1. K. Ertz, see Literature, 2000, vol. II, pp. 605–30, cat. nos E682 to A805a, many reproduced.
2. The earliest, that now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is dated 1601.
3. F. Grossmann, Brueghel. The Paintings, London 1956, p. 119, no. 114. For a good summary of this debate see Ertz, op. cit., 2000, vol. II, pp. 575–87.
4. Sale, London, Sotheby's, 8 July 2009, lot 32, reproduced (as Circle of Pieter Breugel the Elder).
5. F. Grossmann, op. cit. 1956, pp. 196–98, figs 87–90.
6. Marlier, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Le Siècle de Brueghel, Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, 1963, p. 69.
7. Listed in Currie and Allart, op. cit., 2012, vol. II, pp. 511, 522, n. 53. Ertz, op. cit. 2000, pp. 605–17, nos A685, A691–2, A704.
8. Currie and Allart, op. cit., 2012, vol. II, pp. 185–219, figs 302–338b.
1. Letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her sisiter Frances, July 1726, quoted in C. S. Sykes, Black Sheep, London 1982, p. 155.
2. M.W. Montagu, Letters and Works, 1861, 1:III.
3. J. Curling, Edward Wortley Montagu, 1713–1776, The man in the iron wig, New York 1954, p. 161.
4. E. Johnston, George Romney. Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, 1961, p. 16.
5. From the letters of Lady Mary Coke, Coke Letters, 4:258, quoted in J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701–1800, New Haven and London 1997, p. 670.
6. E. Johnston, George Romney. Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, 1961, p. 16.
7. J. Wallis (ed.), Memoirs of the late Edw. W-ly Montague Esq., 1778, pp. 113–14.
8. A. Kidson, George Romney 1784–1802, exhibition catalogue, London 2002, p. 101.
9. A. Kidson, ibid., p. 102.
10. D. Buttery, ‘George Romney, and the Second Earl of Warwick’, in Apollo, August 1986, p. 104.
Notes: Hemessen is considered the greatest and most imaginative artistic force in the northern city of Antwerp between the death of Quinten Massys in 1530 and the coming of age of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Certainly his profound influence on Flemish painting as a whole through the 1530s and 1540s is undeniable, but this has to-date been principally described in terms of his religious and genre paintings. Analysis of his role as a portraitist is scant but the re-emergence of this powerful Renaissance depiction of a well-dressed young man establishes him as one of the finest exponents of the genre in the Netherlands in the second quarter of the sixteenth century and, what is more, one whose style and success would anticipate and serve as a catalyst for the extraordinary flowering of portraiture in northern Europe from circa 1540 onwards.Hemessen’s portraiture is perhaps so alluring because of the lessons he learned on an extended trip to Italy in the late 1520s. There he studied both models from classical antiquity, such as the Laocoön (discovered in 1506), as well as Michelangelo and Raphael, basing many of his early compositions on the work of these two great masters. His work following the return to Antwerp is a lucid illustration of the impact of Italian painting on the pictorial idioms of northern artists and the portrait presented here describes as well as any other the synthesis that Hemessen would achieve between the classicizing tendencies of Italian portraiture of the sixteenth century and the fundamental strain of realism and frigid pathos of the great northern exponents of the genre, such as Jan Gossaert, Joos van Cleve and others. Hemessen may have first encountered Gossaert early in his career at the royal court at Mechelen where he is believed to have worked briefly with the Master of the Magdalen Legend and where Gossaert and Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen were court painters.
Hemessen had been elected to the Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp in 1524, having completed his pupilage under Hendrik van Cleve I, and, as with Jan Gossaert before him, his journey to Italy brought him into contact with the classicising style and idiom of the great painters of the Italian High Renaissance. While Michelangelo and Raphael remain the obvious influences in his religious work, his later portraiture owes more to the great master of the 1530s and ’40s, Agnolo Bronzino. It has been said of the present portrait that it owes much to Bronzino and in many respects this is true: it demonstrates most markedly the influence of his portraits of the mid to late 1530s, examples or reproductions of which it is inconceivable that Hemessen did not somehow see or study. While there is no evidence of a second trip to Italy in the 1530s, he would have seen and learned more of the stylistic developments of his Italian counterparts on his trip to Fontainebleau in the mid-1530s, and from other northern artists returning to the Netherlands from Italy throughout the decade, such as Michel Coxcie.
Bronzino’s influence is marked in this portrait both by its pictorial intensity, which is achieved through its highly polished finish and the placement of the dark figure before a pallid backdrop; and its observational intensity, which we see in the extraordinary level of detail throughout the figure, particularly in the physiognomy, the beard and the intricately modelled fabric of the vestment. In these respects it closely resembles Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Lute in the Uffizi, Florence, of circa 1535 (fig. 1):1 in both works, the mottled surface of the highly textured and similarly pleated cape is painstakingly rendered and, atop the shoulder pad, the uneven surface is silhouetted against a lighter backdrop. Both portraits follow the half- to three-quarter length mise-en-page popularised by Bronzino, but begun by Titian in Venice (whose La Schiavona is probably the first three-quarter length portrait in Western art); they both show a similar arrangement of the hands: the proper right hand grasping an item meaningful to the sitter’s interests or identity, the other resting lower down the plane. Such an arrangement would become standard practice in High Renaissance and Mannerist portraiture, one holding an item that may identify the sitter, the other resting on the hilt of a sword, column or chair. In all these respects Hemessen’s portrait can be compared with a myriad of works by Bronzino, but particularly those of the 1530s such as the Portrait of a Man with a Book in the Metropolitan Museum and also the famous Portrait of Bartolomeo Panticichi, also in the Uffizi.2
Hemessen’s portrait however differs in one key feature: the external setting. Where the sitter (and his dress) might just as easily belong in a Florentine portrait, it is the landscape that roots it firmly back in the north. We see beyond a ‘world landscape’ popularised in preceding decades by Joachim Patinir, Massys and others. It is however painted in the more developed style of the 1530s, reminiscent of the landscapes of Mathys Cock. It is a curious idiosyncrasy that such an Italianate portrait should sit before such a wholly Flemish landscape and it is indeed difficult to conjure another portrait that fuses these two elements so successfully. This, though, would not be the only time Hemessen would employ such a tactic: his version of Raphael’s Holy Family of Francis I (Musée du Louvre, Paris) that he saw in Fontainebleau is personalized by the animation we see through the window behind the protagonists: in Raphael’s original we see essentially a luminous blue sky, but in Hemessen’s version (now in the Groeningen Museum, Bruges) we see a far-reaching panorama, another ‘world landscape’ that, like here, wrenches the Italianate design back to Flanders (fig. 2).
In its graceful and refined appearance and pose the portrait is the very antithesis of the twisting figures and grotesque facial types of Hemessen’s genre scenes for which he is perhaps best-known. This and the few other portraits given to Hemessen, such as the signed double portrait from 1532 in the collection of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, Fife, and the two in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, reveal an unusual classicizing elegance and restraint.3 The portrait was first recognised as the work of Hemessen by Paul Philipott and was one of the stars of the 1963 exhibition in Brussels, Le siècle de Bruegel.4 Its rediscovery at that show was the catalyst behind Burr Wallen’s dedicated article in Oud Holland in 1971 and thus for the re-evaluation of Hemessen as a painter of portraits. Wallen dated the portrait to the 1540s. Peter van den Brink, to whom we are grateful, has proposed Hemessen’s date of execution to be in the 1530s or early 1540s.
Provenance
The reverse is stamped with the insignia (in wax) of William, Prince of Orange (1792–1849), later William II of the Netherlands. The painting does not however match any of the entries in C. J. Nieuwenhuys' Description de la Galerie des Tableaux de S.M. Le Roi des Pays-Bas of 1843, nor does it appear to feature in the sales following the King's death, held in Amsterdam on 12 August 1850 and 9 September 1851. The form of the insignia denotes that the painting was in the collection prior to William's accession in 1840, and must have been sold prior to the compilation of the 1843 inventory. It may have been acquired by Henry, 3rd Earl Warwick, at some point in the 1820s or 1830s. It is interesting to note another link between Warwick and the King: one of the greatest portraits formerly at Warwick Castle, Moroni's Don Gabriel de la Cueva, later Duke of Alburquerque (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) was also in the collection of King William II; it is listed in 1843 inventory, and was sold in the 1850 sale of his collection; the RKD's copy of the sale catalogue marks the buyer as 'Nieuwenhuys' who was at the time operating out of London and thus presumably buying on behalf of the 3rd Earl at the sale.
The painting would thus appear to be one of the later additions to the Warwick collection. The first watertight mention of it in the literature is in the 1897 article on Warwick Castle where it is described as by Pourbus. More summary entries in earlier inventories, lists and descriptions of the castle and its contents refer in only general terms to male portraits which may be identifiable with this work but only conjecture can lead to a link with any of them. There is, for example, mention in several places of a 'Burgomaster'. Samuel Woodburne, for example, refers to a ‘Burgomaster – In the bedroom – very fine’, in his Notes on the Paintings at Warwick Castle, 1832, and at the back, the 3rd Earl notes of it: ‘Burgomaster. Is this not by Sir Anthony Moor? An original’.
The motto on the piece of paper held in the sitter’s right hand has been assigned in the past to several families, including the Dubois family of Antwerp and the Sersanders of Ghent.5
1. See M. Brock, Bronzino, Paris 2002, reproduced in colour p. 113.
2. Brock, op. cit., reproduced in colour pp. 117–118.
3. See Wallen, under Literature, figs 2, 11 and 12.
4. See under Exhibited.
5. See J. Dielitz, Die Wahl- und Denksprüche, Frankfurt 1884, p. 114
TYGERS AT PLAY - ONE OF GEORGE STUBBS’ MOST CELEBRATED WORKS
Painted circa 1770-75, this masterful depiction of two leopard cubs ranks among Stubbs’ most popular subjects. The painting has rarely been seen in public, having been exhibited only four times since its original appearance at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Testament to the artist’s exceptional eye for capturing the animal form, this admirably preserved work boasts impeccable provenance, having been sold only once since it was commissioned from the English painter. It remained in the possession of a single family until 1962, when it was acquired by the present owners. Coming from a distinguished British aristocratic collection, Tygers at Play will be offered with an estimate of £4-6 million / €4.9 - 7.3 million / $6.7 - 10 million).
George Stubbs, A.R.A. (Liverpool 1724-1806 London), Tygers at Play, oil on canvas, 101.5 by 127 cm.; 40 by 50 in. Estimate 4,000,000 — 6,000,000 GBP. Photo Sotheby's
Provenance: Presumably commissioned or purchased by George Brodrick, 4th Viscount Midleton (1754–1836);
Thence by descent to his son George Alan Brodrick, 5th Viscount Midleton (1806–1848);
By inheritance to his cousin, Charles Brodrick, 6th Viscount Midleton (1791–1863);
By inheritance to his brother, William John Brodrick, 7th Viscount Midleton (1798–1870), Dean of Exeter and Chaplain to Queen Victoria;
By descent to his son, William Brodrick, 8th Viscount Midleton (1830–1907);
By descent to his son, William St John Fremantle Brodrick, 9th Viscount Midleton and 1st Earl of Midleton (1856–1942);
By descent to his son, George Brodrick, 2nd Earl of Midleton (1888–1979);
With Oscar & Peter Johnson, London, from whom acquired by the present owners in 1962.
Exhibited: Probably London, Royal Academy, 1776, no. 293 (as Tygers at Play);
London, Oscar & Peter Johnson Gallery, Pictures and Drawings from Yorkshire Houses, 1963, no. 15;
London, Tate Gallery, George Stubbs 1724–1806, 17 October 1984 – 6 January 1985, no. 78;
New Haven, Yale Centre for British Art, George Stubbs 1724–1806, 13 February – 7 April 1985, no. 78;
Leeds, City Art Gallery, Whistlejacket & Scrub: Large as Life; The Great Horse Paintings of Stubbs, 12 September – 9 November 2008, unnumbered
Literature: Sir W. Gilbey, Animal Painters of England, vol. II, London 1900, p. 205;
B. Taylor, The Prints of George Stubbs, London 1969, p. 24;
B. Taylor, Stubbs, London 1971, p. 208, no. 39, reproduced pl. 39 (as ‘Leopards playing in a rocky landscape’);
C. A. Parker, Mr Stubbs the Horse Painter, London 1971, p. 198;
L. Parris, George Stubbs A.R.A., ‘Leopards at Play’ and ‘The Spanish Pointer’, London 1974, pp. 8–11, reproduced p. 9;
C. Lennox-Boyd, R. Dixon and T. Clayton, George Stubbs. The Complete Engraved Works, London 1989, pp. 173–74;
J. Egerton, ed., George Stubbs 1724–1806, exhibition catalogue, London 1984, p. 113, cat. no. 78, reproduced in colour;
J. Egerton, George Stubbs, Painter. Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London 2007, pp. 308–09, no. 122, reproduced in colour;
K. Harker (ed.), Whistlejacket & Scrub: Large as Life, exhibition catalogue, Leeds 2008, pp. 10, 18, & 40, reproduced in colour p. 18;
P. Johnson, Heart in Art. A Life in Paintings, London 2010, reproduced in colour p. 14.
Introduction.
This sensational picture is one of the great works of eighteenth century English animal painting. Indeed, in many ways, it is one of the great lost works from any age in British Art. Lost, for although it was one of the artist’s most celebrated works during his lifetime, and has been known through innumerable prints (which are taken from a later version of the composition, see fig.2), it has only been exhibited four times since it was painted. Having spent the whole of the nineteenth century virtually unseen, it was exhibited only twice in the twentieth, once in a small dealer’s exhibition, shortly after it had been bought by the present owners, in 1963; and again when it featured in the major retrospective of Stubbs’s work at the Tate Gallery in London, and the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven. It then again lay dormant for over another twenty years until 2008, when it appeared in a small exhibition in Leeds, focused on Stubbs’s depiction of horses. As well as being largely hidden from public view for so long, the painting has been in only two private collections since it was acquired from the artist by the 4th Viscount Midleton, who’s family had been prominent patrons of Stubbs early in his career. It remained in the possession of the Midleton family, passing from generation to generation, until it was sold by the 2nd Earl of Midleton, who never had any children, in 1962, and acquired by the present owners; thereby transferring discreetly from one English aristocratic collection to another. This seclusion in which the picture has been carefully cherished accounts for its spectacularly well preserved condition; so rare anyway in paintings of this date but particularly remarkable for a work by this artist, and only serves to heighten the painting's allure.
The painting depicts two leopard cubs frolicking in a spacious and exotic landscape of the artists's imagination. The topography and vegetation is evocative of the creatures' natural habitat, conjuring visions of the African bush or the Indian jungle, with thick vegetation, dense palm fronds and craggy rocks. The background is dominated by a towering rocky prominence, which gives weight and drama to the scene, before receding to distant mountains and untold distant plains, which melt into the soft hues of warm sunlight. The effect of the whole is to imbue the picture with an emotive power which contemporaries would have deemed sublime, at once arousing emotions of desire and romance, as well as an awe and fear appropriate to the wild and ferocious nature of the leopards themselves. Despite the playfulness of these cubs contemporaries were all too aware of the potential ferocity of these animals, and it was precisely this frisson of danger which made Stubbs’s paintings of wild animals so appealing. Highly detailed and intimately observed this painting is a tour-de-force of anatomical observation and painterly skill in rendering the soft texture of the animal’s fur, and the intricate patina of their coats. It is observed with all the underlying knowledge Stubbs had acquired over a decade of studious dissection and anatomical study. Rarely, if ever, do works of this quality, importance and rarity appear on the open market for auction. The emergence of this picture for sale presents an exciting, once in a generation opportunity to acquire one of the masterpieces of eighteenth century British painting.
Stubbs’s paintings of exotic animals are among his most original and innovative works. They have always been hugely popular with both critics and the public alike, and have long been highly sought after by collectors. In 1807, during the two day sale of the contents of Stubbs’s studio held by Peter Cox following the artist’s death, the highest price of the sale was for lot 92, one of the three versions of Stubbs’s Portrait of the Royal Tiger, which sold for the astronomical sum of 350 guineas. Of the other portraits of exotic animals in the sale, lot 88, his Portrait of the celebrated Zebra (Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven), fetched 132 guineas, lot 95, Lion devouring a Stag (Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle), sold for 210 guineas, and lot 80,Lion and Lioness in a Rocky Cavern, made 101 guineas. By comparison the 16 portraits of horses painted for the Turf review series, which were also left in the artist’s studio at his death, sold for an average of just 28 guineas, with the exception of the portrait of Gnawpost, a celebrate grandson of the Godolphin Arabian, which made 155 guineas.
Today demand for the enduring appeal of Stubbs’s exotic animal portraits remains as high as it was during the artist’s lifetime. Combined with the extreme rarity of these pictures, this has meant that in modern times, whenever they have come on the market they have consistently set new records for the artist’s work at auction, and pushed the boundaries of Stubbs’s place in the market. This is particularly true of his paintings of big cats. On 18 March 1970 the sale in these rooms of George Stubbs’s celebrated Portrait of a Hunting Tyger; A Cheetah and a Stag with two Indian handlers (Manchester Art Gallery, see fig. 3) for £220,000 was an undoubted watershed not only for Stubbs prices, but for British art in general. Not only was it the world record for a painting by Stubbs at auction, but it was the highest price ever paid for a work by any British artist to date. Like Tygers at Play, the picture combined an impeccable provenance and a sophisticated composition with exceptional condition, and created an astonishing level of interest from around the world. Twenty five years later, on 8 June 1995, Stubbs’s Portrait of the Royal Tiger (see fig. 5), the same picture that had set the record at Stubbs’s studio sale in 1807, was sold from the collection of the Portman family for £3.2 million, again setting a world record for the artist, and one that would not be exceeded until 2010, with the sale of Macclesfield Mares and Foals for £10.1 million at Sotheby’s.
Stubbs’s ‘Tygers at Play’
The seemingly incorrect title, Tygers at Play, was the name given to this painting by Stubbs himself when he exhibited the picture at the Royal Academy in 1776. It was also the title used by the artist in the lettering that accompanied his engraving of the subject, published in 1780. Broadly speaking, before about 1750 the term tiger was used as a generic classification to define any striped or spotted member of the cat family. In effect it could be used to describe any large feline that was not a lion. By Stubbs’s day, however, following the precepts of the Compte de Buffon and with the rapid increase in global exploration, natural historians and zoologists had come a long way in classifying the natural world and the animals within it.1 His contemporaries could certainly have distinguished between the tiger, the leopard, the panther and the cheetah, each of which Stubbs painted with accurate precision, though he referred to them all as ‘tygers’. This nomenclature seems curiously old fashioned given the artist’s studious and observant depiction of what are quite clearly leopards, and his pains which he was gone to accurately depict their distinctive rosette, or broken moon shaped spots, which are painted with such delicacy. The title is all the more puzzling for having been applied by an artist with such strong links to the scientific community, a man who was not only friends with two of the leading anatomists of their generation, William and John Hunter, but had himself studied anatomy for almost a decade, and continued to practise it on a regular basis. Though the question is at present unanswerable, Stubbs’s use of the title perhaps reflects a contemporary ambiguity, or unresolved debate among natural historian as to the applicable boundaries of the word ‘tigers’, and serves to remind the viewer of the rarity and mystique that still surrounded these animals. If they remain exotic to our eyes, in a post Attenborough era, how exotic and exciting must they have appeared to an eighteenth century audience. One can only imagine the sensation this picture must have caused upon its exhibition, and the ambiguity of its title certainly did nothing to prevent it becoming one of the artist’s most popular subjects.
What is certainly not old fashioned about the picture, indeed it is positively revolutionary, is Stubbs’s treatment of the animals themselves. Deeply embedded in the eighteenth century mind was the concept that animals could be classified into two distinct groups; they were either ‘wild’ or they were ‘tame’. This idea, as old as Aristotle, stemmed from a principally religious, rather than scientific view of the world, and returned to the Judaeo-Christian account of the creation and man’s fall from grace. Intimately related to ideas of human destiny, it was believed that, since the fall, the animal kingdom had experienced a separation. A division according to their natural service or hostility to man, which determined the nature and boundaries of the physical spaces that they were permitted to occupy. Whereas some animals, those that were ‘tame’, had been taken under the protection of man and were permitted to live alongside him, those that were hostile were condemned to find a precarious refuge in the desert places, and their resulting ‘wildness’ was not a natural condition, but a state of rebellion against the divinely conferred dominion of man which had condemned them to exile.2 In paradise man and beast had lived in harmony, and sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings by artist’s such as Rubens and Jan Bruegel often depict this sense of relaxed co-habitation (see fig. 4). Man’s expulsion from the garden, however, had created a state of war in nature, and the lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas and bears which had once gambolled harmlessly in Eden were destined to become Man’s enemy, part of God’s curse on disobedient humanity.3
Thus the ferocious behaviour of wild animals was explained as a sort of derangement, a moral divide drawn between the calm, dutiful behaviour of domestic animals and what John Wesley called the 'variously distorted' passions of wild predators.4 Gaining the status of outcasts and bandits they were thought to thrive only in inhospitable strongholds, far from the 'civilising' influence of man, like Satan and his rebel angels in Hell. As late as 1793 the naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726–1798) wrote in hisHistory of Quadrupeds that the 'rage' of lions was 'tremendous, being inflamed by the influence of a burning sun, on a most arid soil... They live in perpetual fever, a sort of madness fatal to every animal they met with', whilst William Smellie (1740–1795), writing in 1790, defined the tiger as 'perhaps the only animal who's ferocity is unconquerable', often being compelled to 'devour his own young, and tear their mother to pieces'. 5 Such damning characteristics were reinforced in numerous popular histories, and painted depictions of wild animals from the seventeen and early eighteenth centuries. Look for example at the compacted fury of Rubens's lion hunts, where man and beast are depicted in a state of perpetual a combat, or the work of Frans Snyders which portrayed the deranged madness of wild animals. Yet Stubbs's cats are beautiful and serene. They frolic and romp innocently like domestic kittens, their expressions suggesting an almost human smile. They are at peace with their environment; their exquisitely mottled coats melting into the textures of the undergrowth and foliage, uniting them to the landscape through the play of texture and tone. Far from being outcasts from the civilised dominion of man, driven to the limits of the habitable world, they are masters of their own primitive paradise, a pristine creation free from man's intrusion. Indeed their playful rolling seems almost to echo that of the frolicking tiger and leopard in Jan Bruegel's painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Royal Collection, London), painted in 1615 and reproduced in engravings (see fig. 4). As Sir Edwin Landseer recognised, Stubbs, who was profoundly interested in the character of the big cats and who's pictures were based upon studies from the living animals, portrayed the 'gentler emotions' of these predators and sought to depict them in a state appropriate to their true nature. Breathtakingly lifelike, the cats themselves are brought close to the picture plane and convey to the viewer the experience of an intimate encounter with actual wild animals, in their own environment. They are wholly different from the stereotype of ravenous monsters which the eighteenth century had inherited and must have struck contemporaries as something entirely new.
Stubbs's revolutionary depictions of wild animals reflected a growing awareness of the natural world among his contemporaries in the late eighteenth century. European expansion and exploration was increasingly pushing the limits of mankind's understanding and knowledge of nature, and with the discovery of new lands new species were constantly being uncovered, studied, codified, and brought back to Europe. Explorers such as Cook and de Bongainville noticed that on islands where humans had never been the animals were frequently perfectly tame and free from the ferocious habits prescribed to them, as if Eden had been restored. Britain was at the centre of this maritime exploration, and with the ever increasing influx of rare and exotic species came a growing fascination with such animals. In 1766 Captain Cook’s pioneering expedition to the South Pacific, and his subsequent discovery of Australia in 1770, brought back to England numerous species which were previously unknown to Europeans, and men like Warren Hasting brought wild beasts and exotic specimens from Indian, the Middle East and Africa. In this exquisitely detailed and beautifully rendered painting Stubbs captures the contemporary taste for exoticism, and opens a window on a world enthralled by the unknown.
Almost certainly Stubbs’s leopards are based on real animals, cats that he would have seen and made preliminary chalk studies of from life. Although no direct studies for this painting are known, under the items listed in the section entitled ‘Drawings, Drawing Books, Studies from Nature, Sketches, &c’ in the artist’s studio sale in 1807, lot 27 was described as ‘One Book with 34 tigers in black chalk’, whilst the following lot was listed as ‘One book with 7 Cats, in black Chalk…’. Like the majority of the drawings, studies and sketchbooks offered in Stubbs’s studio sale, these have now all disappeared.6 However, from the studies that do survive and with the artist’s training as an anatomist, it would seem implausible that he would not have afforded himself of the opportunity presented by London’s many public menageries, as well as those private collections available to him, to study these beautiful creatures first hand. Indeed Stubbs’s interest in wild and exotic animals was fuelled by, and is partly a reflection of, the growing number of menageries in London, and the powerful allure which they held in the public imagination.
London’s Menageries
Exotic animals were not a new thing in Britain. Since the reign of King John wild animals had been kept for the entertainment and curiosity of the Royal Court, and the first record of a menagerie at the Tower of London dates to 1210. Until the mid-eighteenth century the Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London was still the main site in England for the display of foreign animals, particularly large carnivores, and access to these animals was therefore necessarily limited to a small elite. As the century wore on, however, the Royal menagerie began to be rivalled by an increasing number of institutions, both private and public, which stocked exotic animals for the enjoyment of a much broader section of society.
Outside of the Royal collection, the rise of public menageries in England and the mass import of exotic animals from around the world to Britain, finds cultural roots in the collecting habits of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.7 In the mid-1600s Dutch influence in the East Indies, primarily in the hands of the Dutch United East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), transformed Amsterdam into the entrepôt of Europe for all manner of exotic commodities; from tea, coffee, spices, tobacco and textiles, to wild animals. In the 1670s William III and Mary II established a menagerie at their Het Loo residence near Apeldoorn, where the court artist Melchior d’Hondecoeter painted waterfowl, pheasants, parrots, monkeys and pelicans roaming the formal gardens of the estate. Although initially, as in early eighteenth-century England, exotic animals in seventeenth century Holland tended to populate the gardens and houses of the aristocratic and mercantile elite, in 1675 Jan Westerhof opened a restaurant with a difference on the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam. The Menagerie Blauw Jan, as it was called, enabling his customers to view, and also to purchase, exotic animals whilst they sampled delicacies from around the world. Other proprietors were quick to follow and within a few years a number of other menageries were operating in the city, such as Casal & Ekhorsts Menagerie, or Die Witte Olifant (The White Elephant), a menagerie established by Bartel Verhagen in 1681.8 These institutions were the first permanent, public exhibitions of exotic animals in Europe, and often had touring menageries that sent animals to fairs, taverns and coffee houses in nearby cities and neighbouring countries. Indeed animals from the Blauw Jan were exhibited in London during the late seventeenth century and early 1700s, and as other Dutch exhibitors started to recognise the potential market in Britain they began to send animals over with increasing regularity.
What were already strong cultural ties between Holland and Britain in the seventeenth century, based on commerce, politics, war and religion, as well as personal dynastic bonds, were strengthened in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution which brought William III, Stadtholder of the United Provinces, and his wife Mary II, daughter of James II, to the throne of England. In the following decades this increased Anglo-Dutch exchange led to the development of more permanent sites for the trade and exhibition of exotic animals in Britain. As further cultural and economic integration shifted the dominance of world trade, London eventually replaced Amsterdam as the trade capital of Europe. With increasing volume of commodities from the both the West and East Indies flowed into London, the number of exotic animals in the capital grew dramatically as well, and from the 1690s to the 1730s coffee houses and taverns began to increasingly display exotic animals in an effort to attract customers.
However it was not until the 1750s, just at the time Stubbs was arriving in London, that animal merchants in London began to develop dedicated premises from which to exhibit and sell their exotic merchandise. The territorial gains and economic expansion made by Britain during the Seven Years War (1756–63), acquired at the expense of the French, resulted in a huge increase in shipping between Asia and England, and the British East India Company grew substantially. In the early 1700s the company had transported an average of 200,000 lbs of cargo per annum to England. By the late 1750s this had risen to over 3 million lbs per annum, and the volume of shipping entering the Port of London increased fourfold during the eighteenth century. Together with Britain’s dominance of the sea and her maritime expansion, this new economic prosperity resulted in a huge increase in both the volume and variety of exotic animals entering the capital, and a surge in popularity and public fascination with these animals.
Public menageries flourished in London in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, and into the early nineteenth century. From the 1760s a distinct geography of animal exhibitions and commerce emerged centred on Piccadilly, the Strand and St. James’s. Early institutions ranged in size from the smaller merchants such as Edmond’s Menagerie on Piccadilly, which stocked mainly song birds and small mammals from North America, to establishments with a larger repertoire of animals such as the City Menagerie, which houses monkeys, tigers, opossums and camels. On 24 December 1766 an article in the Public Adviser advertised a merchant dealing from the aptly named ‘Noah’s Ark’, offering a wolf, buffalo, crocodile, several camels and a huge variety of parrots and other caged birds. In 1763 Joshua Brookes established the first of three menageries called the Original Menagerie at Gray’s Inn Gate, Holburn. By 1765 he had open a second premises on the New Road at Tottenham Court, offering a diverse selection of species such as antelope, lions, monkeys, vultures and porcupines. In 1777 he opened a third premises on Haymarket called Brookes’ Menagerie, run by Mary Cross, the widow of his former business partner John Cross, who himself had managed a menagerie on St. James’s. Possibly the most famous menagerie in London however was that established by Gilbert Pidcock at the Exeter Exchange (popularly known as the Exeter ‘Change), which was established in about 1773 on the north side of the Strand, on the site of old Exeter House. Originally the wintering quarters for a travelling show (see fig. 6) Pidcock’s menagerie displayed a wide variety of large animals for the price of a two shilling ticket, or two shillings and six pence at feeding time, and was the first institution in the capital to really rival the royal menagerie at the Tower of London. In 1812 the animals at the Exeter 'Change included a Bengal tiger, a hyena, a lion, a jaguar, a slot a camel, monkeys, a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros, an elephant, an ostrich, a cassowary, a pelican, emews, cranes, an eagle, cockatoos, elks, kangaroos and antelope. In his diary entry for 14 November 1813, Lord Byron recorded a visit he had recently made to Pidcocks, commenting: ‘Two nights ago I saw the tigers sup at Exeter 'Change. Except Veli Pacha’s lion in the Morea, who followed the Arab keeper like a dog, - the fondness of the hyaena for her keeper amused me most. Such a conversazione! – There was a ‘hippopotamus’ like Lord Liverpool in the face; and the ‘Ursine Sloth’ hath the very voice and manner of my valet – but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again – took off my hat – opened a door – trunked a whip – and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler. The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; but the poor antelopes were dead. I should hate to see one here: the sight of the camel made me pine again for Asia Minor.’9
Stubbs was a regular visitor to Pidcock's menagerie, and documentary evidence survives to show that he studied a number of animals there for pictures he exhibited at the Society of Artists and the Academy, as well as for private commissions. On one occasion, in a rather wonderful tale which survives from contemporary anecdote, Stubbs was interrupted in the middle of his dinner, at about 10pm in the evening, by a message that one of the tigers at Pidcock's had died, and its carcass could be bought 'for a song'. Abandoning his meal 'his coat was hurried on, and he flew towards the well-known place and presently entered the den where the dead animal lay extended; this was a precious moment; three guineas were given the attendant, and the body was instantly conveyed to the painter's habitation, where in the place set apart for his muscular pursuits, Mr. S[Stubbs] spent the rest of the night carbonading the once tremendous tyrant of the jungle'.10 The Exeter 'Change remained an important source of inspiration and study for artists well into the nineteenth century. It would later be frequented by a younger generation of artists, inspired by Stubbs's example and the allure of his pictures, such as Edwin Landseer and Jacque Laurent Agasse, whose Two Leopards playing in the Exeter 'Change Menagerie, of 1808, sold for a colossal £3.85 million at auction in 1988 (fig. 7).
As well as the many public menageries that were being established in London in the 1760s and 1770s, Stubbs would have had access to a number of private collections of exotic animals, belonging to his wealth patrons and contacts in the scientific world. George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough kept a private menagerie at Blenheim, which included a tigress presented to the Duke by Lord Clive, Governor of Bengal, and which Stubbs painted circa1767–68 (The Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace). So too did the King’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland, in Windsor Great Park, which included the Cheetah painted by Stubbs circa 1765, which had been brought to England by Sir George Pigot and presented to the George III. Possibly Stubbs’s most important patrons in this field however were the two leading surgeons and anatomists of the century, Dr John Hunter and his elder brother Dr William Hunter. Both men were great collectors of natural history specimens and kept extensive museums of anatomical, pathological and biological specimens. John Hunter also maintained a large private menagerie attached to his house at Earl Court, just outside London, where he kept a varied collection of wild animals, including leopards. In the 1760s, whilst Stubbs was Treasurer of the Society of Artists, Hunter was invited to give a series of lectures on anatomy to the Society, whilst his elder brother, William, was appointed Professor of Anatomy at the newly created Royal Academy when it was opened in 1769, of which Stubbs would later be an Associate Academician. William Hunter’s collection was bequeathed to Glasgow University on his death and forms the basis of the Hunterian Museum, opened in 1807, whilst that of his brother John was acquired by the government in 1799 and forms the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, in London. Both men were close associates of Stubbs, and important patrons who commissioned many portraits of animals in their collections, including the artist’s famous painting of an Indian Rhinoceros (circa 1790/91, Hunterian Museum, Royal college of Surgeons), and his portrait ofThe Kongouro from New Holland (fig. 8), which recently acquired by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. The Hunters admired Stubbs for his exacting eye and ability to accurately depict the natural form of new and exotic species, in much the same way that the members of the Jockey Club had admired the accuracy with which he depicted their racehorses in the early 1760s. Their patronage would result in many of the artist’s most exciting and seminal works.
George Stubbs: Animal Painter
George Stubbs’s position as the greatest animal painter of the eighteenth century was confirmed in 1766 with his publication of The Anatomy of the Horse, a project he had worked on for most of the previous decade. Born in Liverpool in 1724, the son of a currier, Stubbs had first studied anatomy at York County Hospital in 1744, under the distinguished surgeon Dr Charles Atkinson. Later, at Horkstow, in Lincolnshire, he had spent the two years between 1756 and 1758 engaged in studying and dissecting horses in preparation for the publication his great magnum opus, a work the likes of which had not been seen in Europe since Carlo Ruini’s Dell’Anatomia et dell’Infirmita del Cavallo of 1598. This unprecedented work cast Stubbs at the forefront of both science and art in his understanding and knowledge of equine anatomy and propelled him into the limelight as the leading authority on the depiction of the horse. However it also gave Stubbs the training and ability to dissect and study many other animals over the course of his career, and his knowledge and understanding of the physical make up of mammals of all kinds was unparalleled by any artist of his generation. Arriving in London in the early 1760s he quickly caught the attention of a close knit group of noblemen and members of the Jockey Club, including Lord Rockingham, Lord Grosvenor, and the Dukes of Grafton and Portland, whose patronage would dominate Stubbs’s work for the next ten years. His inclusion in Étienne Falconet’s 1769 list of the twelve most reputed artists in London, however, is testament to the broader reputation he had achieved by the end of his first decade in the capital. With a secure base of patronage and the acclaim of fellow artists, by the late 1760s and into the 1770s Stubbs’s confidence was riding high, and not wanting to be pigeon holed with the label ‘horse painter’ he appears to have purposefully expanded the range of his subject matter in order to showcase the breadth of his talent.
The first of Stubbs’s painting to depict wild animals was hisLion attacking a Horse, commissioned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham as early as 1762 (Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven). Demonstrating the interest of both artist and patron in antique sculpture, which Stubbs had encountered on his visit to Rome in 1754, and rooted in the classical tradition of animal combats, this picture was the first in a series of paintings involving encounters between lions and horses which dealt with traditional concepts of the sublime. Simultaneously evoking emotions of terror and pity these works proved particularly attractive to print publishers, who were quick to recognise the market potential for such subjects, and prompted further ideas for paintings of wild animals. By 1763 only one of the four pictures Stubbs exhibited at the Society of Artists was a portrait of a horse. The three others consisted of two lion and horse combats, and the portrait of a Zebra belonging to Queen Charlotte, previously referred to, which had been installed in a paddock at St. James’s for the general entertainment of the populace. Much like this painting of two leopard cubs, Stubbs’s portrait of the Queen’s Zebra appears not to have been a commission, but was painted to satisfy the artists own curiosity about the animal; and from this time on his art in this vein becomes increasingly characterised by images of wild animals in their natural state.
The Provenance
Documentary evidence does not exist to confirm the exact date of this painting, or the circumstances of its commission or purchase. However it has always been believed to have been the picture exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1776, and was either purchased from the exhibition, or commissioned by George Brodrick, 4th Viscount Midleton (1754–1836) (fig. 9). Midleton’s father, the 3rd Viscount Midleton, had been an early patron of Stubbs, having commissioned or bought the artist’s painting of Mares and Foals on a River Bank (Tate Gallery, London) in 1765 for the new villa he had commissioned Sir William Chambers to build for him at Peper Harow, in Surrey (fig. 10). The estate had originally been bought in 1713 by the 3rd Earl’s grandfather, Alan Broderick (1656–1728), Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who was created Viscount Midleton of Co. Cork in 1717. Chambers’s plans for the house were approved in March 1765, however the 3rd Viscount died in August of that year and the house was not completed until his son came of age in 1775. The 3rd Viscount also commissioned Stubbs’s Greyhound attacking a Stag (Philadelphia Museum of Art), paintedcirca 1762, as well as a third painting by Stubbs which is now unidentified. All three pictures hung in the house and were probably the pictures ‘painted on purpose’ by Stubbs to hang in the Dining Room.11 The 4th Viscount clearly had a taste for the exotic, appropriate to his purchase of this painting. Of the two marble chimney pieces designed for the Dining Room and Drawing Room by Chambers, carved by his principal sculptor Joseph Wilton, the latter is described as ‘feneer’d with verd-Antique and inlaid flutings of do., the Tablet of Bacchus and Tyger’.12 Tygers at Playdescended in the family at Peper Harow to William St John Freemantle Brodrick, 9th Viscount Midleton (1856–1942), a Conservative politician who was created Earl of Midleton in 1920. It was then inherited by his son, the 2nd Earl who, despite marrying three times, including to the actress Rene Ray (1911–1993), died without issue and sold the picture in 1962. The painting was bought directly by the present owners, in whose collection it has remained until the present day. It has therefore been in only two collections since the day it was painted, and has never appeared on the open market for sale.
The Condition
By Sarah Walden
This painting has a comparatively recent lining and stretcher, perhaps from the early middle of the twentieth century. The fine even texture of the surface is perfectly secure and undisturbed by any past damage. The exceptionally pure, intact quality of the painting throughout suggests that it had a calm, stable early history with scarcely any intervention perhaps until the cleaning and restoration presumably with the lining mentioned above. The subtle transitions in the landscape, paling as it recedes into the distance, are beautifully preserved, increasing the contrast with the strength of tone of the cubs themselves, which remain in extraordinarily perfect condition down to the slightest whisker. Under ultra violet light a single, quite small, recent retouching of any consequence can be seen in the shadow on the ground just to the left of the cubs. Elsewhere there is only a little surface scratch in the mid left background and a tiny surface touch or two at upper left. Along the base edge there may be old retouching in a few places. The old varnish has been thinned, with some uneven earlier varnish also visible in places under ultra violet. The fine brushwork remains exceptionally well preserved however almost throughout, even in the delicate darker detail of the foreground and the palm tree, as well as in the fragile tracery of the mountains against the sky. Just in the upper right corner of the sky the light ground can be seen emerging unevenly through a slightly thinner film of blue paint. It is rare to find a painting so beautifully preserved.
1. See J. Roger, Buffon, A Life in Natural History, Ithaca and London 1997.
2. D. Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–1850, New Haven and London 2007, p, 160.
3. D. Donald, Ibid, p. 160.
4. D. Donald, Ibid, p. 160.
5. D. Donald, Ibid, p. 162.
6. J. Egerton, George Stubbs, Painter. Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London 2007, p. 308.
7. See C. Plumb, Exotic Animals in Eighteenth Century Britain, unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, 2010.
8. C. Plumb, Ibid.
9. T. Moore, Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, London 1839, pp. 199–200.
10. Quoted in R.D. Atlick, The Shows of London, Cambridge, Mass., 1978, p. 39.
11. C. Hussey, English Country Houses. Mid Georgian 1760-1800, London 1955, p. 114.
12. C. Hussey, ibid., p. 114.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
Other highlights in the evening sale include The Annunciation, an oil sketch by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) who was without question the greatest master of the European Baroque style. The Flemish painter’s extraordinary powers as a composer and colourist and his principal elements of drama, movement and spirituality are exemplified in this panel. This picture is his preliminary study for the larger altarpiece of the same subject today in the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, which can be dated to before 1628-29, when it was bought from Rubens by the great Spanish collector Diego Messia, Marques of Leganés (est. £2-3 million / €2.4 - 3.7 million / $3.4 - 5 million).
Sir Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen 1577-1640 Antwerp), The Annunciation, oil on panel, 42 by 31.4 cm.; 16 1/2 by 12 3/8 in. Estimate 2,000,000 — 3,000,000 GBP. Photo Sotheby's
Provenance: Ludwig Borchardt (1863–1938), Basel;
His widow, Emilie, née Cohen (1877–1948);
By whom sold, Lucerne, Galerie Fischer, 20–24 May 1941, lot 1027 (as Flemish School);
With Charles Albert de Burlet, Basel;
Private Collection, Switzerland;
With Robert Noortman, Maastricht;
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
Exhibited: Rotterdam, Boymans Museum van Beuningen, Olieverfschetsen van Rubens, 1953–54, no. 59;
Antwerp, Rubenshuis, 2004–08, on loan.
Literature: E. Haverkamp Begemann, in the exhibition catalogue, Olieverfschetsen van Rubens, 1953–54, p. 75, no. 59;
M. Jaffé, 'Rubens at Rotterdam', in The Burlington Magazine, CXVI, 1954, p. 57;
J. S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A critical catalogue, Princeton 1980, vol. I, pp. 441–442, no. 318, reproduced vol. II, p. 315;
M. Jaffé, Rubens, Milan 1989, p. 306, cat. no. 918, reproduced;
H. Devisscher, The Annunciation. A new oil sketch for the Rubenshuis, Antwerp 2004;
To be included in forthcoming volume V/1 of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard: The Life of Christ before the Passion, by H. Vlieghe and H. Devisscher, as no. 3a, currently in preparation.
Notes: More than any other painter of the Northern Baroque, Rubens’ artistic personality and skill is revealed in his oil sketches, a part of his working method to which he himself attached the greatest importance. Untrammelled by the possible intervention of the studio or the whims of a patron, like no other works they bear witness to his extraordinary powers as a composer and colourist. Although not the first artist to make them, Rubens certainly used such sketches to an extent that had not been seen before, and indeed his mastery of this vibrant medium has never really been equalled. The sketches formed an essential part of his creative process; in them he would flesh out in paint his ideas for a composition, perhaps relying upon earlier drawings in which the outlines of the design were first intimated, and from which he would now build up a more fully resolved idea of his painting in terms of both composition and (importantly) colour. These oil sketches were much prized at the time – Bellori famously wrote of the ‘gran prontezza e furia del penello’(‘the great speed and fury of his brush’) – not least by Rubens himself, and they have been accorded great value ever since, for they remain among the most sought after of his works.
This exceptional sketch served as the preliminary study ormodello for the large altarpiece of the same subject today in the Rubenshuis in Antwerp (fig.1). That so large a painting – over three metres in height – should find itself condensed into such a small and vibrant panel is entirely typical of Rubens’ oil sketches. The finished canvas was almost certainly acquired from Rubens during his stay in Spain between 1628–29 by the great Spanish collector Diego Messia, Marquis of Leganés (1580–1655), (fig. 2), and the sketch was no doubt painted at, or shortly before, this date, most probably in Spain as well. Besides having a rounded top, the sketch differs from the finished painting in several details. The Virgin here kneels with one knee on the step of the prie-dieu beside her, while in the painting she places both knees upon it. The putti dropping flowers on her from above are more fully resolved in the painting and shown at full-length. As well as elaborating on the symbolically important still life of flowers in a glass vase in the centre of the design, Rubens works out the details of the Virgin’s sewing by placing it in a basket, and adds in addition to this an open bible on the prie-dieu and a sleeping cat is now to be found curled up peacefully beside the basket. In both works Mary is shown turning from her prayer towards the figure of the Archangel Gabriel, who has just entered her room. She is clad modestly in a white gown, with a pale blue robe draped over it. Gabriel wears shimmering raiment in which both pink and yellow hues predominate, with the shadows rendered in a pale lilac. Behind them the space of Mary’s chamber is enclosed by a warm red curtain, while little touches of different colours denote the petals and flowers that the two putti drop from above it, and these in turn echo those of the blooms in the glass vase upon her table. In the finished painting these flowers can be clearly seen as roses, symbolic both of Mary herself, who Christian tradition referred to as ‘the rose without thorns’, and also more specifically of the Immaculate Conception to come. The simple domestic atmosphere of her chamber also serves to accentuate Mary’s ordinariness. The presence of the sewing materials reveals her as a normal woman preoccupied with normal household tasks; the flowers and the glass vase on the table behind her are equally symbolic of her purity and humility.
Both the present sketch and the altarpiece in the Rubenshuis seem to have been the last of Rubens’ paintings devoted to the subject of the Annunciation. As Julius Held noted, in his successive treatments of the theme Rubens seems to have moved towards a more dynamic evocation of the scene by varying the figure of the angel Gabriel. In his earliest approaches to the subject, such as that painted shortly after his return from Italy around 1609–10 for the Brotherhood of the Jesuit Sodality of Married Men, and today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Rubens had depicted the angel kneeling before the Virgin.1 Shortly after, on the external wings of the triptych of Saint Stephen at Valenciennes, painted around 1615–16, now in Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rubens shows the angel crouching on clouds above the standing Virgin.2 Gabriel appears in full flight first in an oil sketch for the ceiling decorations in the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, executed around 1620, and now in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna.3 A very similar sketch, but of rectangular not oval format, is preserved in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.4 Held also drew attention to a related drawing made by Rubens for the 1627 edition of the Breviarium Romanum, now in the Albertina in Vienna, in which the Virgin is shown kneeling at a prie-dieu, and a sewing basket is also introduced, though somewhat less prominently (fig. 3).5
The evident parallels between the sketch and the Albertina drawing of 1627 would seem to support a dating of this sketch to the years 1628–29 when Rubens was in Spain, and when the finished altarpiece was probably acquired by the Marquis de Leganés. More recently, however, Hans Devisscher (see Literature) suggested that the altarpiece itself may have been created in more than one phase. While the dynamic and more fluidly painted figure of the Archangel is indeed typical of Rubens’ style in the 1620s, he suggests that the figure of the Virgin and the still-life elements are more typical of Rubens’ more descriptive and detailed style around 1614–15. This implies that the finished altarpiece may have been left unfinished – for reasons unknown – and then picked up again and completed by Rubens at a later date, during or shortly before his departure for Spain, at which time the earlier phase of the composition (the figure of the Virgin Mary) was much reworked. If Devisscher’s suggestion is correct then the sketch here would have a much earlier dating, to around 1614–15, but such a view has not been shared by other scholars. Havekamp-Begemann evidently observed variations in quality within the canvas and suggested that the Rubenshuis painting was partly the work of assistants in the Rubens studio, but continued to date it to around 1628–29. Jaffé equally assigns it a date around 1628. And in the forthcoming volume of the Corpus Rubenianum devoted to the Life of Christ before the Passion, Devisscher and Hans de Vlieghe have returned to a dating in the late 1620s. This dating has now been endorsed by recent dendronchronological of the panel itself by Ian Tyers, which shows a felling date of after circa1615, thus making a date of execution in the 1620s entirely plausible but an earlier dating of 1614-15 impossible.6
Even if the date of this sketch and the finished picture has been the subject of discussion, little reasonable doubt attaches to the identity of the latter’s first known owner. In the inventory of the Leganés art collection, drawn up on March 30, 1642, no. 264 is described as: ‘Una annunziazion de nra. Senora y un angel, de mano de Rubens, de 4 baras de alto y 2 ymedia de ancho, el cielo en oualo, y lagunos angeles hechando flores, y una cesta con la labor de nra senora, y un gato al pie della en 5,000’, (‘An Annunciation with our Lady and an angel, by the hand of Rubens, 4 by 2 ½ varas, the sky in oval, and a few angels who scatter flowers, a basket with the work of Our Lady and a cat at her feet, 5,000’).6 Diego Messia, Marquis of Leganés (1580–1655) rose to prominence at the archducal court in Brussels and became commander of the Spanish cavalry and artillery in the Spanish Netherlands. He married Doña Policena Spinola, the daughter of Ambrogio Spinola, the commander-in-chief of the Spanish armies in 1627, and his immense wealth made him one of the greatest of all collectors in Spain and the Spanish Netherlands in the seventeenth century. At his death his collection contained 1333 works, with a heavy leaning towards works of the Italian and Flemish schools, but also including Spanish pictures. His portrait was also painted by Rubens (Private Collection) and he numbered several works by him in his collection, including landscapes. Rubens himself praised the Marquis as one of the most important collectors of his time. Despite his precautions, however, disputed inheritance led to the dispersal of the collection in the decades following his death in 1655.
We are grateful to Esther Tisa Francini for her assistance with the cataloguing of the provenance of this work.
1. M. Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo completo, Milan 1989, p. 168, no. 104, reproduced. A preliminary sketch is preserved in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for which see J. S. Held under Literature, 1980, vol. I, pp. 439–40, no. 317, reproduced vol. II, 314.
2. Jaffé, op. cit., 1989, p. 227, nos. 422d and 422e, reproduced.
3. Held, op. cit., 1980, vol. I, p. 46, no. 16, reproduced vol. II, plate 19.
4. Ibid., vol. I, p. 47, no. 17, reproduced vol. II, plate 17.
5. Inv. no. 8205. For which see, J. S. Held, Rubens. Selected Drawings, London 1959, vol. I, p. 130, no. 147, vol. II, plate 157.
6. Report 696, dated May 2014. A copy of this is available for inspection in the Department.
7. A vara is approximately 83.5 cm., thus giving a size around 334 x 209 cm. The Rubenshuis canvas measures 310 x 187.6 cm., but such variations are common because the dimensions seem to be given to the nearest half vara,and many works that can definitely be identified with those listed in the inventory (by surviving inventory number for example) display similar discrepancies.
The Cottage Door is one of Thomas Gainsborough’s most famous compositions, and is among his most popular and enduring works. It is one of the great icons of 18th-century British landscape painting. Reflecting Gainsborough’s constant search for emotional perfection, the majestic composition to be offered in July is possibly the most successful of all Gainsborough’s treatments of this theme (est. £1.5-2 million / €1.8- 2.4 million / $2.5-3.4 million).
Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. (Sudbury 1727 - 1788 London), The Cottage Door, oil on canvas, 149 by 120.5 cm.; 58 3/4 by 47 1/2 in. Estimate 1,500,000 — 2,000,000 GBP. Photo Sotheby's
Provenance: The artist’s posthumous sale, Schomberg House, March–May 1789, either lot 69 (A Landscape with a Cottage and Figures) or lot 78 (as A landscape with a Cottage, Figures, &c);
Wynne Ellis (1790–1875);
His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 15 July 1876, lot 60, to Patrington for £100.5s;
Ralph Cross Johnson;
By whom given to the National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington;
By whom deaccessioned, New York, Sotheby's, 4 June 1987, lot 135 (as After Gainsborough);
Anonymous sale, New Orleans Auction Galleries, 9–19 April 2011, lot 56 (as After Thomas Gainsborough);
With Historical Portraits Ltd, London, from whom acquired by the present owner.
Exhibited: London, British Institution, 1865, no. 161;
San Marino, Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, Revisiting the Cottage Door: Gainsborough’s Masterpiece in Focus, 1 June – 2 December 2013, no. 2.
Literature: G. F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, vol. II, London 1854, p. 298 (recorded in the collection of Wynn Ellis in London: GAINSBOROUGH. – A family of country-people before their cottage : of uncommon power and warmth of colouring);
G. B. Rose, ‘The Ralph Cross Johnson Collection at the National Gallery of Art’, in Art and Archaeology, vol. X, no. 3, September 1920, pp. 342 and 354, reproduced;
J. Hayes, The Landscapes of Thomas Gainsborough, 2 vols, London 1982, p. 480;
H. Belsey, Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors. An Insight into the Artist’s Last Decade, London 2013, pp. 24, 66, 100–07, 116–17, cat. no. 2, reproduced in colour p. 117, and detail reproduced on front cover.
An Introduction
The Cottage Door is one of Gainsborough’s most famous compositions, and is among his most popular and enduring works. It is one of the great icons of eighteenth-century British landscape painting. The subject had huge personal significance for the artist, and such was his emotional attachment to the picture that three versions were produced, all with slight variations in tone and light, reflecting Gainsborough’s constant search for emotional perfection. The first version, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780, was bought in 1786 by Thomas Harvey for Catton House in Norfolk, and is now one of the jewels in the crown of the Henry E. Huntington Collection at The Huntington Library, San Marino, possibly the greatest collection of eighteenth century British painting outside of the United Kingdom. However Gainsborough was so fond of the composition that a second version (the present lot), was painted for his own collection. It remained in his possession until his death and was only sold by his executors in 1789 as part of the great sale of Gainsborough’s collection and studio contents at Schomberg House when it was acquired by the great collector, politician and businessman Wynne Ellis (1790–1875). Ellis’s collection consisted of some 402 Old Master paintings, as well as a huge number of works by modern and contemporary British artists including Gainsborough, Reynolds, David Wilkie, Richard Wilson and Turner. In 1854 the great art historian Dr Gustav Friedrich Waagen, who saw this picture in Ellis’s collection and greatly admired it, described the painting in his Treasure of Art in Great Britainas being ‘of uncommon power and warmth of colouring’. At Ellis's death his staggering collection was left to the nation, however the trustees of the National Gallery selected only 44 of the paintings, with the remainder of the collection being distributed in an astonishing five day sale in 1876. Other works by Gainsborough that were disposed of in this sale included his famous Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which was bought by Agnew’s for the incredible sum of £10,605 and later sold to the American banker John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913). A third version, less finely detailed than the first two, also remained in the artist’s collection and now hangs in a private collection in Dallas.
The majestic composition is possibly the most successful of all Gainsborough’s treatments of this theme, which recurs many times in his art. Based on a pyramid within a pyramid, the construction of the picture and emphasis of light within, focuses attention on the concentrated figure group, which forms the emotional essence of the painting. John Constable said of Gainsborough’s landscapes that ‘on looking at them, we find tears in our eyes, and know not what brings them’. Like many contemporaries he was profoundly moved by the elder painter’s ability to conjure up ‘the depths of twilight’ and the sympathy with which he depicted ‘the lonely haunts of the solitary shepherd’ and other such ‘simple’ subject, as well as the obvious empathy which he held for the peasant men and women that inhabit his pictures. As Susan Sloman has commented, in a more cynical age such overt expressions of emotion are rarely expressed, however Gainsborough’s genius is such that the power of his pictures has endured, and he remains one of the best loved of all English artists.The Cottage Door is one of his finest achievements.
Gainsborough's Cottage Door in Context:
by Hugh Belsey
This recently identified canvas is an autograph replica of the painting shown at the Royal Academy to great acclaim in 1780. The canvas has been reused and so it is highly unlikely that the artist intended to sell it and so it must have been painted for the artist’s own amusement. It is not as finished as the 1780 painting, now in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino, California, but the structure and the handling are indisputably by Gainsborough himself. It represents a very personal moment of the artist wanting to reflect on and analyse the brilliance and balance of the composition that he had exhibited a few years before. In addition to the painting offered here and the exhibited landscape that is now in the Huntington Library in California there is a third replica presently in a private collection in Dallas. All three paintings emphasise and re-examine different aspects of the subject. The painting on offer has a particularly strong and structured figure group and the colouring of the landscape takes on greener tones and the other replica uses a higher colour key. The subject, which has become known as The Cottage Door, dominated the artist’s landscape painting from 1770 until his death eighteen years later.
A group of women and children relaxing, eating and playing around the entrance to a simple cottage was a theme frequently examined by Thomas Gainsborough during the 1770s and 1780s. The subject first appears in the background of Thomas Gainsborough’s landscape painting now in the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood where in the background a group of figures around the cottage doorway are enjoying the last rays of the evening sun and their contentment is contrasted in two other figure groups (fig. 1). One shows a posse of riders tired from trading all day at the market and in the bottom right hand corner of the canvas two pitiable peasant children beg by the roadside. It has been thought that these three contrasting groups represent differing degrees of poverty and the difficulties that recent Enclosure Acts had imposed on the peasantry. Politics was of little interest to Gainsborough but all his landscapes contain an aching nostalgia and, with the travelling figures, a restless sense of transition.
During the 1770s a series of drawings show similar groups of figures around cottage doors each with different emphases. Some have more unruly children, some cottages are almost engulfed by trees and others include a male peasant struggling with a huge bundle of sticks to provide heat and fuel to cook food. Gainsborough developed the Cottage Door theme in 1773 when he made an upright landscape that was purchased by Charles, 4thDuke of Rutland which still forms part of the collection at Belvoir Castle (fig. 2) and he repeated the composition for his friend the violinist Felice de Giardini. Both canvases shows a cottage with a large pollarded tree grown too big for its position beside the steps of a tiny cottage that indicates the length of time this particular patch of landscape had provided an income for the cottagers and their forebears. Their dependence on the landscape is shown by the peasant carrying an overlarge bundle of sticks on his back to satisfy the women and children idling their time away on the front steps. Five years later he returned to the subject painting a landscape on a horizontal-shaped canvas.
The landscape in Cincinnati Art Museum was shown at the Royal Academy in 1778 and in it the bundle of sticks had become larger and heavier, the children playing with dogs around the steps more rowdy and the women at the door more disengaged from the realities of life (fig. 3). It was described in the General Evening Post in May 1778 as ‘remarkable for the breadth and just distribution of the lights, the fine degradation of the distances, and the brilliancy and harmony of the colouring.’ Gainsborough painted the Huntington version of the theme two years later and it was also shown at the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy (fig. 4).
In the 1780 landscape Gainsborough first used a horizontal canvas similar in proportion to the Cincinnati landscape but his imagination ran beyond the confines of the edges and he extended it at both the top and bottom in order to complete his composition. In this painting the woman at the door is more beautiful, the toddlers content eating and drinking and the laden peasant is nowhere to be seen. The grandeur of the landscape adds to the tranquility of the figures and as a critic writing in A Candid Review of the Exhibition described, ‘the whole force of his genius [is concentrated] in a beautiful groupe of children and their mother’. Having calculated a facing-saving way of removing himself from the annual strictures of the Royal Academy exhibitions, Gainsborough had the time and opportunity to develop themes in his work that were of interest to him rather than his clientele. He was clearly satisfied with the 1780 painting of the Cottage Door and reproduced it twice. The act of painting it must have given him the greatest satisfaction as he reflected on a job well done.
It has been suggested that the Cottage Door theme had a personal significance for Gainsborough and this may explain why he returned to the subject so often. Aged nineteen Gainsborough had married and his wife grew to be haughty and, as the illegitimate daughter of a duke, she was anxious to establish her precarious social position. His two daughters were fashion conscious and as Gainsborough writes in one of his letters they spent their time ‘tea drinking, Dancing [and] Husband hunting’. Neither daughter had a sustained marriage and his brothers and sisters back in his native Suffolk saw the artist’s financial success as a lifeline. Perhaps the artist equated himself with the peasant labouring under the weight of the bundle of sticks and saw his wife, daughters, brother and sisters as the family group standing on the steps of the cottage dependent on his labours as the hard-working male. Each of the paintings and drawings of the Cottage Door have a different emphasis and mood and perhaps that reflected Gainsborough’s own varying attitude to his dependents.
If this speculation has any truth, by the time he painted the 1780 version of the landscape and the two replicas he made in the following decade he appears to have been more at ease with the situation and one final painting in the Hammer Museum of Art at the University of California at Los Angeles shows the male peasant seated, smoking and looking at his wife and family with pride and wonder (fig. 5).
The painting presently on offer provides an unusual insight into Gainsborough’s complex personality and it is also a remarkable summation of his thoughts about landscape, tranquility and family life.
We are grateful to Hugh Belsey for providing this catalogue entry, and for his assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1 Thomas Gainsborough, Wooded Landscape with Peasant Travellers, c. 1770. Oil on canvas, 47 x 57 1/2 in (119.4 x 146.1 cm). Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, London
Fig. 2 Thomas Gainsborough, The Woodcutter’s Return, 1773. Oil on canvas, 58 x 48 ½ in (147.3 x 123.2 cm). Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle
Fig. 3 Thomas Gainsborough, The Cottage Door 1778. Oil on canvas, 48 ¼ x 58 ¾ in (122.5 x 149.2 cm). Cincinnati Art Museum.
Fig. 4 Thomas Gainsborough, The Cottage Door 1780. Oil on canvas, 58 x 47 in (147.3 x 119.4 cm). Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino.
Fig. 5 Thomas Gainsborough, Peasant smoking at a Cottage Door, 1788. Oil on canvas, 77 x 62 in (195.6 x 157.5 cm). Hammer Museum, University of California at Los Angeles
The father of Dutch landscape painting, Hendrick Avercamp (1585- 1634) will be represented by A panoramic winter landscape with a multitude of figures on a frozen river. This hitherto unpublished picture was painted early in the artist’s career, probably around 1610. Monumental in its scale and composition, it is the most significant addition to Avercamp’s œuvre in modern times. Estimated at £1-1.5 million (€1.2 1.8 million / $1.7 – 2.5 million), the work is being sold to benefit the following charities: The Tuberous Sclerosis Association; The Glasallt Fawr Camphill Community; The Multiple Sclerosis Trust and Eton Action.
Hendrick Avercamp (Aùsterdam 1585- 1634 Kampen), A panoramic winter landscape with a multitude of figures on a frozen river, oil on oak panel, current dimensions: 69.2 by 109 cm.; 27 by 43 in., original dimensions: circa 55 by 109 cm. Estimate 1,000,000 — 1,500,000 GBP. Photo Sotheby's
Provenance: Possibly James Caulfeild-Browne, 2nd Baron Kilmaine (1765–1825), The Neale, Co. Mayo, Ireland;
Francis William Browne, 4th Baron Kilmaine (1843–1907), The Neale, Co. Mayo, Ireland;
Thence by direct family descent
Notes: This hitherto unpublished winter landscape was painted early in the artist’s career, probably around 1610, and is a significant addition to his early œuvre.1 It was originally painted on a panel comprising two horizontal panels, probably of fairly similar width. At some later date, probably after the artist’s death, a small section of the top edge of the upper panel was trimmed, presumably to remove the bevel, and a third horizontal panel was glued to it. The sky was thus extended, creating a more modern winter landscape with a much lowered horizon line. The bare branches of the trees left and right were extended into the added panel, and patches of pale blue sky, unfamiliar in Avercamp’s early winter scenes, were included. The current appearance of the painting is shown here, but a reconstruction of its original appearance is shown as well, which includes a small section of the added plank, to recover the original proportions (see fig. 1). The lower two planks of the current panel thus comprise about 95% of the originally visible panel, allowing for the rebate of a frame. The proportions and the high horizon line are a key pointer to an early dating, and this is supported by tree-ring analysis (see below). Few of Avercamp’s pictures are dated, and latter-day scholars wisely suggest a relatively broad span of dates for undated works. Nonetheless, a comparison with one of his earliest dated pictures, the small landscape in Bergen, Norway, of 1608 shows a similarly high horizon line, also to be found in other works thought to date from the years around 1610 and the early teens. Avercamp was not consistent with horizon lines, but it is clear that by circa 1620 they are consistently lower, usually around the centre-line of the composition, and by the mid-1620s they are generally lower still. Avercamp’s early pictures are, like the present work, packed full of figures on the ice – too many to count – while many of his later works are sparser.
Details of Avercamp’s life are scant, and no biography of him was written until the latter part of the eighteenth century. His nickname was ‘De Stomme van Kampen’ (the Mute of Kampen), but we do not know for certain if he was in fact deaf or mute or both, and it is more likely that he was man of few words. It has become fashionable to make a romantic connection between his alleged affliction and the isolation from the world which it implies and his subject matter, so that one exhibition a few years ago was even entitled ‘Frozen Silence’. He lived for much of his life and died in Kampen, a city without a strong native artistic tradition in the eastern Dutch province of Overijssel. Avercamp included its fortified walls in several of his winter landscapes. He was however born in Amsterdam and spent some years there, perhaps as many as six, during his apprenticeship to the painter Pieter Isaacsz., whose elegant mannerist style, however, left no visible imprint on him. The present work was very likely painted during Avercamp’s Amsterdam sojourn.
Avercamp liked to re-use particular figures and elements in diverse compositions. Some of these evolved over through several pictures over a span of dates, but many are generally found in paintings of roughly the same period. In many-figured paintings such as the present one, a list of such motifs would be a long one, but here follows a sample with its location in the present work listed first:
The rough wooden privy with a naked arse in the moment of defecation to the extreme left occurs first in a work ofcirca 1605 in Vienna. Similar structures occur in later pictures, but of different architecture and with greater modesty.
Several motifs from the present picture are found in a painting in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, of circa 1608.2These include the figure kneeling on the ice tying the laces of his skates in the extreme foreground, who is similarly placed in the Amsterdam work, the bird trap to the centre-left – a motif made famous in the works of Pieter Brueghel the Younger where a re-used old wooden door also serves as the trap – found in the lower left of the Amsterdam work, and the man right-of-centre stepping forward on his skates holding a fishing spear found nearer the right foreground in the Amsterdam picture.
A similar, though not identical castle with round tower that dominates the central background occurs in reverse in a similar position in a tondo winter landscape, also of circa1608, in the National Gallery, London. The boat equipped with runners and flying a flag from its stern sailing away from us close hauled that occurs in the distance is to be found in several winter landscapes by Avercamp.3 Likewise the cartwheel fixed horizontally to a post found to the left, the largely submerged rowing boat to the right, and the remains of a horse frozen in the ice to the extreme left.4
Many other figures are similarly attired stock types that recur, though not identically depicted, in many works by Avercamp. There is a rich variety of lavishly dressed figures, both male and female, in the present picture, in which everyone who can is showing off their finery. Many of the ladies are wearing black sleeveless full-length cloaks, with headdresses with upstanding spikes. These cloaks, of which Avercamp painted in a number of forms, were calledhuiken, and originated in North Africa, passing via Spain to the Spanish Netherlands, and are often seen in Flemish painting from the late sixteenth century onwards. They would have been less common in Avercamp’s Kampen in the Eastern Netherlands, but were the height of fashion in Brabant, and Avercamp may have seen them in Amsterdam.5 They occur in several other works by him, including the winter landscapes on long-term loan from the Rijksmuseum to The Mauritshuis, The Hague, of circa 1610, and in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, of circa1620.6 Groups of couples skating away from the viewer, like the ones in the centre of the present picture, are found in several other early works, including the picture dated 1608 in Bergen. Most of the ladies are wearing bell-shaped hooped skirts, originally Spanish, called verdugado or farthingale in English, which were fashionable in Flanders at the end of the sixteenth century, but one has the slightly later drum-shaped hoop skirt which arrived from France in the first decade of the seventeenth century.7 Many of the women in the present picture and many other Avercamps wear black masks, whether to remain incognito or to preserve a desirable complexion, or most likely to protect them from the cold.8 Familiar too from many of the artist’s works are figures playing colf on the ice – here near the river bank to the left.
A familiar characteristic of many of Avercamp’s ice-scenes are the shadows of figures that the artist first included and then, changing his mind, painted out. The gradually increasing translucence of the overpaint often causes these to re-emerge. Perhaps because the artist used thicker paint in the present picture, they are less evident to the naked eye, but several of them can be seen in the infra-red image reproduced here (Fig. X), especially in the right foreground.
We are most grateful to Pieter Roelofs of the Rijksmuseum for his help in cataloguing this picture. He has suggested that the soldiers laying down arms in the left foreground, a motif not found in other works by the artist, may indicate that the painting dates from shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Antwerp in 1609, an armistice which initiated the Twelve Years Truce between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands.
Technical analysis
A tree-ring analysis of the three planks currently comprising the panel was conducted by Ian Tyers of Dendrochronological Consultancy Ltd in April 2013.9 The two lower planks were sawn from the same slow-growing and long-lived Baltic oak tree which was felled after 1590, and they were almost certainly available for use during the first decade of the seventeenth century. The original panel was composed of these two planks alone. The added upper plank, also of Baltic oak, was sawn from a tree felled after 1627, and thus unlikely to have been available for use during Avercamp’s lifetime.
X-Ray
An X-Ray taken by Art Access Research in June 2013 shows clearly the consistent character of the lower two planks, and the very different appearance of the upper one, which seems to have a different ground layer (see Fig. 3). Remnants of a painted structure in the upper right corner suggest that the added plank had previously been used as part of the support of another panel painting. This makes it likely that the present panel was enlarged rather later than the earliest likely date of use of the upper plank in the mid-seventeenth century.
Infra-red Imaging
Infra-red imaging (IRR) made by Art Access Research in June 2013 underscores the different character of the upper plank, and clearly shows a pattern of receding black and white floor tiles in the upper right corner, indicating that the previous use of this plank was as the right-hand plank of an upright panel, probably a portrait (see Fig. 2).
Provenance
The early history of this painting is as yet unknown. Although not securely documented in the present family until 1907, it is very probable that the painting entered the collection at a much earlier date. According to family history, the 2nd Baron Kilmaine, M.P. for Carlow 1790–1794, was acquiring paintings in the 1790s as his diary entry records when visiting London on 20 October 1795: ‘Go to Christy’s auction in Pal Mal’. Despite the fact there is no documentary evidence, some of the seventeeth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings and eighteenth-century Irish landscapes purchased at this period are illustrated in nineteenth-century watercolours of the Interiors of The Neale.
The painting is listed in the 1907 Inventory and Valuation of Paintings at The Neale produced by Bennett & Sons at the death of the 4th Baron Kilmaine and a letter and bill addressed to the 5th Baron Kilmaine (1878–1957) at The Neale in September 1909 from John & Edward Tracey, ‘Picture Cleaners, Restorers and Liners to the National Gallery of Ireland’, 13, Heytesbury Street, Dublin: ‘the panel picture, Skating Scene, is also very good. For setting 5 pictures to rights, this including touching up the frame will be £3’.
The painting remained at The Neale until 1925 when the 5th Baron Kilmaine sold his estates in Ireland and the family moved to England. The painting has remained in the collection of the present family hidden from public view until its recent discovery.
1. On the basis of a photograph, Dr Roell, Director General of the Rijksmuseum, wrote in a letter dated 21 February 1949 that in his opinion the present work is ‘a genuine and excellent work by Hendrick Avercamp’. Earlier attributions to Molenaer and Brueghel are recorded.
2. See P. Roelofs, Winter landscape with skaters. Hendrick Avercamp, Amsterdam 2013, 78pp.
3. See P. Roelofs, Hendrick Avercamp, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam 2009, p. 62, fig. 61.
4. Idem, p. 73, fig. 88.
5. See B. M. du Mortier, in Roelofs, op. cit., pp. 154–6, figs. 201–05.
6. See Roelofs, op. cit., pp. 46, 50, reproduced figs 35 and 42.
7. See du Mortier, op. cit., p. 148, fig. 187 and p. 151, figs 191 and 192.
8. Idem, p. 152.
9. Report 603. A printed copy of this is available on request and will be posted with the online catalogue of this sale.
CONTEMPLATION OF THE DIVINE
Sotheby’s London First Selling Exhibition of Old Master Paintings and Sculpture (6-15 July 2014)
From 6 until 15 July, as part of London Art Week, Sotheby’s London will stage its first selling exhibition of Old Master Paintings and Sculpture in its New Bond Street galleries. Entitled ‘Contemplation of the Divine’, the show comprises some twenty paintings, predominantly Spanish, Italian and early Netherlandish, ranging in period from the early Renaissance to the late Baroque, together with seven Spanish sculptures from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
James Macdonald, Worldwide Head of Old Master Paintings Private Sales: “The twenty works exhibited in London this July share a common aesthetic in as much as they are powerful, in some cases even harrowing, images. Through their immediacy and directness, they create a strong connection with contemporary collectors”.
The contemporary art of their day, works such as Francisco de Zurbarán’s late monumental masterpiece of Christ on the Cross and Bernardo de Rincón’s uncompromising life-size sculpture of Christ Victorious remain as shocking as they were when produced some three centuries ago.
The resurgence of interest in Spanish sculpture and its inextricable link with painting is due largely thanks to the ground-breaking exhibition ‘Sacred Made Real’ held at the National Gallery in London in 2009. Whilst that great occasion showcased many of the finest Spanish paintings and sculpture – many loaned from the great cathedrals and museums of Spain – our exhibition offers one distinct advantage, namely that these remarkable artworks on display can be acquired and enjoyed by collectors today.