Doetsch Collection Illustrated Catalogue

The Henry Doetsch Collection

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THE HENRY DOETSCH COLLECTION THE HIGHLY IMPORTANT COLLECTION OF

PICTURES BY OLD MASTERS OF

HENRY DOETSCH, ESQ. (1839-1894) Deceased; late of 7 New Burlington Street, London

Auctioned in London on 22nd, 24th and 25th June 1895 Edited and assembled by:

G. STEPHEN HOLMES Douglas, Isle of Man. August 2018.

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Note by G. Stephen Holmes I first came across the name “Doetsch” in 2003. In an obscure article written by Gustav Glück in 1928, the German art historian admitted that he had not viewed a painting attributed to Marco d'Oggiono of the Holy Children Embracing, which had been in the Doetsch Collection, but he was very much aware of its existence. In 2004, I first saw the magnificent publication THE MOND COLLECTION: AN APPRECIATION by the great art-historian and Leonardo scholar, John Paul Richter, published by John Murray in 1910. The very same painting that Glück mentioned in 1928 had been in the Mond Collection, and Richter revealed that the work had been acquired by Dr. Ludwig Mond at the Doetsch sale and that its previous ascription was Leonardo da Vinci. In 2008, I was fortunate to find a copy of THE DOETSCH COLLECTION in a bookshop in Galway, Republic of Ireland, which had been acquired from Burren College of Art in County Clare in the West of Ireland. The book was £23.

It was also during 2008 that I discovered more and more books on the world-wide-web; books that had been scanned and published as a Portable Document Format (pdf) file; books that were years out of copyright. The more I studied the two collections compiled up to 1894 and 1909 (Henry Doetsch died in 1894 and Ludwig Mond died in 1909 – the latter gave the majority of his collection to the National Gallery in London), the more important they became. There is a “Mond Room” in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, and Mond's chemical company survives to this day (Brunner-Mond patented the Solvay Process), but the name Doetsch (both Mond and Doetsch were born in Germany and moved to England in the mid-nineteenth century) has been largely forgotten, except for a provenance name in some galleries in Europe and North America. For example, a painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. was bought in the Doetsch Sale in June 1895 – it was lot number 48. Algernon Graves listed many of the sale prices in his three volumes of Art Sales books published in 1918, and some of these are available on the world-wide-web, but the books were re-published in 1970 by Burt Franklin so they are not out of copyright. A handful of paintings sold in June 1895 are listed on the world-wide-web, among them the Marco d'Oggiono Infant Christ and St. John (Lot 88) that sold for £157 10s or 150 guineas. Calculating a price in 2008 for a painting that fetched £157 in 1895 is not easy; but a price of between £500,000 and £700,000 might be acceptable for a quality work by one of the best known Milanese followers of Leonardo.

In 2007 I acquired my own copy of the Mond Collection, and now have a history of two of Marco d'Oggiono paintings of the Holy Children Embracing; Richter correctly describes the version in the Royal collection at Hampton Court Palace as “a decidedly inferior painting” to that in the Doetsch Sale.

It is coincidental that Richter assembled the catalogue for the Doetsch sale, and in the early years of the twentieth century, Richter appreciated Dr Mond's collection; he comments briefly on Lot 88 in 1895, but makes a thorough critical analysis of the same painting in 1910, and precedes Glück by twenty years.

In fact, Richter made the same comment that more than a dozen art-historians and critics made during the twentieth century; “So many repetitions and variations of this image [the Holy Children Embracing] exist by pupils of Leonardo da Vinci that it is reasonable to suppose that it [the image] is founded on a lost painting by his hand”. In 1895, Richter assumed that Marco had copied from a drawing by Leonardo (now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle), but by 1910 he had decided that Leonardo would have most likely completed an 'original' painting from which the repetitions and variations were copied; and in the early part of the twenty-first century it is certain that there was a painting upon which ALL the versions are based, and that Glück was right when he asserted that Leonardo alone could have created the motif, probably as a culmination of the ideas in the Virgin of the Rocks. That is another project.

Having acquired a copy of THE DOETSCH COLLECTION, and scanned the eighty or so images contained therein, I have great pleasure in presenting this web-based presentation of one of the finest collections of art in England in the latter part of the nineteenth century, that assembled by Henry Doetsch Esquire of London.

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PREFACE --------o-------THE Doetsch Collection was the creation of the twenty years from 1874 to 1894. In this comparatively short time, the energy of its deceased owner succeeded in collecting and exhibiting in his house in London a rich collection of pictures, for the most part of great interest and importance. He aimed especially at the acquisition of works belonging to the best period of the various Schools of Italy and the Netherlands, without, however, neglecting the German and Spanish Schools. Most richly represented are the schools of Florence and Venice. They form the bulk of the Italian collection, the variety of which affords an admirable picture of the different directions in which Italian art accomplished its development.

It would be difficult to name a second collection of Italian pictures of any extent, in which, compared to the portraits of historical interest, the Madonnas and Saints fall so markedly into the background as is the case here. Those princes, of world-wide celebrity on account of the splendour of their courts and their relations to the first painters of the Renaissance, whose names are familiar to every one, meet us here in numerous portraits, as to which it can be asserted, on good grounds that they were executed under their orders by the painters in their service. The collection is peculiarly rich in portraits of the Medici family and of the Royal House of Spain ; and among the likenesses of princes, we may call special attention to the portrait of King Henry VII., as unique and remarkable from more than one point of view.

No trouble has been spared that, by comparison and in other ways, might contribute to the highest possible degree of certainty in the descriptions and attributions.

Among the pictures of the German and Flemish Schools there are some that, apart from their value as works of art, have a special archaeological and historical interest ; and in all such cases explanatory notes have been added to the descriptions in the catalogue.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the Dutch School is also brilliantly represented by a large number of capital works – chiefly of small size – by the most famous masters, among whom Franz Hals and his School may be mentioned in the first place ; while at the same time there are specimens of masters scarcely to be met with elsewhere, even in the choicest and most famous collections of Dutch art.

It could not fail to happen that, in his extraordinary zeal as a collector, and dominated as he was by the determination to see himself surrounded by works of the greatest masters, the founder and owner of the gallery occasionally procured pictures, the attributions of which failed to satisfy the demands of a scrupulous and ruthless scientific criticism. Influenced, therefore, by these considerations, the executors of the late Mr. Henry Doetsch have seen fit to entrust me (Richter) with the task of submitting every single picture in the collection to a process of critical investigation, and at the same time, with regard to the attributions, they have given me full power to alter them in all cases in which a more accurate determination might seem necessary. However, there is no need to lay stress on the assurance that in the great majority of cases these altered titles in no way depreciate the value of the Collection as such, least of all in the eyes of connoisseurs, or of those collectors whose great object it is to possess pictures which owe their names to something more consistent than chance and more solid than fancy.

From the fact that the Collection was always accessible to lovers of art and to art critics, it follows that not a few of its rare and important works have long since met with their just appreciation in critical and historical publications, such, for instance, as Mr. Bernard Berensons's 'Venetian Painters,' the official catalogue of the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam, Ch. Yriarte's 'Autour des Borgia,' Dr. Bode's articles in the Jahrbuch der Kgl. Preussischen Kunstammlungen and others.

Of a number of pictures it can be proved that they come from the best and most renowned collections, like the Orléans Gallery and the Collection of Charles I. For, with regard to the acquisition of pictures, not only was it important to Mr. Doetsch that they should fully make good their claims in the matter of preservation and authenticity, but also laid special stress upon the securities involved in their provenance and pedigree. He acquired portraits from the Collections of the Marquis of Exeter, the Marquess of Donegal, the Marquis of Hastings, and the Duke of Rixburghe ; from the Markham Collection, from the Pinacoteca Lochis, and through the intermediation of Dr. Gustavo Frizzoni in Milan. In fact there is not doubt that the pictures forming the Doetsch Collection passed from English country seats directly into the owner's hands, and to this circumstance we are also partly indebted for the fact that many of the pictures are still provided with costly frames, such as only the craft of former centuries could design and execute.

J. P. RICHTER, PH. DR. --------o--------

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THE PAINTINGS Although 450 paintings were sold on the three days from 22nd to 26th June 1895, only 80 of them are illustrated in the 1895 catalogue; this web-site is limited to eighty-four works (with seven in colour).

Italian Paintings

7. Ippolito Scarsella: Portrait of a Prince

8. Filippo Mazzuola: Virgin and Child

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13. Parmigiano (1503-1540): Portrait of a Cardinal

23. Guido Reni (1575-1642): Mary Magdalene and two angel boys

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34. Bartolomeo Veneto: Portrait of a Young Man

36. Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1554): Portrait of a Man

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37. Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1554): The Virgin with Saints

43. Jacopo Tintoretto (1513-1594) Portrait of a Agostino Barbarigo

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48. Licinio da Pordenone Portrait of a Venetian Nobleman Now attributed to Giorgione and Titian.

60. Giovanni Cariani The Adoration of the Shepherds

62. Savoldo (1480-1548) Portrait of a Nobleman

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63. Gian Battiste Moroni: Man and Boy

Lot 84. Giovanni Battista Zelotti (1532-1592): Portrait of Antonio Barbaro

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86. Bernardino de'Conti (Painted between 1497 and 1522) Portrait of John of Bourgogne

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88. Marco d'Oggiono (1470-1540)

The Holy Children Embracing A similar picture, with a different background, is at Hampton Court Palace.

Both are by the same hand and appear to be the reproductions of some drawing

by Leonardo da Vinci, to whom both these pictures have also been ascribed.

The picture at Hampton Court, No 391, is decidedly an inferior painting.

This painting was formerly in the collection of the Marquess of Exeter in Burghley House

The Henry Doetsch Collection

The "decidely inferior work" by Marco d'Oggiono in Hampton Court Palace (#391)

89. Giovanni Pedrini: Leda and the Swan Formerly ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci. A similar picture, which is a copy after Sodoma (see Giovanni Morelli pp. 192-196) is in the Borghese Gallery, Rome.

The original cartoon appears to have been at Milan, where Pedrini may have seen it and used it for his own composition. Panel: 52Âź in. by 41Âź in.

From the Collection of the Marquis of Hastings.

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90. Bernardino Luini: The Virgin and Child and the Infant St. John This composition has been repeated by Bernardino in a picture at Langton, Berwick Panel: 21ž in. by 15ž in.

93. Tanzio di Varello (1474-1544) St. John the Baptist

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99. Rafaelino del Garbo (1466-1524): The Virgin with the Infant Christ

100. Rafaelino del Garbo (1466-1524): Cleopatra

107. An Altar-Piece by Jacopo da Pontormo (1494-1557)

The Henry Doetsch Collection

108. DOMENICO PULIGO (1475-1527): Virgin and Child, with St. Joseph and the Infant St. John.

Besides the galleries of Florence and Rome, where there are several pictures by this artist which are properly named, there are few to be met with which are misnamed Andrea del Sarto. He had been influenced by him to some extent.

This is a very characteristic work of this artist. Panel: 37¾ in. by 29¾ in.

From the Collection of the Marquis of Hastings.

109. FRANCESCO UBERTINI called BACCHIACCA (1494-1557) Virgin and Child, with the Infant St. John ; in the background the view of a village.

The group of the Virgin and Child is very much like Raphael's picture in the Naples Museum, known as "Il Divino Amore". The buildings in the background of the picture are copied from Dürer's engraving "The Prodigal Son".

Panel: 24½ in. by 19½ in.

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111. BACCHIACCA (1494-1557): Portrait of a Florentine Lady

120. Alessandro Allori Bronzino: Portrait of a Medici Princess

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121. Federigo Zucchero: Portrait of his Son, Taddeo

124. Ludovico Cardi: Adoration of the Magi

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130. Carlo Dolci: An Ecce Homo

135. Raphael: Portrait of Andrea Navagero

140. Scipiono Gaetano: Portrait Group of a High Papal official and Secretary

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143. Luca Cambioso: Virgin and Child (in repair)

144. Benvenuto di Giovanni of Siena: Virgin and Child

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150. Venetian School: Portrait of Madonna Laura

Lot 157. Angelo Bronzino: Portrait of Ludomia de Medici

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Flemish Paintings

167. Flemish School Portrait of King Henry VII

169. Flemish School Portrait of Earl of Lennox

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184. School of Clouet Portrait of Francis 1st

190. Mabuse Portrait of an Englishman

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203. Peter Lely: Portrait of a Lady

204. Gainsborough: Portrait of a Lady

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207. Franรงois Clouet: Portrait of King Francis (of France)

211. Franรงois Clouet: Portrait of a Lady

222. H van Blarenberghe: A Landscape in Winter

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225. German School: Adoration of the Infant Christ

228. Christopher Amberger Portrait of a Man

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229. Bartel Beham: Portrait of Emperor Ferdinand (of Germany)

232. Jan Vermeyen: The Battle of Pavia

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233. Albrecht Dürer: The Triumphal Procession of Emperor Maximilian

236. Lucas Kranach the Elder: Virgin and Child

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238. Lucas Kranach the Younger: Portrait of Elisabeth Krelerin

241. Unknown German painter: Portrait of Barbara Kressin

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243. Hans Holbein: Portrait of Henry 8th

273. Bernard van Orley: A Triptych

273. Bernard van Orley: Holy Family

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280. Martin Heemskirk: The Virgin and Child, with the infant St. John and two angel boys

282. Gillip van Coninxlo: Landscape with Figures

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287. Jan Breughel: A Seaport

309. Frans Pourbus the Elder: Portrait of a Lady

311. Frans Pourbus: Portrait of a French Princess

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312. Frans Pourbus the Younger: Portrait of Henry 4th of France

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Lot 339. Portrait of a Gentleman with a 'Pink': Dirck Jacobszoon In the twentieth century, it was discovered that the coat of arms hanging from the tree in the top right corner of the painting was that of the Amsterdam banker, Pompejus Occo, and that Occo had commissioned the painting from Dirck Jacobszoon, so the painting has been re-ascribed.

It it is now in the National Netherlands collection - on loan to the Amsterdam Museum from the Rijksmuseum.

In 1895 this painting fetched 150 guineas (ÂŁ157 10s 0d) at the auction

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345. Joachim Wtewael: Diana and ActĂŚon

351. Joost Drooch Sloot: A Village near a River

368. Casper Netscher: Portrait of King James 2nd when Duke of York

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372. Frans Hals: Portrait of a Gentleman

374. Jan Wynants: A Hilly Landscape

376. Jan Miens Molenaer: A Youth Singing and Playing the Guitar

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377. Jan Miens Molenaer: Portrait of a Cavalier

379. Jan Miens Molenaer: A Family Group

380. J. van Velsen: "Le Musicien Espagnol"

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385. Pieter Wouwerman: The Start of the Hunting Party

390. Pieter Wouwerman: A Lady on Horseback

395. Nicoleas Elias (Pickenoy): Portrait of a Lady

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396. Hendrick Dubbels: Fishing Boats off the Coast

406. Govert Flinck: Portrait of a Girl

412. Paulus Potter: The Milkmaid Washing her Milk Pail

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421. Meindert Hobbema: A Landscape (no Windmill!)

422. Meindert Hobbema: Landscape with a Windmill

432. Dominicus van Tol: A Violin Player

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436. Willem van Mieris: An Officer at the Window

443. Hendrick Avercamp: A Winter Scene

444. Johan van Rossum: Portrait of a Young Dutch Gentleman

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445. Jan Olis: A Family Group of Five Figures

448. Jan Dubbels: A Frozen River