’s client account number when making a payment. All payments sent by post must be sent to: Christie’s, Cashiers Department, 8 King Street, St James’s, London, SW1Y 6QT.

(e) For more information please contact our Post-Sale Service Department by phone on +44 (0)20 7752 3200 or fax on +44 (0)20 752 3300.

2

• TRANSFERRING OWNERSHIP TO YOU

You will not own the lot and ownership of the lot will not pass to you until we have received full and clear payment of the purchase price even in circumstances where we have released the lot to the buyer.

3 • TRANSFERRING RISK TO YOU

The risk in and responsibility for the lot will transfer to you from whichever is the earlier of the following:

(a) When you collect the lot; or

(b) At the end of the 30th day following the date of the auction or, if earlier, the date the lot is taken into care by a third-party warehouse as set out on the page headed ‘Storage and Collection’, unless we have agreed otherwise with you in writing.

• WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DO NOT PAY

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(a) If you fail to pay us the purchase price in full by the due date, we will be entitled to do one or more of the following (as well as enforce our rights under paragraph F5 and any other rights or remedies we have by law):

(i)to charge interest from the due date at a rate of 5% a year above the UK Lloyds Bank base rate from time to time on the unpaid amount due;

(ii) we can cancel the sale of the lot. If we do this, we may sell the lot again, publicly or privately on such terms we shall think necessary or appropriate, in which case you must pay us any shortfall between the purchase price and the proceeds from the resale. You must also pay all costs, expenses, losses, damages and legal fees we have to pay or may suffer and any shortfall in the seller’s commission on the resale;

(iii) we can pay the seller an amount up to the net proceeds payable in respect of the amount bid by your default in which case you acknowledge and understand that Christie’s will have all of the rights of the seller to pursue you for such amounts;

(iv) we can hold you legally responsible for the purchase price and may begin legal proceedings to recover it together with other losses, interest, legal fees and costs as far as we are allowed by law;

(v) we can take what you owe us from any amounts which we or any company in the Christie’s Group may owe you (including any deposit or other part-payment which you have paid to us);

(vi) we can, at our option, reveal your identity and contact details to the seller;

(vii) we can reject at any future auction any bids made by or on behalf of the buyer or to obtain a deposit from the buyer before accepting any bids;

(viii) to exercise all the rights and remedies of a person holding security over any property in our possession owned by you, whether by way of pledge, security interest or in any other way as permitted by the law of the place where such property is located. You will be deemed to have granted such security to us and we may retain such property as collateral security for your obligations to us; and

(ix) we can take any other action we see necessary or appropriate.

(b) If you owe money to us or to another Christie’s Group company, we can use any amount you do pay, including any deposit or other partpayment you have made to us, or which we owe you, to pay off any amount you owe to us or another Christie’s Group company for any transaction.

(c) If you make payment in full after the due date, and we choose to accept such payment we may charge you storage and transport costs from the date that is ninety (90) calendar days following the auction in accordance with paragraphs Gc and Gd.

5

• KEEPING YOUR PROPERTY

If you owe money to us or to another Christie’s Group company, as well as the rights set out in F4 above, we can use or deal with any of your property we hold or which is held by another Christie’s Group company in any way we are allowed to by law. We will only release your property to you after you pay us or the relevant Christie’s Group company in full for what you owe.

However, if we choose, we can also sell your property in any way we think appropriate. We will use the proceeds of the sale against any amounts you owe us and we will pay any amount left from that sale to you. If there is a shortfall, you must pay us any difference between the amount we have received from the sale and the amount you owe us.

• COLLECTION AND STORAGE

G

(a) You must collect purchased lots within thirty (30) days from the auction (but note that lots will not be released to you until you have made full and clear payment of all amounts due to us).

(b) If you do not collect any lot within ninety (90) days following the auction we can, at our option:

(i) charge you storage costs at the rates set out at www.christies.com/ en/help/buying-guide/storage-fees.

(ii) move the lot to another Christie’s location or an affiliate or third party warehouse and charge you transport costs and administration fees for doing so and you will be subject to the third party storage warehouse’s standard terms and to pay for their standard fees and costs.use’s standard terms and to pay for their standard fees and costs. (iii) sell the lot in any commercially reasonable way we think appropriate.

(c) The Storage Conditions which can be found at www.christies.com/en/ help/buying-guide/storage-conditions will apply.

(d) Nothing in this paragraph is intended to limit our rights under paragraph F4.

• TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING

H

1

• TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING

We will enclose a transport and shipping form with each invoice sent to you. You must make all transport and shipping arrangements. However, we can arrange to pack, transport and ship your property if you ask us to and pay the costs of doing so. We recommend that you ask us for an estimate, especially for any large items or items of high value that need professional packing before you bid. We may also suggest other handlers, packers, transporters or experts if you ask us to do so. For more information, please contact Christie’s Art Transport on +44 (0)20 7839 9060. See the information set out at www.christies.com/ shipping or contact us at arttransportlondon@christies.com. We will take reasonable care when we are handling, packing, transporting and shipping a lot. However, if we recommend another company for any of these purposes, we are not responsible for their acts, failure to act or neglect.

• EXPORT AND IMPORT

2

Any lot sold at auction may be affected by laws on exports from the country in which it is sold and the import restrictions of other countries Many countries require a declaration of export for property leaving the country and/or an import declaration on entry of property into the country. Local laws may prevent you from importing a lot or may prevent you selling a lot in the country you import it into. We will not be obliged to cancel your purchase and refund the purchase price if your lot may not be exported, imported or it is seized for any reason by a government authority. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy the requirements of any applicable laws or regulations relating to the export or import of any lot you purchase.

(a) You alone are responsible for getting advice about and meeting the requirements of any laws or regulations which apply to exporting or importing any lot prior to bidding. If you are refused a licence or there is a delay in getting one, you must still pay us in full for the lot. We may be able to help you apply for the appropriate licences if you ask us to and pay our fee for doing so. However, we cannot guarantee that you will get one. For more information, please contact Christie’s Art Transport Department on +44 (0)20 7839 9060. See the information set out at www.christies.com/shipping or contact us at arttransport_ london@ christies.com.

(b) You alone are responsible for any applicable taxes, tariffs or other government-imposed charges relating to the export or import of the lot

If Christie’s exports or imports the lot on your behalf, and if Christie’s pays these applicable taxes, tariffs or other government-imposed charges, you agree to refund that amount to Christie’s.

(c) Lots made of protected species

Lots made of or including (regardless of the percentage) endangered and other protected species of wildlife are marked with the symbol ~ in the catalogue. This material includes, among other things, ivory, tortoiseshell, crocodile skin, rhinoceros horn, whalebone, certain species of coral, and Brazilian rosewood. You should check the relevant customs laws and regulations before bidding on any lot containing wildlife material if you plan to export the lot from the country in which the lot is sold and import it into another country as a licence may be required. In some cases, the lot can only be shipped with an independent scientific confirmation of species and/or age, and you will need to obtain these at your own cost. Several countries have imposed restrictions on dealing in elephant ivory, ranging from a total ban on importing African elephant ivory in the United States to importing, exporting and selling under strict measures in other countries. The UK and EU have both implemented regulations on selling, exporting and importing elephant ivory. In our London sales, lots made of or including elephant ivory material are marked with the symbol and are offered with the benefit of being registered as ‘exempt’ in accordance with the UK Ivory Act. Handbags containing endangered or protected species material are marked with the symbol ≈ and further information can be found in paragraph H2(h) below. We will not be obliged to cancel your purchase and refund the purchase price if your lot may not be exported, imported or it is seized for any reason by a government authority. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy the requirements of any applicable laws or regulations relating to the export or import of property containing such protected or regulated material.

(d) Lots of Iranian origin

As a convenience to buyers, Christie’s indicates under the title of a lot if the lot originates from Iran (Persia). Some countries prohibit or restrict the purchase and/or import of Iranian-origin property. It is your responsibility to ensure you do not bid on or import a lot in contravention of any sanctions, trade embargoes or other laws that apply to you. For example, the USA prohibits dealings in and import of Iranian-origin “works of conventional craftsmanship” (such as carpets, textiles, decorative objects, and scientific instruments) without an appropriate licence. Christie’s has a general OFAC licence which, subject to compliance with certain conditions, may enable a buyer to import this type of lot into the USA. If you use Christie’s general OFAC licence for this purpose, you agree to comply with the licence conditions and provide Christie’s with all relevant information. You also acknowledge that Christie’s will disclose your personal information and your use of the licence to OFAC.

(e) Gold

Gold of less than 18ct does not qualify in all countries as ‘gold’ and may be refused import into those countries as ‘gold’.

(f) Jewellery over 50 years old

Under current laws, jewellery over 50 years old which is worth £39,219 or more will require an export licence which we can apply for on your behalf. It may take up to eight weeks to obtain the export jewellery licence.

(g) Watches

Many of the watches offered for sale in this catalogue are pictured with straps made of endangered or protected animal materials such as alligator or crocodile. These lots are marked with the symbol ψ in the catalogue. These endangered species straps are shown for display purposes only and are not for sale. Christie’s will remove and retain the strap prior to shipment from the sale site. At some sale sites, Christie’s may, at its discretion, make the displayed endangered species strap available to the buyer of the lot free of charge if collected in person from the sale site within one year of the date of the sale. Please check with the department for details on a particular lot. For all symbols and other markings referred to in paragraph H2, please note that lots are marked as a convenience to you, but we do not accept liability for errors or for failing to mark lots

(h) Handbags

A lot marked with the symbol ≈ next to the lot number includes endangered or protected species material and is subject to CITES regulations. This lot may only be shipped to an address within the country of the sale site or personally picked up from our saleroom. The term “hardware” refers to the metallic parts of the handbag, such as the buckle hardware, base studs, lock and keys and/or strap, which are plated with a coloured finish (e.g. gold, silver, palladium). The terms “Gold Hardware”, “Silver Hardware”, “Palladium Hardware”, etc. refer to the tone or colour of the hardware and not the actual material used. If the handbag incorporates solid metal hardware, this will be referenced in the catalogue description.

• OUR LIABILITY TO YOU

I

(a) We give no warranty in relation to any statement made, or information given, by us or our representatives or employees, about any lot other than as set out in the authenticity warranty and, as far as we are allowed by law, all warranties and other terms which may be added to this agreement by law are excluded. The seller’s warranties contained in paragraph E1 are their own and we do not have any liability to you in relation to those warranties

(b) (i) We are not responsible to you for any reason (whether for breaking this agreement or any other matter relating to your purchase of, or bid for, any lot) other than in the event of fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation by us or other than as expressly set out in these Conditions of Sale; or (ii) we do not give any representation, warranty or guarantee or assume any liability of any kind in respect of any lot with regard to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, description, size, quality, condition, attribution, authenticity, rarity, importance, medium, provenance, exhibition history, literature, or historical relevance. Except as required by local law, any warranty of any kind is excluded by this paragraph.

(c) In particular, please be aware that our written and telephone bidding services, Christie’s LIVE™, condition reports, currency converter and saleroom video screens are free services and we are not responsible to you for any error (human or otherwise), omission or breakdown in these services.

(d) We have no responsibility to any person other than a buyer in connection with the purchase of any lot

(e) If, in spite of the terms in paragraphs (a) to (d) or E2(i) above, we are found to be liable to you for any reason, we shall not have to pay more than the purchase price paid by you to us. We will not be responsible to you for any reason for loss of profits or business, loss of opportunity or value, expected savings or interest, costs, damages, or expenses.

J • OTHER TERMS

1 • OUR ABILITY TO CANCEL

In addition to the other rights of cancellation contained in this agreement, we can cancel a sale of a lot if: (i) any of your warranties in paragraph E3 are not correct; (ii) we reasonably believe that completing the transaction is or may be unlawful; or (iii) we reasonably believe that the sale places us or the seller under any liability to anyone else or may damage our reputation.

2 • RECORDINGS

We may videotape and record proceedings at any auction. We will keep any personal information confidential, except to the extent disclosure is required by law. However, we may, through this process, use or share these recordings with another Christie’s Group company and marketing partners to analyse our customers and to help us to tailor our services for buyers. If you do not want to be videotaped, you may make arrangements to make a telephone or written bid or bid on Christie’s LIVE™ instead. Unless we agree otherwise in writing, you may not videotape or record proceedings at any auction.

3 • COPYRIGHT

We own the copyright in all images, illustrations and written material produced by or for us relating to a lot (including the contents of our catalogues unless otherwise noted in the catalogue). You cannot use them without our prior written permission. We do not offer any guarantee that you will gain any copyright or other reproduction rights to the lot

5

4 • ENFORCING THIS AGREEMENT

If a court finds that any part of this agreement is not valid or is illegal or impossible to enforce, that part of the agreement will be treated as being deleted and the rest of this agreement will not be affected.

• TRANSFERRING YOUR RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

You may not grant a security over or transfer your rights or responsibilities under these terms on the contract of sale with the buyer unless we have given our written permission. This agreement will be binding on your successors or estate and anyone who takes over your rights and responsibilities.

• TRANSLATIONS

6

If we have provided a translation of this agreement, we will use this original version in deciding any issues or disputes which arise under this agreement.

• PERSONAL INFORMATION

7

We will hold and process your personal information and may pass it to another Christie’s Group company for use as described in, and in line with, our privacy notice at www.christies.com/about-us/contact/ privacy and if you are a resident of California you can see a copy of our California Consumer Privacy Act statement at https://www.christies. com/about-us/contact/ccpa

8 • WAIVER

No failure or delay to exercise any right or remedy provided under these Conditions of Sale shall constitute a waiver of that or any other right or remedy, nor shall it prevent or restrict the further exercise of that or any other right or remedy. No single or partial exercise of such right or remedy shall prevent or restrict the further exercise of that or any other right or remedy.

9 • LAW AND DISPUTES

This agreement, and any contractual or non-contractual dispute arising out of or in connection with this agreement, will be governed by English law. Before either you or we start any court proceedings and if you and we agree, you and we will try to settle the dispute by mediation in accordance with the CEDR Model Mediation Procedure. If the dispute is not settled by mediation, you agree for our benefit that the dispute will be referred to and dealt with exclusively in the English courts; however, we will have the right to bring proceedings against you in any other court.

10 •REPORTING ON WWW.CHRISTIES.COM

Details of all lots sold by us, including catalogue descriptions and prices, may be reported on www.christies.com. Sales totals are hammer price plus buyer’s premium and do not reflect costs, financing fees, or application of buyer’s or seller’s credits. We regret that we cannot agree to requests to remove these details from www.christies.com

• GLOSSARY

K

auctioneer: the individual auctioneer and/or Christie’s. authentic: a genuine example, rather than a copy or forgery of:

(i) the work of a particular artist, author or manufacturer, if the lot is described in the Heading as the work of that artist, author or manufacturer;

(ii) a work created within a particular period or culture, if the lot is described in the Heading as a work created during that period or culture;

(iii) a work for a particular origin source if the lot is described in the Heading as being of that origin or source; or

(iv) in the case of gems, a work which is made of a particular material, if the lot is described in the

Heading as being made of that material.

authenticity warranty: the guarantee we give in this agreement that a lot is authentic as set out in section E2 of this agreement.

buyer’s premium: the charge the buyer pays us along with the hammer price

catalogue description: the description of a lot in the catalogue for the auction, as amended by any saleroom notice

Christie’s Group: Christie’s International Plc, its subsidiaries and other companies within its corporate group.

condition: the physical condition of a lot

due date: has the meaning given to it in paragraph F1(a).

estimate: the price range included in the catalogue or any saleroom notice within which we believe a lot may sell. Low estimate means the lower figure in the range and high estimate means the higher figure. The mid estimate is the midpoint between the two.

hammer price: the amount of the highest bid the auctioneer accepts for the sale of a lot

Heading: has the meaning given to it in paragraph E2.

SubHeading: has the meaning given to it in paragraph E2. lot: an item to be offered at auction (or two or more items to be offered at auction as a group).

other damages: any special, consequential, incidental or indirect damages of any kind or any damages which fall within the meaning of ‘special’, ‘incidental’ or ‘consequential’ under local law.

purchase price: has the meaning given to it in paragraph F1(a).

provenance: the ownership history of a lot

qualified: has the meaning given to it in paragraph E2 and Qualified Headings means the section headed Qualified Headings on the page of the catalogue headed ‘Important Notices and Explanation of Cataloguing Practice’.

reserve: the confidential amount below which we will not sell a lot

saleroom notice: a written notice posted next to the lot in the saleroom and on www.christies.com, which is also read to prospective telephone bidders and notified to clients who have left commission bids, or an announcement made by the auctioneer either at the beginning of the sale, or before a particular lot is auctioned.

UPPER CASE type: means having all capital letters.

warranty: a statement or representation in which the person making it guarantees that the facts set out in it are correct.

VAT SYMBOLS AND EXPLANATION (FOR ALL LOTS EXCLUDING NFTS)

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

The VAT liability in force on the date of the sale will be the rules under which we invoice you. You can find the meanings of words in bold on this page in the glossary section of the Conditions of Sale.

VAT PAYABLE

Symbol

No Symbol

†

θ

We will use the VAT Margin Scheme in accordance with Section 50A of the VAT Act 1994 & SI VAT (Special Provisions) Order 1995.

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

We will invoice under standard VAT rules and VAT will be charged at 20% on both the hammer price and buyer’s premium and shown separately on our invoice. For qualifying books only, no VAT is payable on the hammer price or the buyer’s premium

* These lots have been imported from outside the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable at 5% on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

Ω These lots have been imported from outside the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Customs Duty as applicable will be added to the hammer price and Import VAT at 20% will be charged on the Duty Inclusive hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

α The VAT treatment will depend on whether you have registered to bid with a UK address or non-UK address:

• If you register to bid with an address within the UK you will be invoiced under the VAT Margin Scheme (see No Symbol above).

• If you register to bid with an address outside of the UK you will be invoiced under standard VAT rules (see † symbol above)

‡ For wine offered ‘in bond’ only. If you choose to buy the wine in bond no Excise Duty or Clearance VAT will be charged on the hammer If you choose to buy the wine out of bond Excise Duty as applicable will be added to the hammer price and Clearance VAT at 20% will be charged on the Duty inclusive hammer price

Whether you buy the wine in bond or out of bond, 20% VAT will be added to the buyer’s premium and shown on the invoice.

VAT refunds: what can I reclaim?

Non-UK buyer If you meet ALL of the conditions in notes 1 to 3 below we will refund the following tax charges:

No symbol We will refund the VAT amount in the buyer’s premium

and α We will refund the VAT charged on the hammer price. VAT on the buyer’s premium can only be refunded if you are an overseas business. The VAT amount in the buyer’s premium cannot be refunded to non-trade clients.

‡ (wine only)

No Excise Duty or Clearance VAT will be charged on the hammer price providing you export the wine while ‘in bond’ directly outside the UK using an Excise authorised shipper. VAT on the buyer’s premium can only be refunded if you are an overseas business. The VAT amount in the buyer’s premium cannot be refunded to non-trade clients.

* and Ω We will refund the Import VAT charged on the hammer price and the VAT amount in the buyer’s premium

1. We CANNOT offer refunds of VAT amounts or Import VAT to buyers who do not meet all applicable conditions in full. If you are unsure whether you will be entitled to a refund, please contact Client Services at the address below before you bid.

2. No VAT amounts or Import VAT will be refunded where the total refund is under £100.

3. To receive a refund of VAT amounts/ Import VAT (as applicable) a non-UK buyer must:

a) have registered to bid with an address outside of the UK; and

b) provide immediate proof of correct export out of the UK within the

required time frames of: 30 days of collection via a ‘controlled export’, but no later than 90 days from the date of the sale for * and Ωlots. All other lots must be exported within 90 days of the sale.

4. Details of the documents which you must provide to us to show satisfactory proof of export/ shipping are available from our VAT team at the address below. We charge a processing fee of £35.00 per invoice to check shipping/ export documents. We will waive this processingfeeifyouappointChristie’s Shipping Department to arrange your export/shipping.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

No part of this catalogue may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Christie’s.

© COPYRIGHT, CHRISTIE, MANSON & WOODS LTD. (2024)

5. Following the UK’s departure from the EU (Brexit), private buyers will only be able to secure VAT-free invoicing and/or VAT refunds if they instruct Christie’s or a third party commercial shipper to export out of the UK on their behalf.

6. Private buyers who choose to export their purchased lots from the UK hand carry will now be charged VAT at the applicable rate and will not be able to claim a VAT refund.

7. If you appoint Christie’s Art Transport or one of our authorised shippers to arrange your export/ shipping we will issue you with an export invoice with the applicable VAT or duties cancelled as outlined above. If you later cancel or change the shipment in a manner that infringes the rules outlined above we will issue a revised invoice charging you all applicable taxes/ charges. If you export via a third party commercial shipper, you must provide us with sufficient proof of export in order for us to cancel the applicable VAT or duties outlined above.

8. If you ask us to re-invoice you under normal UK VAT rules (as if the lot had been sold with a † symbol) instead of under the Margin Scheme the lot may become ineligible to be resold using the Margin Schemes. You should take professional advice if you are unsure how this may affect you.

9. All reinvoicing requests, corrections, or other VAT adjustments must be received within four years from the date of sale.

If you have any questions about VAT refunds please contact Christie’s Client Services on info@christies.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7389 2886. Fax: +44 (0)20 7839 1611.

SYMBOLS USED IN THIS CATALOGUE

The meaning of words coloured in bold in this section can be found in paragraph K, Glossary, of the section of the catalogue headed ‘Conditions of Sale’.

º Christie’s has a direct financial interest in the lot. See Important Notices and Explanation of Cataloguing Practice in the Conditions of Sale for further information.

º

♦

Christie’s has provided a minimum price guarantee and has a direct financial interest in this lot. Christie’s has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold. See the Important Notices in the Conditions of Sale for further information.

Christie’s has a financial interest in the lot. See Important Notices in the Conditions of Sale for further information.

Christie’s has a financial interest in this lot and has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold. See the Important Notices in the Conditions of Sale for further information.

¤ A party with a direct or indirect interest in the lot who may have knowledge of the lot’s reserve or other material information may be bidding on the lot

λ

Artist’s Resale Right. See paragraph D3 of the Conditions of Sale for further information.

• Lot offered without reserve

∼ Lot incorporates material from endangered species which could result in export restrictions. See paragraph H2(c) of the Conditions of Sale for further information.

≈

Handbag lot incorporates material from endangered species. International shipping restrictions apply. See paragraph H2 of the Conditions of Sale for further information.

Lot incorporates elephant ivory material. See paragraph H2 of the Conditions of Sale for further information.

ψ

Lot incorporates material from endangered species which is shown for display purposes only and is not for sale. See paragraph H2(h) of the Conditions of Sale for further information.

Lot is a Non Fungible Token (NFT). Please see Appendix A

– Additional Conditions of Sale – Non- Fungible Tokens in the Conditions of Sale for further information.

Lot contains both a Non Fungible Token (NFT) and a physical work of art. Please see Appendix A – Additional Conditions of Sale – Non-Fungible Tokens in the Conditions of Sale for further information.

With the exception of clients resident in Mainland China, you may elect to make payment of the purchase price for the lot via a digital wallet in the name of the registered bidder, which must be maintained with one of the following: Coinbase Custody Trust; Coinbase, Inc.; Fidelity Digital Assets Services, LLC; Gemini Trust Company, LLC; or Paxos Trust Company, LLC. Please see the lot notice and Appendix B – Terms for Payment by Buyers in Cryptocurrency in the Conditions of Sale for further requirements and information.

See VAT Symbols and Explanation in the Conditions of Sale for further information.

See Storage and Collection Page.

Please note that lots are marked as a convenience to you and we shall not be liable for any errors in, or failure to, mark a lot.

IMPORTANT NOTICES

CHRISTIE’S INTEREST IN PROPERTY CONSIGNED FOR AUCTION

Δ Property in which Christie’s has an ownership or financial interest

From time to time, Christie’s may offer a lot in which Christie’s has an ownership interest or a financial interest. Such lot is identified in the catalogue with the symbol Δ next to its lot number. Where Christie’s has an ownership or financial interest in every lot in the catalogue, Christie’s will not designate each lot with a symbol, but will state its interest in the front of the catalogue.

º Minimum Price Guarantees

On occasion, Christie’s has a direct financial interest in the outcome of the sale of certain lots consigned for sale. This will usually be where it has guaranteed to the Seller that whatever the outcome of the auction, the Seller will receive a minimum sale price for the lot. This is known as a minimum price guarantee. Where Christie’s holds such financial interest, we identify such lots with the symbol ° next to the lot number.

º

♦ Third Party Guarantees/Irrevocable bids

Where Christie’s has provided a Minimum Price Guarantee, it is at risk of making a loss, which can be significant if the lot fails to sell. Christie’s therefore sometimes chooses to share that risk with a third party who agrees, prior to the auction, to place an irrevocable written bid on the lot. If there are no other higher bids, the third party commits to buy the lot at the level of their irrevocable written bid. In doing so, the third party takes on all or part of the risk of the lot not being sold. Lots which are subject to a third party guarantee arrangement are identified in the catalogue with the symbol º♦ In most cases, Christie’s compensates the third party in exchange for accepting this risk. Where the third party is the successful bidder, the third party’s remuneration is based on a fixed financing fee. If the third party is not the successful bidder, the remuneration may either be based on a fixed fee or an amount calculated against the final hammer price. The third party may also bid for the lot above the irrevocable written bid.

Third party guarantors are required by us to disclose to anyone they are advising their financial interest in any lots they are guaranteeing. However, for the avoidance of any doubt, if you are advised by or bidding through an agent on a lot identified as being subject to a third party guarantee you should always ask your agent to confirm whether or not they have a financial interest in relation to the lot

Property in which Christie’s has an interest and Third Party Guarantee/Irrevocable bid

Where Christie’s has a financial interest in a lot and the lot fails to sell, Christie’s is at risk of making a loss. As such, Christie’s may choose to share that risk with a third party whereby the third party contractually agrees, prior to the auction, to place an irrevocable written bid on the lot. Such lot is identified with the symbol next to the lot number. Where the third party is the successful bidder on the lot, they will not receive compensation in exchange for accepting this risk. If the third party is not the successful bidder, Christie’s may compensate the third party. The third party is required by us to disclose to anyone they are advising of their financial interest in any lot in which Christie’s has a financial interest. If you are advised by or bidding through an agent on a lot in which Christie’s has a financial interest that is subject to a contractual written bid, you should always ask your agent to confirm whether or not they have a financial interest in relation to the lot

Bidding by parties with an interest

When a party with a direct or indirect interest in the lot who may have knowledge of the lot’s reserve or other material information may be bidding on the lot, we will mark the lot with this symbol ¤. This interest can include beneficiaries of an estate that consigned the lot or a joint owner of a lot. Any interested party that successfully bids on a lot must comply with Christie’s Conditions of Sale, including paying the lot’s full buyer’s premium plus applicable taxes.

Post-catalogue notifications

If Christie’s enters into an arrangement or becomes aware of bidding that would have required a catalogue symbol, we will notify you by updating christies.com with the relevant information (time permitting) or otherwise by a pre-sale or prelot announcement.

Other Arrangements

Christie’s may enter into other arrangements not involving bids. These include arrangements where Christie’s has advanced money to consignors or prospective purchasers or where Christie’s has shared the risk of a guarantee with a partner without the partner being required to place an irrevocable written bid or otherwise participating in the bidding on the lot. Because such arrangements are unrelated to the bidding process they are not marked with a symbol in the catalogue.

Please see: http://www.christies.com/ financial-interest/ for a more detailed explanation of minimum price guarantees and third party financing arrangements.

EXPLANATION OF CATALOGUING PRACTICE

Terms used in a catalogue or lot description have the meanings ascribed to them below. Please note that all statements in a catalogue or lot description as to authorship are made subject to the provisions of the Conditions of Sale, including the authenticity warranty. Our use of these expressions does not take account of the condition of the lot or of the extent of any restoration. Written condition reports are usually available on request.

A term and its definition listed under ‘Qualified Headings’ is a qualified statement as to authorship. While the use of this term is based upon careful study and represents the opinion of specialists, Christie’s and the consignor assume no risk, liability and responsibility for the authenticity of authorship of any lot in this catalogue described by this term, and the authenticity warranty shall not be available with respect to lots described using this term.

PICTURES, DRAWINGS, PRINTS, MINIATURES AND SCULPTURE

Name(s) or Recognised Designation of an artist without any qualification: in Christie’s opinion a work by the artist.

QUALIFIED HEADINGS

“Attributed to…”: in Christie’s qualified opinion probably a work by the artist in whole or in part.

“Studio of …”/“Workshop of …”: in Christie’s qualified opinion a work executed in the studio or workshop of the artist, possibly under their supervision.

“Circle of …”: in Christie’s qualified opinion a work of the period of the artist and showing their influence.

“Follower of …”: in Christie’s qualified opinion a work executed in the artist’s style but not necessarily by a pupil.

“Manner of …”: in Christie’s qualified opinion a work executed in the artist’s style but of a later date.

“After …”: in Christie’s qualified opinion a copy (of any date) of a work of the artist.

“Signed …”/“Dated …”/ “Inscribed …”: in Christie’s qualified opinion the work has been signed/dated/inscribed by the artist.

With signature …”/“With date …”/ “With inscription …”: in Christie’s qualified opinion the signature/ date/inscription appears to be by a hand other than that of the artist.

The date given for Old Master, Modern and Contemporary Prints is the date (or approximate date when prefixed with ‘circa’) on which the matrix was worked and not necessarily the date when the impression was printed or published.

COLLECTION LOCATION AND TERMS

Specified lots (sold and unsold) marked with a filled square ( ) not collected from Christie’s, 8 King Street, London SW1Y 6QT by 5.00pm on the day of the sale will, at our option, be removed to Crozier Park Royal (details below). Christie’s will inform you if the lot has been sent offsite.

If the lot is transferred to Crozier Park Royal, it will be available for collection from 12.00pm on the second business day following the sale.

Please call Christie’s Client Service 24 hours in advance to book a collection time at Crozier Park Royal. All collections from Crozier Park Royal will be by prebooked appointment only

Tel: +44 (0)20 7839 9060

Email: cscollectionsuk@christies.com.

If the lot remains at Christie’s, 8 King Street, it will be available for collection on any working day (not weekends) from 9.00am to 5.00pm.

COLLECTION AND CONTACT DETAILS

Lots will only be released on payment of all charges due and on production of a Collection Form from Christie’s. Charges may be paid in advance or at the time of collection. We may charge fees for storage if your lot is not collected within thirty days from the sale. Please see paragraph G of the Conditions of Sale for further detail.

Tel: +44 (0)20 7839 9060

Email: cscollectionsuk@christies.com

SHIPPING AND DELIVERY

Christie’s Post-Sale Service can organise local deliveries or international freight. Please contact them on +44 (0)20 7752 3200 or PostSaleUK@christies.com.

CROZIER PARK ROYAL

Unit 7, Central Park Central Way London NW10 7FY

Vehicle access via Central Way only, off Acton Lane.

COLLECTION FROM CROZIER PARK ROYAL

Please note that the opening hours for Crozier Park Royal are Monday to Friday 8.30am to 4.30pm and lots transferred are not available for collection at weekends.

As a leader in the art market,

Christie’s is committed to building a sustainable business model that promotes and protects the environment. Our digital platform on christies.com offers a conscious approach, creating an immersive space where we bring art to life through high quality images, videos and in-depth essays by our specialists.

With this robust online support, Christie’s will print fewer catalogues to ensure that we achieve our goal of Net Zero by 2030. However, when we do print, we will uphold the highest sustainable standards.

Please scan for more information about our sustainability goals and projects.

The catalogue you are reading is:

printed on fully recycled paper;

printed with vegetable-based ink and biodegradable laminates;

printed in close proximity to our markets in an effort to reduce distribution emissions.

IDENTITY VERIFICATION

From January 2020, new anti-money laundering regulations require Christie’s and other art businesses to verify the identity of all clients. To register as a new client, you will need to provide the following documents, or if you are an existing client, you will be prompted to provide any outstanding documents the next time you transact.

Private individuals:

• A copy of your passport or other government-issued photo ID

• Proof of your residential address (such as a bank statement or utility bill) dated within the last three months

Please upload your documents through your christies.com account: click ‘My Account’ followed by ‘Complete Profle’. You can also email your documents to info@christies.com or provide them in person.

Organisations:

• Formal documents showing the company’s incorporation, its registered ofice and business address, and its oficers, members and ultimate benefcial owners

• A passport or other government-issued photo ID for each authorised user

Please email your documents to info@christies.com or provide them in person.

The Exceptional Sale

London | 1 July 2025

EXHIBITION

27 June–1 July 2025

8 King Street London SW1Y 6QT

CONTACT

Thomas Williams twilliams@christies.com +44 (0)20 7752 3239

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION (LOTS 10 & 33) A LATE LOUIS XV ORMOLU-MOUNTED ‘BLEU TURQUE’ CHINESE PORCELAIN VASE AND COVER OF EXCEPTIONALLY LARGE SIZE

CIRCA 1765-1770

The cover with a berried finial, the vase with a reeded crossed-ribbon border above a foliate cast and arched collar punctuated with roundels, the baluster body with twin eagle head handles flanked by with scrolls and trailing husks and terminating in acanthus leaves, the cabochon-ornamented base with later beaded collar, above a guilloche moulding over a tooled and panelled frieze with foliate bosses to the centre of each side, raised on leaf and scroll-cast feet 34 in. (86 cm.) high; 20½ in. (52 cm.) diameter

£500,000-£800,000

P.