1283BurlingtonFeb2010

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FEBRUARY

2010 T H E B U RLINGTON MAG AZI NE

Dutch and Flemish art A reunited panel by Quentin Metsys of ‘Christ blessing’ and the ‘Virgin in Adoration’ Jan Gossaert: the sitter for his Washington merchant; the patron for his London ‘Adoration’ NO .

Drawings by Wouter Crabeth II | More on Rubens, Van Dyck and the Antwerp sketchbook

1283

Ter Brugghen’s ‘Bagpipe player’ acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

VOL . C L II

Botticelli | Wouwerman | Avercamp | Dutch paintings in Geneva | Maíno | Rodin/Matisse | Hockney | Orozco USA

$35·50

February 2010

£15.50/€ 24

www.ixad.nl

Johannes Lingelbach Frankfurt-am-Main 1622 - 1674 Amsterdam Peasants Dancing the Tarantella (detail) oil on canvas: 109 x 90 cm signed

TEFAF 12 - 21 MARCH 2010

Van Eeghenstraat 82 • 1071 GK Amsterdam • www.noortman.com • T +31 (0) 20 333 2222 • F +31 (0) 20 333 2233 • info@noortman.com

Galerie Canesso Tableaux anciens

Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem Haarlem, 562 - 638 ................................................................................... .

Portrait of a Man Oil on wood panel. Oval, 50,6 × 38 cm (19 ¹⁵⁄₁₆ × 15 in) Inscribed on right “A[nn]o 158[?]7” ­

26, rue Laffitte • 75009 Paris • Tel. + 33 1 40 22 61 71 • Fax + 33 1 40 22 61 81 • e-mail : contact@canesso.com

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feb10pageII:Layout 1 19/01/2010 16:10 Page 1

Barbara Lane

Hans Memling, Master Painter in Fifteenth-Century Bruges iv + 386 pp., 302 b/w ills., 32 colour ills., 220 x 280 mm, 2009, HB, ISBN 978-1-905375-19-6, €140, £98.00 Harvey Miller Publishers

This book contributes to the ongoing reappraisal of Memling by addressing some of the tantalizing problems that remain unresolved despite much recent study of his work.

Royal Collection Publications

 

Jeremy Wood

Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and later Artists: Italian Masters. Raphael and his School 680 pp., 295 b/w ills., 16 colour ills., 180 x 265 mm, 2010, HB, ISBN 978-1-905375-39-4, €175, £122.50 Harvey Miller Publishers

Desmond Shawe-Taylor

Publication April 2010 An exploration of landscape painting during the Dutch Golden Age, this lavishly illustrated book includes works by Jacob van Ruisdael, Willem van de Velde, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Jan Both, Meyndert Hobbema and Jan van der Heyden.

The Shadow of Rubens: Print Publishing in 17th-century Antwerp

This book presents both an overview of the print production in the 17th century Southern Low Countries and a focused approach to the work of three collaborators of Rubens.

Many biographical data on these engravers are presented, and more than 100 prints are published for the first time.

Dutch Landscapes Paperback, 250 x 210mm, 176 pages 118 colour illustrations, bibliography and index ISBN 978 1 905686 25 4, £19.95

Ann Diels

viii + 271 pp., 279 b/w ills., 225 x 305 mm, 2009, HB, ISBN 978-1-905375-50-9, €115, £80.50 Harvey Miller Publishers

Forthcoming:

Already available:

Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Jennifer Scott Paperback, 250 x 210mm, 192 pages 150 colour illustrations, maps and bibliography ISBN 978 1 905686 00 1, £19.95 ‘A very readable introduction to the art and indeed actual history of an often-neglected area’ Huon Mallalieu, Country Life Distributed by Thames & Hudson Ltd Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, Faraday Close, Durrington, Worthing, West Sussex, BN13 3RB T +44 (0)1903 828511 F +44 (0)1903 828801 E enquiries@lbsltd.co.uk

This section of the Corpus Rubenianum is concerned with Rubens’s remarkable study of Italian sixteenth-century art as shown through his numerous copies and adaptations. Rubens’s study of the Cinquecento lasted throughout his life and was not just the focus of his early years in Antwerp when he learned his craft.

Jeremy Howarth

The Steenwyck Family as Masters of Perspective xiv + 555 pp., 200 b/w ills., 16 colour ills., 190 x 250 mm, 2009, HB, ISBN 978-2-503-51509-0, €160, £112.00

The catalogue raisonné, the first ever written on the Steenwycks, covers the known works of the artists and contains detailed provenances and bibliographic references. It contains a number of illustrations, including a number which will be barely known except by specialists in the subject.

undertakes

C ATA L O G U E D E S I G N AND PRODUCTION for Private Galleries, Art Fairs and Museums

D. Lyna, F. Vermeylen, H. Vlieghe (eds.)

Art Auctions and Dealers The Dissemination of Netherlandish Art during the Ancien Régime xi + 174 pp., 41 b/w ills., 178 x 254 mm, 2009, PB, ISBN 978-2-503-51620-2, €60, £42.00

This collection of essays presents a status quaestionis concerning the dissemination of Flemish and Dutch art during the period 1400-1800, and highlights the role art auctions and dealers have played in this process.

All prices exclude taxes – where applicable – and shipping costs.

Begijnhof 67 – B-2300 Turnhout – Belgium – Tel: +32 14 44 80 30 – Fax: +32 14 42 89 19 info@brepols.net – www.brepols.net

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feb10tomasso:Agnews 12/01/2010 15:27 Page 1

TOMASSO BROTHERS F I N E A RT

Jan Claudius de Cock (1667–1735) A Pair of Figures representing Air and Fire Both signed: J.C. de Cock. Inscribed: Ayer and Ignis Terracotta 27 cm high (Air) and 26 cm high ( Fire)

Bardon Hall Weetwood Lane info@tomassobrothers.co.uk

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Are you ready to own a masterpiece?

TEFAF Maastricht is the world’s greatest art and antiques fair.

At TEFAF Maastricht you will find an unsurpassed selection of genuine masterpieces from 260 of the world’s most prestigious dealers. It’s the only fair where you can see and buy paintings from Breughel to Bacon as well as objects reflecting 6,000 years of excellence in the applied arts. And where else is the authenticity, quality and condition of every item verified by 26 vetting committees, made up of 168 internationally respected experts?

For art lovers, TEFAF Maastricht is the ultimate place to go.

MAASTRICHT 12-21 MARCH 2010 The Netherlands

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feb10vanhaeften:AQ_33598_Van Haeften 11/01/2010 14:38 Page 1

17th Century Dutch and Flemish Old Master Paintings

On canvas

22¾ x 18½ ins. (57.5 x 46.3 cm)

ADRIAEN COORTE (active 1683 – in or after 1707) A Still Life of Fruit on a Stone Ledge Signed and dated lower right, A.Coorte, i688

Exhibiting at TEFAF Maastricht | 12–21 March 2010 | Stand no. 304

Johnny Van Haeften 13 Duke Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6DB Tel: +44 (0)20-7930 3062 Fax: +44 (0)20-7839 6303 e-mail: paintings@johnnyvanhaeften.com www.johnnyvanhaeften.com

TEFAF Roundup:Master Drawings Roundup 19/01/2010 16:01 Page 1

MAASTRICHT 2010

12-21 March 2010

A selection of highlights from the Fair

the most prestigious commercial art event in the world, TEFAF Maastricht 2010 has a record number of exhibitors. The 260 dealers from 17 different countries (up from 240 in 2009) will be showcasing works in many categories. It has become common now for galleries to ‘unveil’ works of rarity and high value that have been saved especially for the fair. This adds to a giddy sense of anticipation on the opening day when museum buyers, dealers and collectors congregate in the vast halls of the MECC exhibition centre. Museum quality works from classical antiquity to the 21st century abound at this strictly vetted fair.

Although all disciplines are represented, there is usually a strong showing of fine Dutch and Flemish old masters. This is reflected here in the selected highlights to compliment the theme of the issue. Paintings of note from the Low Countries include Peasants dancing the tarantella outside an inn in a hilly landscape by Johannes Lingelbach (Noortman Master Paintings, Amsterdam) and an exquisite painting of A posy of flowers on a marble ledge by Rachel Ruysch (Johnny Van Haeften, London).

Also to be found are works by Joos de Momper the Younger, Philips Wouverman, Jan Wyck, Adriaen Coorte and Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNISED AS

Peasants dancing the tarantella outside an inn in a hilly landscape, by Johannes Lingelbach (1622–74).

Signed lower left: J: Lingelbach.

Oil on canvas, 109 by 90 cm.

NOORTMAN MASTER PAINTINGS, AMSTERDAM

Last year a new section entitled TEFAF Design was introduced in an upstairs hall. This year more dealers showing 20th-century and contemporary design are introduced and the section relocates to the ground floor, next to (but separate from) the TEFAF Modern section. Another development is the introduction this year of TEFAF on Paper. This section of works on paper will incorporate 18 new dealers to be stationed upstairs.

There will still be the usual works on paper in the Paintings, Drawings and Prints and Modern sections.

For more details on the fair visit: www.tefaf.com

King William III at Namur, by Jan Wyck (1652–1700).

Oil on copper, 25.7 by 30.2 cm.

CHARLES BEDDINGTON, LONDON

St Sebastian, by Louis Finson (1580–1617).

Oil on canvas, 133 by 91.5 cm.

WHITFIELD FINE ART, LONDON

Travellers with packhorses and wagons near a wooden bridge,

by Philips Wouverman (1619–68). Signed in monogram, lower right.

Oil on canvas, 49 by 55.5 cm.

JOHNNY VAN HAEFTEN LTD, LONDON

feb10schlichtebergen:AQ_39887_Schlichte 13/01/2010 16:11 Page 1

KUNSTHANDEl

SCHlICHTE BERGEN Old Master Paintings and drawings 19th century Oil sketches EXHIBITING AT THE EUROPEAN FINE ART FAIR T E F A F, 12 – 21 MARCH 2010 STAND 371 . TEl. + 31 6 53 93 41 17

THOMAS FEARNlEY Fredrikshald (norway) 1802 – 1842 Munich

A view of Lake Lucerne from Brunnen, Mount Bürkenstock and the Gotthard Massif beyond Oil on paper 24.5 by 34.5cm. signed with initials, inscribed and dated “Brunnen 24. Juny 35” PrOVenance

hofjægermester th. Fearnley (the artist's son), christiania (Oslo), who, according to c.w. schnitler in Thieme-Becker XI s.v., owned many works by his father and especially oil sketches thence by descent to the artist's great-granddaughter Bequeathed by the above to the previous owner in 1994

Gallery P.c. hOOFtstraat 53ii, 1071 Bn aMsterdaM telePhOne: +31 (0)20-67 51 701 telePhOne: +31 (0)20-67 69 344

eMail: schlichtebergen.gallery@xs4all.nl

By aPPOintMent

Postal Address VelaZQueZstraat 8, 1077 nh aMsterdaM telePhOne: +31 (0)20-67 69 344 FacsiMile: +31 (0)20-67 34 786

TEFAF Roundup:Master Drawings Roundup 19/01/2010 16:02 Page 2

MAASTRICHT 2010

12-21 March 2010

A selection of highlights from the Fair

St Paul and St Barnabas in Lystra, by Willem van Nieulandt II (1584–1635).

Signed and dated: GUIL. VAN NIEULANT 1614. Oil on panel, 67 cm by 97 cm.

MOATTI FINE ART, LONDON

Spring: a landscape with elegant company on a tree-lined road,

by Joos de Momper the Younger (1564–1635).

Oil on canvas, 128.6 by 188.9 cm.

BERNHEIMER/COLNAGHI, MUNICH AND LONDON

A young man at a stone window playing a Theorbo, by Jacob van Oost (1601–71).

Signed and dated on the ledge lower centre: I.V.OOST.F: 1646.

Oil on canvas, 89 by 72.5 cm.

FRENCH & COMPANY, NEW YORK

A posy of flowers on a marble ledge, by Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750).

Signed, lower right: Rachel Ruysch.

Oil on canvas, 33 by 26.4 cm.

JOHNNY VAN HAEFTEN, LONDON

The arrival of Cleopatra at Tarsus, by Agostino Tassi (1578–1644).

Oil on canvas, 119 by 170 cm.

GALERIE CANESSO, PARIS

Still life with a guitar,

by Sebastiano Lazzari (active in Verona, second half of the 18th century).

One of a pair. Oil on canvas, 49 by 62.5 cm.

DIDIER AARON & CIE, PARIS

feb10pageIX:Layout 1 19/01/2010 15:52 Page 1

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Senenko, Marina ColleCtion of DutCh paintingS XVii–XiX CenturieS the pushkin State Museum of fine arts Moscow: Red Square Publishers 2009. 503 pp., 150 col. + 400 b. & w. ills.

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feb10gordon:Margot Gordon Jan 2004 19/01/2010 11:55 Page 1

margot gordon fIne art

CIrCle of tItIan, xvI Century The Sacrifice of Isaac Black chalk, heightened with white, on blue-grey paper, 308 x 242 mm Provenance: e. Wauters (l. 911)

master drawings new york January 23 – february 20, 2010 shepherd & derom galleries 58 east 79 street, new york City

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Master Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century

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FEB.Contents:cont.nov.pp.corr 19/01/2010 17:03 Page 1

VOLUME CLII • NUMBER

1283

• FEBRUARY

2010

EDITORIAL

75

111

Exhibitions in 2010

Florence 1900. The Quest for Arcadia, B. Roeck

by ALISON BROWN

ARTICLES

76

111

A rediscovered prototype by Quinten Metsys: ‘Christ blessing with the Virgin in adoration’

by KIFFY STAINER - HUTCHINS , SIMON WATNEY and

by JILL LLOYD

112

HUGO PLATT

82

86

The sitter in Jan Gossaert’s ‘Portrait of a merchant’ in the National Gallery of Art, Washington: Jan Snoeck (c.1510–85)

by HERMAN T h. COLENBRANDER

Three drawings attributed to Wouter Pietersz Crabeth II

by XANDER VAN ECK

94

Rubens’s lost ‘pocketbook’: some new thoughts

by DAVID JAFFÉ

99

Hendrick ter Brugghen’s ‘Bagpipe player’ acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

by ARTHUR K . WHEELOCK J r.

James Ensor. The complete paintings, X. Tricot

by PATRICK FLORIZOONE

113 p.83

Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, S. Tumarkin Goodman, ed.

by CHRISTINA LODDER

The patron of Jan Gossaert’s ‘Adoration of the Kings’ in the National Gallery, London

by LORNE CAMPBELL

90

Edvard Munch, Complete Paintings, G. Woll

114

Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, A. Collins Goodyear and J.W. McManus, eds.

by CATHERINE CRAFT

115

In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976, C. Cherix

by TON GEERTS

p.91

115

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

BOOKS

101

EXHIBITIONS

Pre-Eyckian Panel Paintings in the Low Countries, C. Stroo, ed.

117

by JAN PIET FILEDT KOK

102

by MARINA VAIZEY

Hans Memling: Master Painter in Fifteenth-Century Bruges, B.G. Lane

119

Conrad Laib. Ein spätgotischer Maler aus Schwaben in Salzburg, A.-F. Köllermann

by MARK EVANS

Matisse and Rodin

by CATHERINE LAMPERT

by TILL-HOLGER BORCHERT

103

David Hockney

121

Jean Baptiste Vanmour

by YURIKO JACKALL

p.119

122

Hendrick Avercamp

by QUENTIN BUVELOT

103

105

The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age, M.M. Mochizuki

124

Beyond the Dutch

by SIMON WATNEY

125

Philips Wouwerman

by TONY GODFREY

by LUUK PIJL

Die Zeichnungen von Adam Elsheimer: Kritischer Katalog, J. Jacoby

126

by LUUK PIJL

106

Botticelli

by SCOTT NETHERSOLE

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens and their Contemporaries, M.D. Carroll

128

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld

129

Contemporary art in Munich

by OLIVER TOSTMANN

by MARK MEADOW

106

Rembrandt’s Faith. Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age, S. Perlove and L. Silver

131

by XANDER VAN ECK

108

by CATHERINE CRAFT

p.117

by JESSICA STEVENS-CAMPOS

Jan van Noordt. Painter of History and Portraits in Amsterdam, D.A. de Witt

133 134

Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, W. Liedtke The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Collection of Dutch Paintings XVII–XIX Centuries, M. Senenko

by MARJORIE E. WIESEMAN

110

Gabriel Orozco

by MORGAN FALCONER

by QUENTIN BUVELOT

109

Juan Bautista Maíno

by PETER CHERRY

by ERIK SPAANS

109

Dutch and Flemish paintings in Geneva

In Another Light. Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century, P.G. Berman

by JAN GORM MADSEN

p.130

136

CALENDAR

140

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Cover illustration: Portrait of a merchant, here identified as Portrait of Jan Snoeck, by Jan Gossaert. c.1530. Panel, 63.6 by 47.5 cm. (National Gallery of Art, Washington).

Illustrated in this issue on p.83.

FEB.Masthead:Masthead 18/01/2010 16:29 Page 1

VOLUME CLII • NUMBER

1283

• FEBRUARY

2010

Editor: Richard Shone

Managing Director: Kate Trevelyan Kee

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The Burlington Magazine, 14-16 Duke’s Road, London WC1H 9SZ Tel: 020–7388 1228 | Fax: 020–7388 1229 | Email: burlington@burlington.org.uk Editorial: Tel: 020–7388 8157 | Fax: 020–7388 1230 | Email: editorial@burlington.org.uk

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Editorial Exhibitions in 2010 a mass of press releases and emails have announced exhibition plans for 2010 and, with additional sleuthing, we have gathered together some of the more outstanding museum shows for a highly selective overview of the year. It has to be said, however, that our pulse has not quickened; there are many of considerable interest and potential enjoyment but few that break new ground or that venture beyond Western European painting and sculpture. While scholarly shows tend to be of the smaller, in-focus variety and are often all the better for it, budget cuts have bitten deeply into major loan shows and the usual tranche of blockbusters (as they began to do last year).

Much more affordable ‘in house’ exhibitions have become the order of the day. There is no harm in this – indeed it is welcome; a fascinating example which blends scholarly connoisseurship and technical expertise will be the National Gallery’s Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries (30th June to 10th September); a special issue of this Magazine in June will coincide with this. A modest appetiser, currently (but only to 7th February) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is Fakes and Forgeries in which works by the notorious ‘Bolton forger’ Shaun Greenhalgh are displayed alongside examples of police methods of detection and investigation.

Such methods might well come in handy at the numerous celebrations marking the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Caravaggio. We cannot yet vouch for the quality of works that will be displayed under his name but two exhibitions in Italy in particular appear to be showing some works by the artist, one opening in Rome this month at the Scuderie (18th February to 13th June) and another of Caravaggio e i Caravaggeschi, to be held in Florence at the Uffizi and the Pitti simultaneously (22nd May to 17th October). Further exhibitions celebrating round-figure anniversaries are thin on the ground. The five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Botticelli was marked a little prematurely by the Städel Museum, Stuttgart, and the resulting show is reviewed in this issue on pp.126–28. And the birth of Jacopo Bassano in, probably, 1510 is celebrated in Bassano del Grappa in an international loan show running from 6th March to 2nd June. But as far as we know the deaths in 1910 of Holman Hunt and Félix Nadar are not being commemorated, although Le Douanier Rousseau, who died in the same year, is remembered in a fine loan exhibition currently at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (to 9th May).

Modestly conceived monographic exhibitions are sure to reveal unexpected works and new scholarship. They include the London National Gallery’s look at the Danish painter Christen Købke (17th March to 13th June; then in Edinburgh); Gabriel Metsu at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (4th September to 5th December; then in Amsterdam and Washington); the impressive survey of sculpture by Houdon (Musée Fabre, Montpellier; 16th March to 27th June); Sir Thomas Lawrence at the National Portrait Gallery, London (21st October to 23rd January); the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s retrospective devoted to Philippe Otto Runge (1st November to 31st January); and Otto Dix is at the Neue Galerie, New York (11th March to 30th

OVER THE LAST FEW WEEKS

August). Already seen in Paris, the show devoted to the influential late work of Renoir is now installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (to 9th May; then in Philadelphia); there is a full-scale retrospective devoted to Kirchner (Städel Museum, Frankfurt; 23rd April to 25th July); the crucial period 1913–17 in Matisse’s work is explored at the Chicago Art Institute (20th March to 20th June; then at MoMA, New York); and the Arshile Gorky retrospective, recently in Philadelphia, is at Tate Modern (10th February to 3rd May).

The Burlington’s March issue contains articles on Sienese art to coincide with the substantial exhibition of the arts in Siena in the first half of the fifteenth century (in the galleries of S. Maria della Scala and elsewhere; 26th March to 10th July). The show pays particular attention to Jacopo della Quercia, Donatello, Gentile da Fabriano and Sassetta. Other exhibitions of Italian art include Bronzino’s drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (to 18th April), and his paintings at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (24th September to 23rd January); the British Museum’s Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings (22nd April to 25th July); Salvator Rosa at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (15th September to 28th November); Canaletto and his contemporaries at the National Gallery, London (13th October to 16th January); and, moving into the last century, a major exploration of the early career and European influence of Giorgio de Chirico, which will be at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 26th February to 18th July. Italian modernism is well to the fore, alongside German and French art, in the New York Guggenheim’s show Chaos and Classicism: 1918–1936 (1st October to 9th January).

Two more general anniversaries remind us of the extraordinary influence of the Russian Ballet and of Post-Impressionism in the early twentieth century. Several shows have already been devoted in 2009 to Diaghilev’s company and its revolutionary designs for the opera and ballet. In England it made its first great sensation in 1911, and the Victoria and Albert Museum is mounting a substantial exhibition, Serge Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929, running from 25th September to 9th January. But no exhibition appears to have been planned to mark one of the cardinal shows of the twentieth century in Britain, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, held at the Grafton Galleries, London, from 8th November 1910 to 15th January 1911. However, two exhibitions at either end of 2010 remind us of the impact of two of the best-represented artists in that show. The Real van Gogh: the Artist and His Letters is already on view at the Royal Academy of Arts (to 18th April), marking the superb publication of Van Gogh’s complete correspondence; and Tate Modern is holding a major show (30th September to 16th January) devoted to Gauguin, who was the first of the Post-Impressionists to have gained some favour in Edwardian London. We shall publish a special issue on aspects of PostImpressionism in December, mindful of the generally supportive position the Magazine assumed in the famously turbulent reception of the Grafton Galleries exhibition. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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A rediscovered prototype by Quinten Metsys: ‘Christ blessing with the Virgin in adoration’

by KIFFY STAINER-HUTCHINS, SIMON WATNEY and HUGO PLATT

1. Christ blessing, here attributed to Quinten Metsys. c.1491–1505. Panel, 37.6 by 30.4 cm. (Holy Trinity Church, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire).

2. The Virgin in adoration, by Quinten Metsys. c.1491–1505. Panel, 34.7 by 26.5 cm. (Trustees of the Rt. Hon. Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement; Lady Juliet Tadgell).

THE WORKSHOP OF Quinten Metsys (1465/66–1530) produced a number of variant versions of paintings of Christ blessing and the Virgin in adoration, some of them diptychs, with varying degrees of participation by Metsys himself. His influence was

such that there are also many variants by artists in his circle, as well as many later copies. In January 2006 the present writers discovered a small painting depicting Christ blessing, hanging in Holy Trinity Church, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. Although

We wish to thank the following people for their help: the Revd Canon William Matthews and his parish (Holy Trinity Church, Bradford-on-Avon), Lady Juliet Tadgell, Lorne Campbell, Rachel Billinge and Cathy Metzger, as well as Nancy Allred, Konrad Bernheimer, Xanthe Brooke, David Bull, Nichola Costaras, Yolande Decker, Joe Fronek, Amanda Gray, Johnny van Haeften, David Koetser, Alastair Laing, Cindy Pardoe, Caroline Platt, Karen Sanig, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Alice Tetlow, Alexandra Walker, Tim Warner-Johnson, Lucy Whitaker, Baroness Willoughby de Eresby and Martin Wyld.

1 A technical publication illustrating this study in more depth is planned in the near future.

2 Other workshop and later versions and copies of the Tadgell Virgin include: Virgin in adoration (Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Virgin (Priesterseminar, Salzburg); Virgin at prayer (private collection, Leicestershire; see M.J. Friedländer: Early Netherlandish Painting, VII: Quentin Massys, pl.13–5c); and Virgin (WallrafRichartz-Museum, Cologne). Versions and copies of the Bradford-on-Avon Christ include: Christ blessing (Suermondt Museum, Aachen); Salvator Mundi (North Carolina Museum of Art); Christ blessing (Grosvenor Museum, Chester); Christ blessing (Thomas Plume Library, Maldon, Essex); and Christ blessing (with an identical

morse; sale, Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 19th to 21st February 1957, lot 411; present whereabouts unknown). A version of the combined Bradford-onAvon/Tadgell image can be seen in the Praying Mary and the blessing Christ (whereabouts unknown; Kaufmann sale, Berlin, 4th December 1917, lot 84). A now lost copy of the Antwerp Christ was once owned by Nicholas Rockox; see J. Denucé: The Antwerp Art-Galleries: Inventories of the Art Collections in Antwerp in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, The Hague 1932, p.89. Versions of the Prado pair include a Christ (sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 24th January 2008, lot 6) and a separated pair with the figures reversed in Christ as saviour (Kunstmuseum, Winterthur) and Virgin at prayer (private collection, Germany).

3 The reverse of the panel is inscribed with ‘5965’ in faint pencil and ‘5137’ in blue crayon. On the reverse of the frame is ‘5965’ in white chalk and ‘No 28’ in light orange/red wax(?) crayon.

4 Label on reverse of frame reads ‘Leonard Koetser / Old Master Paintings / 13 Duke Street St James’s / London, SW1 / Telephone Whitehall 9349 / ‘The Virgin Adoring’ by Quentin Matsys. / catalogue no. 10. / Spring Exhibition, 1960’.

Additional paper label on reverse of frame reads ‘143’. Ink stamp on reverse of cradle (Christie’s stock number) reads ‘HS 558’.

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clearly early Netherlandish, the painting (Fig.1), hereafter called the Bradford-on-Avon Christ, was displayed in a nineteenthcentury-style frame which bore an erroneous attribution to the Spanish painter Luis de Morales (1509–86). However, the exceptionally fine detailing and brushwork appeared typical of Quinten Metsys.

Upon further examination, the Christ blessing (unusually comprising two short horizontal planks) appeared to have been cut down along the right edge, cropping Christ’s left shoulder and rendering the image spatially imbalanced on that side. It was later established that rather than being one half of a pair or of a diptych, the painting was originally the left half of a single rectangular panel of which the missing right-hand side was found to be a figure of the Virgin in adoration which is now in the collection of the Trustees of the Rt. Hon. Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement (Lady Juliet Tadgell), hereafter called the Tadgell Virgin (Fig.2).

The technical evidence confirming this is set out in the Appendix to this article,1 and the comparisons made are restricted to those paintings which most closely relate to this discovery: the Virgin at prayer (placed on the left) and Christ as saviour of c.1505 by Quinten Metsys and workshop in Antwerp, hereafter called the Antwerp pair (Figs.8 and 9); the Christ and the Virgin (placed on the right as with the Tadgell Virgin) of c.1510–25 from the workshop of Quinten Metsys in London, hereafter called the London pair (Figs.10 and 11); and to a lesser degree the much later unaltered diptych of the Virgin at prayer (placed on the left) and Christ as saviour by Quinten Metsys from Madrid, hereafter called the Prado diptych, which is signed and dated 1529 on the reverse.2 Thus far tracing the provenance of the Bradford-on-Avon Christ 3 and the Tadgell Virgin 4 has proved difficult.5 The only information that can be firmly established is that the Christ blessing belonged to Major Thomas Clarence Edward Goff, who in 1940 gave it to Holy Trinity Church, Bradford-on-Avon,6 and that the Virgin in adoration was with the Leonard Koester Gallery, London, from whom it was acquired in May 1960 by Baron Fermor-Hesketh; it was put up by for sale by an anonymous source at Christie’s, London, on 8th July 1988 (lot 131),7 and purchased later that year by the current owner.

The original combined panel of Christ blessing with the Virgin in adoration (Fig.3) would have measured approximately 38 by 61 cm. and would have been set within an engaged frame. In the Tadgell painting, the Virgin’s head is slightly downcast and turned with her shoulders in three-quarters profile to the left.

5 Nothing has emerged from extensive searches at the National Archives, National Trust archives (Goff bequest), Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby archives, Royal Archives, Leonard Koetser Gallery archives, Witt Library, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie and Getty Provenance Index. A search of the Getty Provenance Index for similarly titled works listed under Metsys found nothing, but for those under Morales there were a number of possibilities which, although poorly described, might be worth researching further, as Luis de Morales used to be a popular attributional dumping ground for unassigned religious works in this vein.

6 Major Goff was the great-grandson of William IV and the actress Dorothy Jordon. He lived at The Courts, Holt, near Trowbridge, Wiltshire, and formerly at Carrowe Park, County Roscommon, Connaught, Ireland. In 1943 Goff bequeathed The Courts to the National Trust but continued to live there until his death in 1949. Various family obituaries and letters to The Times between 1949 and 1975 record a Royal inheritance that included ‘furniture, pictures, letters and notebooks which had once belonged to William IV’. If there is any basis to this claim it is likely that these items were part of William IV’s private collection at Bushy House. Among Major Goff’s collection was a picture by Michael Dahl, A

3. Reconstruction of the original state of Figs.1 and 2.

Therefore, in the original composition her head would have been inclined towards Christ, with her hands, which are held together in prayer, directed towards him. The background of both paintings, beneath differing and, in places, misleading, restoration, is covered with gold, flecked with a pattern of reddish-brown spots and shading. Raised golden rays radiate from behind the heads of both Christ and the Virgin to the top and sides of the panels. It seems probable that the two paintings were separated long ago and, while their original construction and matching technique appear highly typical of the period and origin, as a result of later restorations the two fragments now appear rather different.

Christ’s mantle is clasped at the base of the neck with a morse of gold set with rubies, pearls and other precious stones. In design it closely resembles examples of similar late Gothic jewellery in the celebrated painting by Petrus Christus of A goldsmith in his shop, possibly St Eligius (1449; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The impastoed detailing of Christ’s morse and the Virgin’s pearls and robe edging are extremely finely rendered (Figs.5 and 7), using a combination of raised dots and carefully positioned painted highlights and shadowing that give a brilliant three-dimensional effect. The exceptionally fine depiction of the jewellery in particular may perhaps be identified as by the hand of the master rather than that of his workshop; compare, for example, Christ’s morse with the large brooch of Metsys’s Grotesque old woman (c.1513; National Gallery, London). Additionally, the delicately painted eyelashes involve fine ‘beaded’

Horse Guards trumpeter, which had been inherited from his grandfather, the Revd Lord Augustus Fitzclarence, an illegitimate son of William IV. See M.F. Sandars: The Life and Times of Queen Adelaide, London 1915, pp.287–88; Lady Cecile Goff: letter to The Times (17th December 1928), p.10; C. Hussey: ‘The Court [sic], Holt, Wiltshire – I and II’, Country Life (1st and 8th January 1943); obituary of Major T.C.E. Goff in The Times (15th March 1949), p.7; and latest wills for Mr Tom Goff (Major T.C.E. Goff’s son) in The Times (2nd July 1975), p.18. The National Archives at Kew may well have the actual codicils to Queen Adelaide’s will listing the items left to the Fitzclarences. The Revd A. Richardson in the Holy Trinity Church Records of 1940, p.98, wrote: ‘In June a picture, Head of Christ, was presented by Col. Goff of Holt. hung in the North Aisle’. ‘Colonel’ appears to have been a temporary promotion given to Major Goff to reflect his activities as military attaché to Major-General Lord Athlone in the Second World War. 7 The Koetser spring exhibition catalogue of 1960, p.10, refers to the painting as ‘The Virgin Adoring’. The painting was also similarly advertised (with image) in the Connoisseur (April 1960), ‘Collection L. Koetser, London’. The Christie’s sale catalogue of 1988 calls the painting Virgin at prayer, comparing it with the Antwerp Virgin and giving a full attribution to Metsys. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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6. Detail of Fig.2.

4. Detail of Fig.1.

5. Detail of Fig.1.

strokes (possibly in a water-based medium), as a finishing touch (Figs.4 and 6; the Virgin’s lashes are slightly abraded or smeared).

Although the beaded brushstroke technique is not exclusive to Metsys, it is skilfully executed here and the same hand can be seen at work on the eyelashes of both the Antwerp pair and Prado diptych, as well as on the hairs of the old man’s fur collar in the Ill-matched lovers (c.1520–25; National Gallery of Art, Washington), but not on the London pair.8 The imagery of Christ blessing and the Virgin Mary in Netherlandish painting has been much discussed in recent years.9 The presence of the adoring Virgin in prayer on Christ’s left-hand side made the subject suitable for private devotion and the theme spawned a large number of variants which attest to its popularity.10 The most direct antecedent for the format of the original image is Christ blessing with the Virgin at prayer from Robert Campin’s workshop, which moreover is not a diptych.

The Philadelphia painting has long been recognised as an important precursor for Metsys’s various diptychs of Christ and the Virgin.11 The discovery of the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting serves to demonstrate further how directly Metsys drew on Campin’s composition as a model – showing Christ and the Virgin in the same proximity, the Virgin behind Christ’s left shoulder and using the same hand gestures, as well as adopting 8 See notes 13, 14 and 28 below. See also J.O. Hand, C.A. Metzger and R. Spronk: exh. cat. Prayers and Portraits; Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, Washington (National Gallery of Art) and Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) 2006–07, pp.109 and 282–84.

9 See G. Finaldi, ed.: exh. cat. The Image of Christ, London (National Gallery) 2000, pp.94–96; and Hand, Metzger and Spronk, op. cit. (note 8).

10 H. van Os: exh. cat. The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300–1500, Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1994–95, pp.40–43.

11 S. Kemperdick and J. Sander, eds.: exh. cat. The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden, Frankfurt (Städel Museum) and Berlin (Gemäldegalerie) 2008–09; see also Hand, Metzger and Spronk, op. cit. (note 8), p.110.

12 Kemperdick and Sander, op. cit. (note 11), p.216.

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7. Detail of Fig.2.

the device of placing Christ’s foreshortened left hand on the edge of the frame, so that it had the appearance of reaching beyond the confines of the picture plane into the viewer’s space.

Jochen Sander has concluded that the Philadelphia picture ‘is likely to have been painted in the 1430s’, by the same artist in Campin’s workshop who was responsible at much the same time for a fragment of the Crucifixion of the bad thief (Städel Museum, Frankfurt) from a lost altarpiece. Furthermore, he argues that the Philadelphia painting ‘established an independent Netherlandish tradition, which in the course of time would separate the two figures again, assigning each to his or her own half of a diptych’.12 The Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting strongly suggests, however, that the Campin workshop’s innovative early fifteenth-century combination of Christ blessing and the Virgin at prayer within a single picture retained its own autonomous currency within later Netherlandish art, at least in Metsys’s studio.

13

Unlike the Bradford-on-Avon Christ, the head of the Antwerp Christ is now surrounded by a stronger corona of light, and Christ holds a delicate filigree-cross in his left hand, while the Antwerp Virgin now wears a crown. Recent technical studies by Catherine Metzger show that the two Antwerp panels have been much altered from their initial format; see Hand, Metzger and Spronk, op. cit. (note 8), pp.110–15 and 283–84. They were made into a diptych, to which end the larger Christ panel, originally created as a ‘Salvator Mundi’, was reduced and converted into a ‘Christ blessing’. The original ‘Virgin of Sorrows’, although always intended as part of a diptych format, was changed during painting to the ‘Queen of Heaven’.

Metzger concludes that Metsys himself had a major hand in the painting of both pictures, but the workshop may well have participated in the reformatting and preparatory work necessary to convert a stand-alone painting (i.e. the Christ) into a

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8. Virgin at prayer,

by Quinten Metsys and workshop. c.1505.

Panel, 40.9 by 30.6 cm. (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp).

9. Christ as saviour, by Quinten Metsys and workshop. c.1505.

Panel, 40.9 by 30.8 cm.

(Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp).

The exceptionally subtle modulation and colouring in the Bradford-on-Avon and Tadgell paintings clearly reveals Metsys’s own hand, particularly when compared with the universally accepted Virgin at prayer and Christ as saviour in Antwerp (Figs.8 and 9). However, not only are the respective positions of the Christ and Virgin reversed in the Antwerp pair, but it has recently been discovered that they were originally independent paintings which were later adapted to form a diptych.13 Stylistically the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell paintings also display a palpable intimacy and freshness that is not so evident in other variants, and as they were originally combined in one single picture plane (a feature of design that began to wane as the diptych became more popular), it seems that they may be marginally earlier in date than the Antwerp pair.

Both the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell and Antwerp paintings are certainly of much higher quality than the Christ and Virgin in London (Figs.10 and 11), which are currently accepted as later products of Metsys’s workshop.14 Hitherto most art historians have regarded the London panels as variants of the Antwerp pair.

However, Christ and his mother in the combined Bradford-onAvon/Tadgell painting share the same relative positions as the London pair, which similarly place Christ on the left and the Virgin on the right (as viewed), and which are also lit from the left – as in the majority of accepted works of Christ and the Virgin from the Metsys workshop (the exceptions being the Antwerp pair and the much later Prado diptych). The details of the Virgin’s dress in the many workshop versions are also closer to that of the Tadgell Virgin than in the Antwerp Virgin (Fig.8). Thus it now seems more likely that the London paintings are in fact direct

workshop versions after the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting rather than a reversed image variant after the Antwerp pair.15 The morse in the Bradford-on-Avon Christ (Fig.5) is very similar to the one on the London Christ, though larger in relation to the overall composition and more brilliantly detailed.

It is also relatively similar to the morse in the Antwerp version, but seemingly finer in execution. The elaborate raised painting of these morses seems to derive directly from Jan van Eyck, perhaps mediated through the later workshop practice of Hans Memling. It is instructive to compare it to the equally brilliantly painted jewellery and other metalwork in Metsys’s celebrated painting of The banker and his wife of 1514 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), as well as in other autograph works by this artist – including the Grotesque old woman as previously mentioned.

The stylistic and technical comparison of the combined Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting with similar accepted works by Metsys, particularly the Antwerp pair, establishes a solid case for the work to be considered the product of Metsys’s own hand.16 Larry Silver dated the Antwerp paintings to the years c.1491–150717 but more recent research points out that they are now almost universally accepted as from around 1505.18 We would therefore suggest a similar or perhaps even earlier date for the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting, which stylistically seems likely to have been painted before the Antwerp pair and thus conceivably completed between 1491 (shortly after Metsys’s entry into the Guild of St Luke) and 1505. However, this Antwerp Mannerist adaptation of an essentially conventional late medieval devotional image seems to speak more of the very early sixteenth century than the late fifteenth.

diptych; thus the representation of the pair in the Franz Franken II’s painting of a Banquet in the house of burgomaster Rockox of c.1630–35 (Alte Pinakothek, Madrid), approximately 120 years later, is probably correct; communications between StainerHutchins and Metzger, January 2009.

14 As with the Antwerp pair, and following a recent technical survey by Campbell, Billinge and Jill Dunkerton, it now appears that the London panels did not start life together either but were altered to form a diptych some time later. Campbell also concludes that while assessment is hampered by extensive old restoration (including a crude re-gilding of the backgrounds), the two paintings appear to be by different assistants active within the Metsys workshop; communications between Stainer-Hutchins and Campbell and Billinge between October 2007 and January 2009.

15 L. von Baldass: ‘Gotik und Renaissance im Werke des Quinten Metsys’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, NS 7 (1933), pp.137–81, esp. p.166, contended that the London panels were workshop copies after lost early works by Metsys and that the Antwerp panels were variants produced by him at a slightly later date.

16 It is also important to note that in 1960 Leonard Koetser believed the Tadgell Virgin to be by the hand of Metsys, not his studio (communication between StainerHutchins and David Koetser, 4th November 2008, and so did Christie’s in 1988 (see note 7 above).

17 L. Silver: The paintings of Quinten Massys (with a Catalogue Raisonné), New York 1984, pp.192–99.

18 Hand, Metzger and Spronk, op. cit. (note 8), p.110, although the alterations may be slightly later (see note 13 above).

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10. Christ, by the workshop of Quinten Metsys. c.1510–25. Panel, 60.2 by 34.6 cm. (National Gallery, London).

11. Virgin, by the workshop of Quinten Metsys. c.1510–25.

Panel, 60.3 by 34.7 cm.

(National Gallery, London).

Finally and perhaps most importantly, we should ask whether the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting should be considered as the original early prototype for all the closely related subsequent works by Metsys and/or his workshop. The possibility of a missing compositional prototype was first proposed in 1933 by Ludwig von Baldass, who suggested that a pair of panels once existed earlier in date than the Antwerp pair with the position of the figures reversed: . . . not too far removed in date from the two large altarpieces are the beautiful heads of the Virgin praying and of Christ blessing in the Antwerp gallery. Both pictures are obviously fragments. The complete compositions – Christ facing the same way, Mary facing the opposite way – have been preserved in the workshop copies in the National Gallery, London, although these differ in various details. The style of these workshop pictures is also slightly more archaic. One may reasonably assume that they go back to lost originals by Metsys and that the artist himself then painted the versions in the Antwerp Museum a little later.19 In concurring with this theory, Lorne Campbell concludes that the lost originals were probably created by Metsys early in his career and that the Antwerp panels were probably the earliest variations on this theme.20 In Silver’s discussion of the Antwerp pair, he observes that both this ‘diptych’ and Van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece, the work which he considered to be the chief model for the Antwerp pair, display the Virgin on God’s and Christ’s right-hand side (our left 19

Baldass, op. cit. (note 15), p.166.

Campbell adds that Metsys’s workshop may have continued over a long period to produce further versions, including the London panels, but at the end of his life he painted the very different Prado diptych, which he signed and dated 1529 on the reverse; communications between Stainer-Hutchins and Campbell between October 2007 and January 2009.

21 See Silver, op. cit. (note 17), p.196, who explains that in terms of heraldic form, when standing behind the shield, the ‘correct’ or more normal related positions for Christ and the Virgin is to have Christ in dexter (right) and the Virgin 20

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as viewed) – this being an aberration to the heraldic norm but by no means iconographically incorrect as it still places the Virgin in an intercessionary role. Both the Philadelphia painting and the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting, together with most of Metsys’s many workshop versions and copies of this theme, as well as his altarpiece of the Holy Trinity with the Virgin (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), all show the related positions in their reversed, more conventional norm – that is, the Virgin on Christ’s left (our right as viewed) in her supplicatory role. Silver’s main argument against Baldass’s theory is that there is no necessary reason to assume an earlier version than the Antwerp pair since the chief difference between this diptych and the many subsequent versions and copies is merely a ‘correction’ of the figures’ relative positions.21 However, the original state of the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting undoubtedly strengthens Baldass’s hypothesis of a lost earlier version of the subject with Mary on Christ’s left (our right), although the prototype now appears to be a single panel painting rather than a pendant pair or a diptych. This discovery also reinforces the strong probability that this image played a determining role as a model for other surviving variants and copies, especially those in which the Virgin is placed on the right.

Using a variety of such models, copies or variants would have been produced which could be later paired and adjusted to suit individual patrons. As a result, assistants were able to produce multiple versions of popular images from stock compositions without needing help from the master.22 Direct sources for a Virgin placed on the right would have been readily available and in sinister (on his left) – i.e. Christ on the viewer’s left and the Virgin on the viewer’s right.

22 Hand, Metzger and Spronk, op. cit. (note 8), pp.4 and 22–25. See also J. Dijkstra: ‘Methods for the Copying of Paintings in the Southern Netherlands in the 15th and early 16th Centuries’, in H. Verougstraete-Marcq and R. van Schoute, eds.: Le Dessin Sous-Jacent dans La Peinture, 8: Dessin Sou-Jacent en Copies, Louvain-La-Neuve 1991, pp.67–76.

23 Ibid.; and Baldass, op. cit. (note 15), p.156: ‘. . . Quinten’s workshop must have had journeymen of great skill and versatility, adept at varying the master’s motifs’.

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A REUNITED PANEL BY METSYS

copying techniques were various, including tracings on sheets of gelatine or oiled paper, or more skilled freehand interpretations such as the London pair.23 If we accept that the Bradford-on-Avon/Tadgell painting is stylistically of a similar or slightly earlier date to the Antwerp pair as first painted by Metsys, and that it is of equal or perhaps even higher quality, and that Metsys was as directly influenced by the composition of the Philadelphia painting as by the physiognomy of Van Eyck’s lost Head of Christ, and that there would have been a practical need within the Metsys workshop for such a stock image as this, then the hitherto hypothetical idea of a lost prototype must be reconsidered. This rediscovered masterpiece in its original form (Fig.3) does indeed appear to constitute the lost compositional prototype which Baldass suspected existed.

Appendix Technical examination of Quinten Metsys’s ‘Christ blessing with the Virgin in adoration’.

Since its separation from the Tadgell Virgin panel, the Bradford-on-Avon Christ has received relatively little interference and survives largely in excellent condition. Seen from the front the panel has been trimmed very slightly on the top and left edges (right up to the original paint-edge, or barbe); the bottom edge remains intact. The sawn edge on the right has a newer looking slight chamfer on the reverse together with a very narrow stepped cut along the profile edge – both appear to be later modifications or a forged attempt to match other edges and make the panel appear as a stand-alone painting taken from a much smaller engaged frame. The figure of Christ has been selectively cleaned leaving the background covered in multiple layers of aged darkened varnish and some minimal restoration. More recent retouchings can be seen along the plank join through the chin. There is almost no paint abrasion from past cleaning methods.

The Tadgell Virgin has received rather more intervention. The panel has been cut down at the top by about 2.5 cm. and trimmed slightly on the bottom edge.

Additionally, a 0.4 cm. wide strip of paint and ground abutting the sawn edge on the left has been scored and scraped in an attempt to forge a barbe (i.e. the creation of a false paint-edge that might once have abutted an engaged frame if the work had been created as a single image). More recently the panel has been thinned to a depth of 0.5 cm. and cradled on the reverse. Cleaning and restoration has resulted in some misinterpreted retouching, including an over-defined straight gold band in the upper background (which is not analogous to work of the period or to Metsys), and a poorly reconstructed veil behind the Virgin’s head. Microscopic examination also shows that cleaning abrasion is evident on some details (e.g. the raised pearls and ruby in the centre of the circlet around the head, the veil, the robe-edging and knuckles on the back of the hand).24 X-rays of both paintings, carried out at the National Gallery, London, clearly confirm that the panels were once conjoined and that the vertical cut between the two figures butts up exactly.25 The Bradford-on-Avon panel is the wider of the two as the painting was sawn just to the right of Christ’s left hand. Presumably this was to leave the hand intact as well as to ensure that the figure of the Virgin sat centrally on its own.

However, once separated, the Tadgell panel would have appeared rather tall and narrow, thus encouraging the removal of the top 2.5 cm. and cropping the golden rays emanating from the Virgin’s head. Christ’s left upper arm has been cut through but remains visible in shadow in the lower left corner of the Tadgell Virgin (Fig.3).

Originally the rectangular panel comprised two matching horizontally grained oak planks glued and joined together with two internal vertical dowels. The join runs horizontally (approximately 17 cm. up from the bottom edge of both panels), in a matching straight line across the paintings through the cleft of the chin of both figures. X-rays of the Christ show a wooden dowel and slot at right angles to the panel grain across the plank join in the area of Christ’s right cheek. The remains of a corresponding dowel-slot in the thinned Tadgell panel, across the plank join in the area of the Virgin’s left cheek, is visible only to the naked eye as an oval shadow on the reverse, between the fourth and fifth horizontal (from bottom) and third and fourth vertical (from left) cradle members.

The Bradford-on-Avon panel reveals the original thickness of the whole panel to have been up to 1.6 cm. The largely intact reverse shows a curved convex profile (in 24

The restoration is evident in the image published in 1960 in the Connoisseur (see note 7 above), and the structural and cosmetic attentions seem to comprise one campaign that appears typical of a mid-twentieth-century treatment. The pigment titanium white, not commercially available until the 1950s, appears to have been used in places.

25 It has not been possible to reproduce the X-rays here (see note 1 above).

26 For example, images of St Luke painting the Virgin that date from the early sixteenth century depict the artist working in this way; see the St Luke painting the Virgin and Child (c.1520?) by a follower of Metsys in the National Gallery, London.

the vertical direction only) which is 0.6 cm. thicker in the middle than at the top and bottom edges. Seen from reverse there are no original bevelled edges. Instead, narrow (approximately 0.6 cm. wide) right-angled sawn steps were cut into and along all four reverse edges of the combined panel, and these formed the ‘tongue’ that once slotted tongue-and-groove style into the now lost original engaged frame. These steps survive on the reverse left edge slightly trimmed, and reverse right and bottom edges of the Bradford-on-Avon panel. The step on the top edge is missing and the step on the right reverse ‘separated edge’ is forged. The thinned Tadgell panel also has the shadowy remains of a matching sawn step seen down the reverse left edge only.

The original engaged frame would have been of the same wood and, as described above, would have been closely fitted around the panel before painting. The whole, including the image panel, would then have been prepared, gilded and painted at the same time. Most northern painters of this period painted portraits and small diptychs with the works already framed in this way.26 Seen facing, and where original edges survive, both ground and paint end in a barbe together with a further 0.4 cm. or so of bare wood (the stepped tongue that was inserted into the groove of the engaged frame). These strips of bare wood (and thus the original barbe also) remain largely intact on both the bottom edge of the Bradford-on-Avon panel and the right edge of the Tadgell panel. However, the top and left edges of the Bradford-on-Avon panel and the bottom edge of the Tadgell panel have been trimmed right up to, or just along the line of the barbe. This trimming (including the loss of some of the stepped cuts on the reverse) probably resulted from the method of extraction of the panel from its original frame before it was sawn in two.

While not yet analysed, the pigment and media of the paint and ground layers appear entirely typical for the period and place of origin as well as consistently similar on both the separated paintings. The creamish-white ground is characteristic of chalk and glue size and is of medium thickness sufficient to cover the texture of the wood grain. A thin intermediary second priming (e.g. typically comprising lead white with a pigmented toning) appears evident under both infra-red reflectography, and as a pale paint layer under magnification at the bottom paint-barbe of the Bradford-on-Avon panel.

Infra-red reflectography of both paintings (also carried out at the National Gallery) shows some underdrawing in the form of free-hand contour lines and shading.27 On the Christ there are lines describing and shading the right hand raised in benediction. In the Virgin the line of the bodice, the Virgin’s chin, some strokes of hair and lines and shading around the eye sockets are described in a similar style. The underdrawing is followed fairly closely in the upper paint layers, however some painted alterations are apparent, including parts of Christ’s left hand, the heel of his right hand and tip of his right middle finger raised in benediction. The characteristics of the underdrawing in particular compare very closely with that found on the related Antwerp pair and also on the much later Prado diptych.28 The upper paint layers appear largely typical of oil. The paint surface is notably smooth overall, with the exception of Christ’s morse, the Virgin’s pearl beading and the halo rays on both (all of which have raised work) and perhaps the Virgin’s blue robe. The images are painted in a highly detailed manner with very fine brushwork. The typical build-up of multiple layers, including opaque reflective base body-colours, reserves, transparent glazes and opaque highlights, has resulted in a translucent and vibrant effect showing all the craft of Flemish art of the period.

The gold leaf of the background has been applied first over the ground, leaving a reserve for the figures, and is covered in the upper sections with a pattern of dots and dashes of a now brownish-red lake (possibly madder) comparable to that found on the background of the diptych Ecce Homo and the Mater Dolorosa by Albrecht Bouts in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge MA. Seen more clearly behind the Virgin, this pattern is actually evident on both paintings and should blend gradually into a denser shadow behind the shoulders of each figure. However, the pattern on the Bradford-on-Avon Christ can only be seen under the microscope beneath several thick layers of heavily discoloured, aged varnish and, as mentioned earlier, the upper background of the Tadgell Virgin has been wrongly restored to an overdefined horizontal gold band.

The raised lines of the halo rays appear to be rendered using a mixture including chalk and an oil mordant, then gilded. The rays do not run beneath either hair or veil and abut a reserve for these areas.

Finally, the overall palette appears typical for the date and origin. For example, characteristically, the gold colour of the morse together with the edging of Christ’s robe and the Virgin’s under-dress appear to have been painted using lead-tin yellow pigment. The pale purplish-crimson of Christ’s robe appears typical of a thin crimson-red lake glaze (possibly applied with a blotting technique) over a light grey body-colour. The very thick deep blue of the Virgin’s robe has a slight greenish tinge and displays a marked drying craquelure typical of a well-preserved azurite pigment densely loaded in oil. An identical fine and even aged crackle pattern in the paint layers is evident on both panels.

27 It has not been possible to reproduce the infra-red reflectograms here (see note 1 above).

28 Communications between Stainer-Hutchins, Metzger (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Campbell and Billinge (National Gallery, London) between October 2007 and January 2009. For details on underdrawing and technique in the Antwerp and Prado pairs, see Hand, Metzger and Spronk, op. cit. (note 8), pp.104–09, 110–15 and 282–84. The much later Prado paintings are the only known pendant works on this particular theme that were originally created as a diptych and which remain unaltered (see notes 13 and 14 above for alterations to the Antwerp and London pairs).

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The sitter in Jan Gossaert’s ‘Portrait of a merchant’ in the National Gallery of Art, Washington: Jan Snoeck (c.1510–85)

by HERMAN Th. COLENBRANDER

ONE OF T HE GREAT

treasures of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, is Jan Gossaert’s portrait of an unknown man, thought to be a banker or a merchant, seated in his office (Fig.12). The discovery of a watercolour (Fig.13) in the Snouck van Loosen Stichting in Enkhuizen throws light on the identity of the sitter in this remarkable portrait.

On the outskirts of the city of Gorinchem in the province of South Holland is the sixteenth-century manor of Schelluinderberg at Schelluinen (Fig.14). Although it has undergone some transformation, this charming house, with its characteristic hexagonal stair tower, has miraculously survived.1 At the top of the tower there is a copper weather-vane, incised with a pike (Fig.15). Because the Dutch word for pike is snoek (snoeck in old spelling), this vane, as well as the sandstone portrait busts in the antique manner, the coat of arms and the relief on the wall with a cartouche showing a pike and the motto INT WATER CLOUC (‘Brave in the water’; Fig.16), have kept alive the name of the original inhabitant of this rare sixteenth-century mansion.

It was built c.1546 for Jan Jacobsz Snoeck (c.1510–85) of Gorinchem and expanded and embellished c.1568, work which was possibly carried out by the stonemason Cornelis Bloemaert.2 Jan Snoeck, descended from a patrician family of Gorinchem, which for several generations had held important offices in the city and which was to maintain its prominence up to the time of Napoleon and even afterwards, must already have been a substantial businessman to have been appointed one of the city’s aldermen at the age of twenty-four. Later he served as alderman eleven times, as mayor about fourteen times, as chairman of the dike board of the district of Arkel in 1537, as treasurer of the city between 1554 and 1557 and in 1558 as member of the first city council, newly appointed by Philip II of Spain. In 1567 he signed up on the city’s behalf to the League of Beggars (a league of nobles who had vowed to defend the Netherlands against Philip II). In 1572 and again in 1584 he was first delegate at the

assembly of the States of Holland at Dordrecht and in Delft.

Furthermore, he was churchwarden in 1550, king of the Old Crossbowmen and in 1572, as was his father before him, Master of the charitable institution of the Holy Spirit. In the 1560s he was also a member of the Guild of Pedlars.3 During his mayorship in 1542 the harbour of Gorinchem (now called the Wijdschild) was constructed.

Both Jan’s grandfather and father amassed considerable wealth and possessions and the next generations added to these through fortunate marriages. In 1533 Jan married Anna van Sevenbergen, the daughter of the well-to-do mayor of Gorinchem.

Thereafter fortune smiled on the various branches of the family, money marrying money right through to the present.

Important among Jan Snoeck’s direct descendants who kept their forebear’s memory alive were the brothers Hubert (born 1703), alderman in Gorinchem, and Samuel (born 1709), bailiff in Papendrecht. Both were sons of Matthijs, the great-greatgreat-grandchild of Jan Snoeck. In his genealogical research into the first ten generations of the Snoeck family, published in 1909, Frans Beelaerts van Blokland, himself related to the family by marriage,4 mentions Jan Snoeck: ‘His portrait came by inheritance into the possession of the Van Asch van Wijck family and was sold at the end of the last century to a foreign art dealer’.5 (In 1772 Michiel Antonii Van Asch van Wijck of Gorinchem married Cornelia Snoeck, daughter of the above-mentioned Hubert.)6 It has not yet been possible to establish when and to which dealer the portrait was sold and the work did not resurface thereafter, at least not under the sitter’s name.7 Another branch of the family, descended from Samuel, afterwards called Snouck van Loosen, also remained rich up to 1885, when Margaretha Maria Snouck van Loosen, the last of four unmarried daughters died, bringing that branch of the family to an end. In her will the huge family fortune was entrusted to a foundation, the Snouck van Loosen Stichting in Enkhuizen that

1

sister of Maria Adriana Snoeck. Presumably it was his marriage that prompted Van Blokland to undertake his genealogical research on the Snoeck family; see Nederland’s Adelsboek 10 (1912), pp.117–18; and additions in Nederland’s Adelsboek 72 (1981), pp.117 and 125.

5 ‘Zijn geschilderd portret kwam door erfopvolging in het bezit van het geslacht Van Asch van Wijck en werd in het laatst der vorige eeuw aan een buitenlandschen kunsthandelaar verkocht’; see F. Beelaerts van Blokland: ‘De eerste tien generatiën van het Gorinchemsche regentengeslacht Snoeck’, De Nederlandsche Leeuw 27 (1909), cols.41–46, 65–74 and 101–06. See also ‘Snoeck, Snouck van Loosen en Snoeck van Tol’, in Jaarboek van den Nederlandschen Adel 1 (1888), pp.211–14.

6 Beelaerts van Blokland, op. cit. (note 5), pp.44–45. From the family tree it appears that on 18th October 1772 Cornelia Snoeck (1746–1813), daughter of Hubert Snoeck and Anna van Cruijskerken, married in Gorinchem Michiel Antonii Van Asch van Wijck, lord of Prattenburg (1742–1804), and canon of Oud Munster in Utrecht; see Nederland’s Adelsboek 46 (1953), p.454. According to a communication of Mrs Van Asch van Wijck, a number of objects, among them paintings, were sold after a division of the family estate.

See H.J. Zuidervaart: Schelluinderberg. De geschiedenis van een buitenplaats en pastorie in de omgeving van Gorinchem, Schelluinen 1988; and C.L. van Groningen, et al.: De Nederlandse Monumenten van Geschiedenis en Kunst. De Provincie Zuid-Holland.

De Alblasserwaard, Zwolle 1992, pp.317–21. I am especially grateful to the late J. de Waal-Kalisformer, the former owner of the house.

2 Zuidervaart, op. cit. (note 1), figs. on pp.82 and 17. It has not been possible to establish who was the architect of the house, of which the rental value in 1553 was estimated at 30 florins carolus. On account of the stylistic affinity with other houses in Gorinchem, the mason may have been Cornelis Bloemaert of Utrecht, who taught the architect Hendrick de Keyser and was the father of the painter Abraham Bloemaert.

3 R.F. van Dijk, archivist of the city of Gorinchem, kindly communicated to me references to Jan and Jacop Snoeck in documents in the archives of Gorinchem; see notes 14 and 15 below.

4 In 1905 Frans Beelaerts van Blokland (1872–1956) married Maria Adriana Snoeck (1873–1948), and in 1910 his younger brother, Willem Adriaan Beelaerts van Blokland (1883–1935), married Adriana Maria Catharina Snoeck (1881–1951), the

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GOSSAERT’S ‘PORTRAIT OF A MERCHANT’

12. Portrait of a merchant, here identified as Portrait of Jan Snoeck, by Jan Gossaert. c.1530. Panel, 63.6 by 47.5 cm. (National Gallery of Art, Washington).

13. Portrait of Jan Snoeck, by an anonymous artist after Jan Gossaert. c.1750.

Watercolour, 49 by 39 cm. (Snouck van Loosen Stichting, Enkhuizen).

still exists.8 Among this Foundation’s holdings, H.J. Zuidervaart came across not only a portrait of the last heiress, Margaretha Maria, by the Dutch painter J.A.J. Kruseman, but also a fine watercolour portrait of Jan Snoeck (Fig.13).9 On the basis of its style and cartouche, the watercolour may be dated to the mid-eighteenth century and the sitter obviously resembles the man in the Washington painting (Fig.12).10 On the console beneath the portrait to the left we read: ‘GEBOREN Ao MD’, and to the right: ‘OVERLEEDEN VI AUGUSTUS MDLXXXVI’. The inscription on the white marble slab reads: ‘IOHAN. SNOUCK. IACOBSZOON. SCHEPEN. 1525. EERSTE

1538 XIV MAAL BURGEMEESTER en SCHOUT der STAD GORINCHEM en LANDE van ARKEL. EERSTEGECOMMITTEERDE ter DAGVAART der STATEN van HOLLAND te DORDRECHT. 1572’. The coat of arms is vert and shows a quarter 1. of gold a rose gules, and 2. 7 muschetons in two rows 4 and 3 (white and black).11 The watercolour closely follows the painting, although more readily visible in the watercolour is the pattern on the sitter’s garment, just below the V-neck, in which one might discern the date 1525.12 Compared with the watercolour, the painting in Washington is more richly detailed. The ‘banker’ Jan Snoeck, seated in his

7

Valentiner: John G. Johnson collection: catalogue of Flemish and Dutch paintings, Philadelphia 1972, pp.43 and 179. In 1902 this copy was in the collection of R. Porgès in Paris.

11 This second quarter is smaller and may not be a quarter in the real sense. The shape of the coat of arms was not in use before c.1630; see O. Neubecker: Elseviers gids van de heraldiek, Amsterdam and Brussels 1981, p.51; and Zuidervaart, op. cit. (note 1), fig. on p.28.

12 The watercolour is in excellent condition. According to an annotation the new mount was made c.1955 by Mr Van Oort at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. A black-and-white negative (no.C 6639) is in the Stichting Iconografisch Bureau, The Hague. The late W. van Leeuwen kindly informed me that the last descendant of the Snouck Van Loosen family, Margaretha Maria, gave in her will of 1885 detailed instructions concerning the family possessions. She appointed two trustees of which one was the grandfather of W. van Leeuwen. The former house of the family had to be converted into a home for old ladies, and all family papers and portraits had to be burned. The testament was disputed and all papers went into storage. A few portraits, among others the one by Kruseman mentioned in the text, were restored and hung in one of the downstairs rooms.

Zuidervaart, op. cit. (note 1), p.28, fig. on p.36. Zuidervaart hoped that it might come to light for it ‘would be a most desirable acquisition to the Museum “Dit is in Bethlehem” in the Gasthuisstraat 25 [in Gorinchem]’.

8 See Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek 2 (1912), col.1336.

9 Zuidervaart, op. cit. (note 1), fig. on p.28. I am grateful to the late W. van Leeuwen, trustee of the Snouck van Loosen Stichting, Enkhuizen, for his kindness in putting at my disposal a good colour print of the watercolour and for supplying me with additional information.

10 J.O. Hand and M. Wolff: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art. Systematic Catalogue. Early Netherlandish Painting, Cambridge 1986, pp.103–06. In 1866 the painting was in the collection of the Marquess of Lansdowne, London and Bowood, Wiltshire (in 1866 the painting was lent for an exhibition at the British Institution and on that occasion (21st August) George Scharf made a sketch in his sketchbook now in the National Portrait Gallery, London; Sketchbook SSB 77, fol.30v–31). In 1967 it was with Thos. Agnew & Sons, London. See also A. Mensger: Jan Gossaert: die niederländische Kunst zu Beginn der Neuzeit, Berlin 2002, pp.166–67, fig.95. The Museum of Art in Philadelphia owns an old and fairly faithful copy; see W.R.

VROEDSCHAP

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GOSSAERT’S ‘PORTRAIT OF A MERCHANT’

15. The weathervane on the manor of Schelluinderberg, Schelluinen.

(Photograph: L.J.P. de Waal).

14. Manor of Schelluinderberg, Schelluinen. (Photograph: Rijksdienst voor Archeologie, Cultuurlandschap en Monumenten, Zeist).

comptoir among his papers and office paraphernalia, looks up alertly at the viewer. On either side of his head are hanging files – at left Alrehande Missiven and at right Alrehande Minuten.

Above his head there are balls of twine and a tasselled dagger.

On the table in front we see, from left to right, a sander, a flat round box, scissors, a leather pen and ink case, two piles of gold coins, a balance with a dobla excelente (a Spanish coin) on the triangular scale and a weight on the round one, a penknife, a leather-bound book, an inkstand with four quills, a stick of sealing wax and a little roll of paper. In front he has a notebook in a parchment folder on which is lying a loose quire of paper on which he is writing.

All these similarities conclusively prove that the Washington portrait is the model for the watercolour of Jan Snoeck. The provenance of the picture is undocumented before 1866, the year in which it was lent, under the name of Hans Holbein, from the collection of the Marquess of Lansdowne to an exhibition at

13

Hand and Wolff, op. cit. (note 10), pp.103 and 106, note 16.

Gorinchem, Regionaal Archief Gorinchem, Rechterlijke Archieven van Gorinchem en het Land van Arkel 134, fol.152.

15 Gorinchem, Regionaal Archief Gorinchem, Archief Stadsbestuur AS 132, fol.158v.

16 Jan Snoeck’s father, Jacob, is not known to have served as secretary. He was born before 1486; in 1509 and 1510 he was stadholder of the bailiff of Gorinchem and in 1525 and 1527 alderman. He died in 1530. In 1656 the painter Samuel van 14

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16. Relief on the façade of the manor of Schelluinderberg, Schelluinen.

(Photograph: author).

the British Institution in London.13 It is fair to assume that this was the same painting as the one with the Van Asch van Wijck family in the nineteenth century that was sold abroad.

Nevertheless we should bear in mind that although the identification here proposed of the Washington portrait is entirely dependent on the impeccable provenance of the watercolour, it is by no means a guarantee of an irrefutable identification of the sitter. In the light of the fact that the written information on the watercolour does not in all respects correspond with the data concerning Jan Snoeck in the archives in Gorinchem, we must further investigate the identification proposed here.

Hoogstraten succeeded his grandfather (who died many years before) in the position of master of the mint in Dordrecht; see C. Brusati: Artifice and illusion: The art and writing of Samuel Van Hoogstraten, Chicago and London 1995, pp.17–19, 78–79 and 82–83. In the Huygens family the function of secretary to the stadholder was apparently a hereditary prerogative for three generations.

17 J.G. Smit: Bronnen voor de economische geschiedenis van het Beneden-Maasgebied. 2e deel. Rekeningen van de Hollandse tollen 1422–1534, The Hague 1997, pp.199–226: ‘M Rekening van de tollen te Gorinchem en Schoonhoven 1518. Jan Snouck en

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GOSSAERT’S ‘PORTRAIT OF A MERCHANT’

17. Detail of ring worn by the sitter in Fig.12.

18. Detail of the cap worn by the sitter in Fig.12.

19. Seal of Jan Snoeck on a letter dated 1577.

(Archief Ridderlijke Duitsche Orde, Balije van Utrecht, Utrecht; inv. no.31–6).

According to the inscription on the watercolour, Jan Snoeck was born in 1500 but documents record that in 1584 he was seventy-four years old, from which it can be concluded that he was born c.1510.14 If c.1510 is correct as his date of birth, it is highly unlikely that he was elected alderman at the age of fifteen. The record books of the Gorinchem aldermen show that he was not appointed to this office for the first time until 1534. However, in 1525 his father was an alderman, but as the painting depicts a relatively young man, the possibility that it is of his father is not very likely as he had been born before 1486 and died in 1530. Furthermore, according to the inscription Jan Snoeck died on 6th August 1586, but in fact he died on the 24th August of that year.15 Any identification may be strengthened by exploring the possible occasion for the commissioning of Jan Snoeck’s portrait.

It cannot have been undertaken to mark his first appointment as alderman. As we have seen, this took place in 1534; Gossaert had died two years before in 1532. Neither does Snoeck seem to have been represented here as a pendant to a portrait of his wife (as might be presumed by analogy with Maerten van Heemskerck’s portraits of a man and a woman, possibly Pieter Gerritsz Bicker and Anna Codde, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), for Jan and Anna only married in 1533 or 1534.

On account of the Alrehande Missiven and Minuten on either side of Jan’s head, as well as of his clothes, it is more likely that the painting belongs to the genre of the office portrait.

Missiven and Minuten were typical papers of an administrative organisation. We know that between 1501 and 1517 Jan’s grandfather (died 1527) was secretary of the city. Jan may have had himself portrayed as secretary of the city, having possibly succeeded his grandfather.16 However, on the basis of recent research, he is more plausibly portrayed in his capacity as the collector of river tolls at Gorinchem, for his grandfather, Jan,

had also been toll collector of the province of Holland in Gorinchem. In 1516 Jan’s father, Jacob (died 1530), had been appointed ‘beziener’ (inspector), another office of the same toll.

We know that in 1544 and in 1551 Jan was ‘controleur’ of the toll, so we might well presume that before 1532 he was already attached to the same toll, possibly as clerk. The river toll in Gorinchem, at the confluence of the Walloon and the Meuse, was one of the most important and profitable tolls in the province of Holland, as all shipping on these rivers passed by the city.17 In that case the portrait of Jan Snoeck may be seen as an example of the tradition in which secretaries of cities and the holders of other important offices had themselves portrayed to mark their appointment.

But whatever the particular occasion for having his portrait painted, the arguments for the identification of the sitter as Jan Snoeck are rendered conclusive in view of the following. In the portrait in Washington there are two essential details present which the copyist, for whatever reason, has omitted in the watercolour. On his index finger Jan Snoeck is wearing a ring bearing the letters IS (Fig.17). There can be no doubt these are his initials.18 Moreover, less clearly visible is a monogram on his cap of the letters IAS (Fig.18). The assumption that these letters may represent the initial letters of his motto is obvious.

As mentioned above, on the north façade of the house in Schelluinen a relief carries Snoeck’s device of a swimming pike and his motto INT WATER CLOUC. From that we might expect the motto, reduced to its initials, to have been IWC, as indeed can be found on his seal (Fig.19), and not IAS.19 At that time, mottos were always in a foreign language, never in the mother tongue. Clearly Jan Snoeck violated this rule on his relief,20 but the Latin translation of the motto reads ‘In Aquis Strenuus’,21 the initials giving us IAS, precisely the letters of the monogram on Jan Snoeck’s cap.

Willem Codde, 18 juni–30 september’.

18 This monogram on the ring led Leo van Puyvelde to the identification of the sitter as Jerome Sandelin, tax collector of Zeeland for the region of the western Schelde, mentioned in documents between 1539 and 1557; see L. van Puyvelde: ‘Un portrait de marchand par Quentin Metsys et les percepteurs d’impôts par Marin van Reymerswael’, Revue Belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art 26 (1957), p.9. This identification was accepted in J. Rosenberg: ‘A Portrait of a Banker (Jerome Sandelin?) by Jan Gossaert called Mabuse’, Studies in the History of Art 1 (1967–68),

pp.39–43, but Hand and Wolff, op. cit. (note 10), p.104, doubt it in view of the age of the sitter. Van Puyvelde’s suggestion can now be discarded.

19 Zuidervaart, op. cit. (note 1), p.82. It shows two upright pikes, back to back, with, in the corners, the letters (clockwise) IWCS (Int Water Clouc Snouck).

20 M. Praz: Studies in seventeenth-century imagery, 2nd ed., Rome 1975, p.63. For the use of signs on hats and caps, see Y. Hackenbroch: Enseignes. Renaissance Hat Jewels, Florence 1996.

21 With thanks to Harm-Jan van Dam and Mies Wijnen. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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The patron of Jan Gossaert’s ‘Adoration of the Kings’ in the National Gallery, London

by LORNE CAMPBELL

JAN GOSSAERT’S Adoration of the Kings (Fig.20) is signed in two places and is generally dated between c.1510 and c.1515.1 It was first mentioned in 1600, when it was in a chapel dedicated to the Virgin in the church of the Benedictine abbey of St Adrian at Geraardsbergen (Grammont) in East Flanders, south of Ghent and west of Brussels. In August 1600 Albert and Isabella, the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, returning from Oudenaarde to Brussels, visited the abbey, saw the painting and asked to have it.2 On 5th April 1601 Albert authorised a payment of ‘2,100 livres de 40 gros’ to the abbot for its purchase3 and on 18th May 1601 it was recorded that the painter Gijsbrecht van Veen, residing in Brussels, had been sent to Geraardsbergen to buy from the Abbey of ‘St Andrew’ the painting in oil on panel of the Adoration of the Three Kings or Magi, 2 3⁄4 ells high by 2 1⁄2 ells wide, with its plain frame.

It was to be placed on the high altar of the chapel of the palace in Brussels.4 The picture was reframed and installed in the chapel in 1603.5 In 1696 Gislenus Coucke, afterwards (1703–13) abbot of St Adrian’s, noted that, at Geraardsbergen, a copy had replaced the original, which had been removed to Brussels; the copy was still at Geraardsbergen at the end of the eighteenth century.6 It is usually assumed that Gossaert painted the Adoration for the abbey.7 Little is known about the history of the abbey of St Adrian. The buildings were sold in 1797 and afterwards most of them were demolished; the archives have been dispersed or destroyed. The choir and towers of the church seem to have been knocked down in 1799.8 According to Benoist Ruteau, writing in 1637 about the cult of St Adrian and the abbey at Geraardsbergen, other paintings by Gossaert were in the abbey in his time: a Last Judgment, in the chapel of St Natalia (St Adrian’s wife); a

Crucifixion, on the ‘autel privilegé’; and other, unspecified paintings.9 The Last Judgment was mentioned in an inventory taken in 1791, when it was still on the same altar.10 If these paintings were in truth by Gossaert, then it would appear that he was employed at the abbey. It seems very likely that he painted the Adoration for the abbey and that he may have executed other commissions for Geraardsbergen at much the same time.

According to Jan van Waesberghe, writing in 1627 about the history of Geraardsbergen, and Ruteau (1637), the Adoration came from the ‘chapel of the Virgin’ at St Adrian’s.11 According to Ruteau, Jan de Broedere, or Van Coppenhole, abbot from 1504 until 1526, ‘restored the crypt behind the choir and built there a fine chapel dedicated to the Virgin’.12 Historians have taken this statement rather literally and have concluded that De Broedere paid for the building. The chapel, visible in some views and plans of the abbey,13 seems to have been about 13 metres long. The crypt had been the burial place of several abbots, many monks and some noblemen of the district, whose tombs appear to have remained after the crypt was reconstructed as a chapel.14 Jan de Broedere himself was buried there under a plain ‘blue’ stone.15 In the will dated 12th April 1518 of Daniel van Boechout, lord of Boelare near Geraardsbergen, it was recorded that the abbot Jan de Broedere had agreed that Daniel and his wife should be buried in the chapel of the Virgin behind the choir,16 and, indeed, their tomb was erected there.17 When their daughter died in 1563, she was buried in the abbey church ‘in her father’s chapel’.18 It seems clear that Daniel van Boechout may have contributed towards the cost of the chapel of the Virgin and that it was for a time known as his chapel.

1 M.J. Friedländer: Early Netherlandish Painting, VIII, Leiden and Brussels 1972, pp.16–25 and 92, no.12; and M. Davies: National Gallery Catalogues: The Early Netherlandish School, 3rd ed., London 1968, pp.63–66.

2 J. van Waesberghe: Gerardi Montium sive altera imperialis Flandriae Metropolis eiusque Castellania, Brussels 1627, p.178 (the Abbot Jérôme de Monceaux ‘Epiphaniam sacelli Deiparae Virginis, Ioannis Malbodij egregij pictoris opus cessit Alberto Austriaco Belgarum Principi Aldenarda hac Bruxellas cum coniuge serenissima Isabella transeunti, & magno opere roganti’); B. Ruteau: La Vie et martyre de S. Adrien tutelaire de la ville de Grardmont [. . .] avec le commencement & Chronique de son Monastere . . ., Ath 1637, pp.228–29 (‘Soubs le mesme Abbé l’Archiduc Albert auec Isabella Infante d’Espagne, venant d’Audenarde à Grardmont, & visitant l’Eglise de S. Adrien, il impetra de l’Abbé & Conuent la peinture de la Chapelle de nostre Dame, pour la mettre en la sienne Royalle, comme elle est encore presentement, & offrit au Monastere en recompense deux mille florins: c’estoit vn oeuure de Iean de Maubeuge excellent peintre . . .’). J.K. Steppe: ‘Tableaux de Jean Gossaert dans l’ancienne Abbaye de Saint-Adrien à Grammont’, in H. Pauwels, H.R. Hoetink and S. Herzog: exh. cat. Jean Gossaert dit Mabuse, Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) and Bruges (Groeningemuseum) 1965, pp.39–46, cites manuscript sources of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are later than the books by Van Waesberghe and Ruteau and do not seem to add significantly to what is printed there.

3 ‘. . . pour l’achapt qu’avons faict de luy d’une pièce de paincture représentant les Trois Roys . . .’. See M. de Maeyer: Albrecht en Isabella en de schilderkunst, Brussels 1955, p.269; for the payment itself, see J. Finot: Inventaire sommaire des archives départementales antérieures à 1790 [. . .] Nord, série B, Chambre des Comptes de Lille, VI, Lille 1895, p.5.

4 ‘Digo yo, Joachim Denzenhear, guarda ropa y joyas del Sermo Sor Archiduque Alberto, que la pintura sobre tabla, al olio, de la Adoracion de los Tres Reyes Magos, de dos añas y tres quartas de alto y dos y media de ancho, con su marco llano, que Su Ala mando comprar por mano del pintor Grisbeque Benio, beçino de Brusselas, del abadia de Sant Andres, que esta en

camara de Gramont, en ocho mill y quatroscientos reales pagados por finanças, por mano del recividor general Christobal Godin en el mes de abril de mill y seiscientos y un años, que la dicha pintura hea de poner en la capilla real del palacio de Brusselas en el altar mayor de la dicha capilla. La qual dicha pintura queda en mi poder. En cuya berdad di esta firmada de mi nombre. Al dicho Christobal Godin en Brusselas, a 18 de mayo año de 1601 años. Joachim Dencenhear’; see De Maeyer, op. cit. (note 3), p.270.

5 The previous retable, made by Jean Mone in 1538–41 and installed in 1554, was removed and restored; it is now in the cathedral of Brussels; see J. Duverger et al.: ‘Nieuwe gegevens aangaande XVIde eeuwse beeldhouwers in Brabant en Vlaanderen’, Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Schone Kunsten 15/2 (1953), pp.23 and 89–90. For the history of the chapel and palace, see A. Smolar-Meynart et al.: Le Palais de Bruxelles. Huit siècles d’art et d’histoire, Brussels 1991.

6 Ghent, Stadsarchief, Vreemde Steden nr 52. See G. van Bockstaele: Het Cultureel Erfgoed van de Sint-Adriaansabdij van Geraardsbergen 1096–2002, Geraardsbergen 2002, p.98, with references; I am grateful to Geert van Bockstaele for sending photocopies of the document.

7 See in particular Steppe, op. cit. (note 2). François Mols (1722–91), however, writing in the 1780s, claimed that it had come from ‘the effects of David of Burgundy, Bishop of Utrecht, in whose service Jean de Mabuse worked for a long time’: ‘Ce Rare Morceau avoit été Achetté de feues L.A.R. Les Archiducs Albert & Isabelle – de LAbbaye de Grammont (ou Mons S.ti Gerardi) en flandre – en 1605 – pour Deux Mille florins – Mais Le tableau Même vennoit des Depouilles De David Batard de Bourgoigne Eveque dUtrecht, au Service duquel Jean de Maubeuse avoit été longtems’; see Mols’s notes in his copy of H. Walpole: Anecdotes of Painting in England, 2nd ed., Strawberry Hill 1765, I (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, shelf mark II 11928), facing p.50. In 1788 an anonymous author claimed that it had been ‘carried to Holland, and during the Troubles

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20. Adoration of the Kings, by Jan Gossaert. c.1510–15. Panel, 177.2 by 161.3 cm. (National Gallery, London).

Gossaert would appear to have painted the Adoration between about 1510 and about 1515.19 Between 1508 and 1524 he was in the service of Philip of Burgundy, Bishop of Utrecht from 1517.

Although the exact terms on which Philip employed Gossaert are not known, it seems unlikely that he could have worked for other patrons without Philip’s consent. It therefore appears logical to

look for connections between Philip and the possible patrons of the Adoration, Jan de Broedere and Daniel van Boechout.

Very little is known about Jan de Broedere, alias Van Coppenhole, also called Johannes de Cruce.20 He seems to have come from the Geraardsbergen area.21 Philip the Handsome is supposed to have asked De Broedere’s predecessor, Gijsbrecht

in the Low Countries, it escaped the Iconoclastes’; see the Description, a printed sheet perhaps prepared for an exhibition of 1787 and made available at a London sale in 1788: Horace Walpole acquired one of these printed Descriptions and preserved it in his own copy of his Anecdotes, formerly in the library of the Earl of Derby. It was reprinted in M.W. Brockwell: The ‘Adoration of the Magi’ by Jan Mabuse Formerly in the Collection of the Earl of Carlisle, London N.D. [1911], appendix, pp.7–9. David of Burgundy was Bishop of Utrecht from 1456 until his death in 1496. It was his half-brother, Philip of Burgundy, Bishop from 1517 to 1524, who employed Gossaert. These confused reports are clearly unreliable.

8 G. van Bockstaele: ‘Abbaye de Saint-Adrien à Grammont’, in Monasticon belge, VII: Province de la Flandre Orientale, II, Liège 1977, pp.53–128; and idem, op. cit. (note 6), pp.50–51.

9 ‘. . . Iean de Maubeuge excellent peintre, duquel ils ont encore des rares pieces, comme celle du iugement en la Chapelle de S. Natalie, celle de la Crucifixion à l’autel priuilegé & autres’: see Ruteau, op. cit. (note 2), p.229.

10 Steppe, op. cit. (note 2), p.43.

11 See note 2 above.

12 ‘L’Abbé Coppenolle fit bastir le quartier Abbatiale, puis la Censse ou bastimens au bas de la cour, ou est presentement le college: il releua aussi la grotte derriere le choeur, & y bastit vne belle Chapelle dediée à la Vierge’: see Ruteau, op. cit. (note 2), p.219.

13 See Van Bockstaele, op. cit. (note 6), pp.69 and 72, for reproductions of a late eighteenth-century painting of the abbey (by the local artist Petrus Canivé, born in 1738) and a late eighteenth-century plan (both in the abbey at Geraardsbergen).

14 ‘In d’abdie van Sint Adriaens, achter de choor, in Onse Vrauwe capelle licht, int’ harnas, met zijn wapen zeer triomphant, daer staet: Cij gist noble homme monsieur Rogier de Gavre d’Escornaij, ch[eva]l[ie]r, sr de Hoornebeke, obiit 1456, le 21 d’octobre’; see Baron de Béthune: Epitaphes et monuments des églises de la Flandre au XVIme siècle, d’après les

manuscrits de Corneille Gailliard et d’autres auteurs, Bruges 1897–1900, p.111. Rogier was a younger son of Arnold VI van Gavere, Baron of Schorisse (Escornaix), and was himself lord of Horebeke, east of Oudenaarde (ibid., pp.104–06).

15 Van Bockstaele, op. cit. (note 6), p.160, citing a manuscript of 1699.

16 Ibid., p.166.

17 Béthune, op. cit. (note 14), pp.104–05 and 111–12.

18 Ibid., p.104.

19 See Friedländer, op. cit. (note 1), pp.16–25 and 19, no.12.

20 Van Bockstaele, op. cit. (note 8), pp.101–03.

21 The abbot’s coat of arms was described by Ruteau in 1637: ‘. . . deux croix en deux coings, & trois coquilles en chasque des deux autres coings. Sa deuise estoit VIVE MEMOR LETHI, viuez memoratif de la mort’; see Ruteau, op. cit. (note 2), p.219. The quotation is from Persius’ Satires, V, 153; see Van Bockstaele, op. cit. (note 6), p.153: ‘Vive memor Lethi; fugit hora’, which has been freely translated as ‘Forget not death, for time is on the wing’. For the coat of arms, see ibid., pp.139 and 153, with reproductions of one of the abbot’s seals. Jan de Broedere was probably a descendant of Jan van Coppenhole, who seems to have died in 1406 and who was buried at St Adrian’s with his wife, Margareta, and their son; her arms were d’azur à trois coquilles d’or; see Béthune, op. cit. (note 14), p.105. The abbot was perhaps a son of Gilles de Coppenolle, from Moerbeke, south of Geraardsbergen, who died before 1st December 1492, leaving a widow, Christoffe de le Croix (= de Cruce); see J. Verschaeren: Rijksarchief te Ronse, Inventaris van het archief van de Sint-Adriaansabdij te Geraardsbergen, Brussels 1974, p.258. In 1507 the heirs of Gillis de Broedere, alias vander Crusen (= de Cruce), had rights over property at Kokenbeke near Sint-Maria-Lierde, north of Geraardsbergen; ibid., p.148. The abbot was not the same person as the priest Jan de Broedere, alias Coppenole, who was residing at Moerbeke in 1497 but who died before 1520; ibid., pp.85 and 262; and Van Bockstaele, op. cit. (note 8), p.101. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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van Ouwegem, to demit his charge because of his great age. In 1504 De Broedere, who had been his coadjutor, obtained a papal bull confirming his right to succeed and, after Gijsbrecht’s death, he was consecrated at Valenciennes on 25th November 1506.

His abbacy was a period of great prosperity and he died in 1526.

A missal, sold at Christie’s in 2002, is decorated with his coat of arms and was presumably commissioned by him.22 The miniatures, which are of fairly indifferent quality, hardly substantiate the idea that De Broedere was a discerning patron. There is at least one indication that he had connections with the court of Margaret of Austria. On 9th April 1511 Margaret summoned to Ghent both Jan de Broedere and Jan Clercx, Abbot of Ninove; they were to celebrate divine service on the eve of Palm Sunday (12th April), on Palm Sunday itself, on Maundy Thursday and on Good Friday.23 It is possible that, at Margaret’s court, De Broedere might have made the acquaintance of Gossaert’s patron Philip of Burgundy.

Daniel van Boechout, on the other hand, is relatively well documented and was closely associated with Philip of Burgundy.

He was very much more likely than the abbot to have had the opportunity to employ Gossaert while he was in Philip of Burgundy’s service.

Daniel inherited through his father, Johan van Boechout, the lordship of Boelare near Geraardsbergen;24 and from his mother, Johanna van Vianen, the lordship of Beverweerd, about seven miles south east of Utrecht.25 His mother and his father’s brother Daniel van Boechout, Viscount and Castellan of Brussels, were the leading members of a noble company that went in 1440–41 to the Town Hall of Brussels to inspect ‘the town’s painting’, evidently one or more of the Scenes of Justice painted by Rogier van der Weyden for the ‘Golden Chamber’ there.26 The Van Boechouts were closely related to many of the great families of Brabant and Liège; the Van Vianens, the Van Borselens and many of the other great families of the northern provinces.

Perhaps born in about 1455,27 Daniel was probably brought up on his mother’s estates near Utrecht. He may have been the ‘Daniel de Bouchoute of the diocese of Utrecht’ who matriculated in 1476 at the University of Louvain.28 Although his father, Johan, inherited Boelare from his maternal uncle Pieter van Reynghersvliete, who died shortly after 1462,29 Pieter’s widow, Margriet van Halewyn, continued to live in the castle there, which was part of her dower, and only after her death in about 1480 did the Van Boechout family come into their Flemish inheritance.30 When Daniel’s elder brother, Jan, decided to enter the Church,31 Daniel became his parents’ heir and seems to have divided his time between his estates in the northern provinces and his lands in Flanders. On 27th July 1487 David of Burgundy, Bishop of Utrecht, certified that, in his presence, Daniel’s widowed mother had made over to Daniel all her landed property.32 On 24th August 1487 he contracted to marry Marie de Luxembourg, daughter of Jacques de Luxembourg (died 1487), Lord of Fiennes, a Knight of the Golden Fleece, and sister of Philippe de Luxembourg (died 1519), Cardinal (1498) and Bishop of Le Mans (1476) and Thérouanne (1498). In the marriage contract, Daniel estimated his annual income at about 8,480 livres parisis monnaie de Flandre ‘4,240 livres de 40 gros’, out of which he paid 4,000 livres parisis to his mother, brother and sister.33 When David of Burgundy died in 1496, Daniel was his castellan at Ter Horst near Rhenen.34 At an unspecified date, Daniel was one of the chamberlains at the court of Philip the Handsome.35 By 1517, when Philip of Burgundy became Bishop of Utrecht, Daniel was well established in his favour, and when Philip made his ceremonial entry into Utrecht in May 1517, Daniel took a prominent place in his entourage and the town of Utrecht made him generous gifts of wine.36 Philip appointed him to his council; during Philip’s absences from the Nedersticht (the area around Utrecht), Daniel was his

22 Sold at Christie’s, London, Printed Books and Manuscripts from Beriah Botfield’s Library at Longleat Sold by Order of the Trustees of the Longleat Chattels Settlement, 13th June 2002, lot 3. The coat of arms corresponds with that on the abbot’s seal; Van Bockstaele, op. cit. (note 6), pp.139 and 153, although the quarterings are reversed and the combinations of colours in the first and fourth quarters, azure a cross gules, infringe the rules of heraldry.

23 M. Bruchet and E. Lancien: L’Itinéraire de Marguerite d’Autriche Gouvernante des Pays-Bas, Lille 1934, p.86.

24 M. van Trimpont: Het land en de baronie Boelare, 2nd ed., Geraardsbergen 2001, pp.155–63.

25 L. G[alesloot]: ‘Le domaine de Bouchout, près de Bruxelles. Quelques souvenirs historiques’, Messager des sciences historiques (1880), pp.265–96 and 413–38; A.J. Maris: Rijksarchief in de provincie Utrecht, Repertorium op de Stichtse Leenprotocollen uit de Landsheerlijke Tijdvak, I: De Nederstichtse Leenacten (1394–1581), The Hague 1956, pp.52 (56), 73 (81) and 414–15 (447); and S. van Ginkel-Meester and T. Hermans: ‘Beverweerd’, in B.O. Meierink et al., eds.: Kastelen en ridderhofsteden in Utrecht, 2nd ed., Utrecht 1995, pp.132–37.

26 L. Galesloot: ‘Notes extraites des anciens comptes de la ville de Bruxelles’, Compte-rendu des séances de la Commission royale d’histoire, ou Recueil de ses Bulletins, 3e sér. IV (1867), pp.475–500, esp. pp.487–88.

27 His parents married in 1440 or 1441; see idem: Inventaire des Archives de la Belgique, Inventaire des Archives de la Cour Féodale de Brabant, Brussels 1870–84, I, pp.134–35; according to J.-T. de Raadt: Sceaux armoriés des Pays-Bas et des pays avoisinants, Brussels 1898–1903, I, p.307, Johan van Boechout was already calling himself lord of Beverweerd in 1440 and must therefore have been married to Johanna, the heiress; she was described as his wife on 19th August 1441; S.W.A. Drossaers: Algemeen Rijksarchief, Het Archief van den Nassauschen Domeinraad, Het Archief van den Raad- en Rekenkamer te Breda tot 1581, The Hague 1948–55, II, p.224, no.859. Daniel was the younger of their two sons; see Van Trimpont, op. cit. (note 24), pp.158–59. His sister Katharina, aged five on 26th September 1461, was born in 1455–56; Galesloot 1870–84, op. cit., I, p.176.

28 ‘Ex lilio [. . .] Daniel de Bouchoute, Traj. Dioc.’: see J. Wils: Matricule de l’Université de Louvain, II, Brussels 1946, p.349.

29 Van Trimpont, op. cit. (note 24), pp.148–53.

30 A. de Portemont: Recherches historiques sur la ville de Grammont en Flandre, Ghent 1870, II, pp.426–28; R.C. van Caenegem: Les Arrêts et jugés du Parlement de Paris sur appels flamands, Textes, Brussels 1966–77, II, pp.547–49; F. de Potter and J. Broeckaert: Geschiedenis van de gemeenten der provincie Oost-Vlaanderen (5th series, 4th vol.), Ghent 1900, ‘Over Boelare’, pp.14 and 19; J.T. de Smidt and E.I. Strubbe: Chronologische Lijsten van de Geëxtendeerde Sententiën en Procesbundels (dossiers) berustende in het archief van de Grote Raad van Mechelen, I, Brussels 1966, p.119; and Verschaeren, op. cit. (note 21), pp.260–61.

31 The ‘heer Johan van Bouchout’ who in February 1476–77 witnessed a deed of David of Burgundy, Bishop of Utrecht (A.M.C. van Asch van Wijck: Archief voor kerkelijke en wereldlijke geschiedenis van Nederland, meer bepaaldelijk van Utrecht, Utrecht 1850–53, I, p.78), may have been Daniel’s father or alternatively his elder brother, who was a canon of Utrecht Cathedral by 1476–77 and who died in or around 1507. See F.C. Butkens: Trophées sacrés et prophanes du duché de Brabant, 2nd ed., with supplement, The Hague 1724–26, II, pp.270–71; N.B. Tenhaeff: Bronnen tot de bouwgeschiedenis van den Dom te Utrecht, II, I: Rekeningen 1395–1480, The Hague 1946, pp.533, 550 and 562; Drossaers, op. cit. (note 27), III, p.90; Maris, op. cit. (note 25), p.52; J. Alberts, C.A. Rutgers and E. Roebroeck: Bronnen tot de bouwgeschiedenis van den Dom te Utrecht, II: Rekeningen 1480/1–1506/7, The Hague 1969, p.765; B. van den Hoven van Genderen: De Heren van de Kerk, De Kanunniken van Oudemunster te Utrecht in de late middeleeuwen, Zutphen 1997, p.418; and Van Trimpont, op. cit. (note 24), pp.158–59.

32 Drossaers, op. cit. (note 27), III, p.90, no.1289.

33 V. Campen: La Baronnie de Boulaere, Geraardsbergen 1930, pp.66–67 (Geert van Bockstaele kindly sent photocopies from this book), and Van Trimpont, op. cit. (note 24), pp.159–60, resume the terms of the marriage contract.

34 Van Asch van Wijck, op. cit. (note 31), I, p.25; for the castle, now destroyed, see J. Renaud: ‘Ter Horst’, in Meierink et al., op. cit. (note 25), pp.259–60.

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stadhouder, or representative, there; and he was castellan of Philip’s principal residence at Duurstede.37 He had stabling there for his horses and a room in the great tower, which in 1533 was still known as ‘the lord of Boelare’s chamber’.38 In his will of 1518, however, Daniel expressed his desire to be buried at Geraardsbergen.39 Philip of Burgundy died on 7th April 1524. On 13th May, Daniel – one of Philip’s four executors 40 – and some colleagues were diligently compiling inventories of Philip’s goods at Duurstede.41 Daniel was still there on 13th November 1524 but died between 26th September 1525 and 23rd July 1527.42 He was buried in the Chapel of the Virgin in the Abbey Church of St Adrian at Geraardsbergen. Daniel’s elder daughter and heir, Marie van Boechout, married in 1512 as her first husband Hugues de Lannoy, Lord of Rollencourt, who died in 1528; their granddaughter and heir was Anne of Egmont (1533–58), the first wife of William the Silent, Prince of Orange. Daniel’s second daughter, Françoise, married in 1527 Richard de Merode, Lord of Frentzen.43 Jeanne van Boechout van Boelare, probably an illegitimate daughter of Daniel’s, married in 1508 Alvaro de Almaras, a merchant from Segovia. In 1517 Jeanne was able to buy for 7,150 Rhenish florins Daniel’s property of Diepenstein (near Steenhuffel, north of Brussels and west of Mechlin), which was being sold by order of the Council of Brabant to pay debts owed by Daniel to his sister.44 Jeanne and her husband are represented as donors in a window of the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows in the church at Steenhuffel. It is dated 1535, the year of Alvaro’s death. Their son Alvaro the younger, who died in 1560, married Maria Scheyfve, whose father, Pieter Scheyfve, commissioned from Bosch in about 1495 the triptych of the Adoration of the Kings now in the Prado.45 Daniel may have got to know Philip of Burgundy when both were involved in the civil strife that afflicted Flanders in the early 1490s 46 or afterwards, when they were at the court of

Philip the Handsome. They must certainly have met when both were in the service of David of Burgundy, Bishop of Utrecht.

At the time of David’s death in 1496, Daniel was his castellan at Ter Horst while Philip was his castellan at Duurstede; Philip was asked to protect Ter Horst when it was under threat.47 Gossaert had been in Philip’s service since the winter of 1508–09, when he accompanied Philip on his embassy to Rome, and, as Gossaert seems to have had lodgings in Philip’s residences,48 it is more than likely that Daniel van Boechout had met Gossaert in about 1508 and that the two men knew each other well.

Daniel van Boechout, Philip of Burgundy and Gossaert appear to have shared a taste for erotic images. Among the items which Daniel had from the estate of Philip of Burgundy were ‘two precious little panels of fornication (de boelschap), well done, with a cover or case (custodie) for one of them’.49 These were two paintings of explicitly erotic subjects; the cover may have been put there to avoid embarrassing the innocent. They may very well have been by Gossaert. Philip’s taste for erotic works of art must have been well known, for he owned a marble statue of the ‘false god Priapus’ as well as many paintings of nudes;50 he gave several such pieces to his relatives Margaret of Austria51 and Philip of Cleves-Ravenstein.52 Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite, dated 1516 and painted for Philip of Burgundy (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), shows how successful he was in creating such images. Daniel and his wife, who predeceased him, were buried in ‘a beautiful [. . .] tomb in the Italian style’:53 if it was made in Daniel’s lifetime, it gives another indication of his aesthetic tastes.

Daniel van Boechout provides the obvious link between Gossaert and the abbey at Geraardsbergen and it was probably Daniel who secured the permission of Gossaert’s employer Philip of Burgundy to commission him to paint not only the great Adoration but also his other paintings which once adorned the abbey church.

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46 G. Doutrepont and O. Jodogne, eds.: Chroniques de Jean Molinet, Brussels 1935–37, II, p.241; Van Trimpont, op. cit. (note 24), pp.160–61.

47 See note 34 above; Van Kalveen, op. cit. (note 36), p.11; and Sterk, op. cit. (note 36), p.16.

48 J. Prinsen, ed.: Collectanea van Gerardus Geldenhauer Noviomagus, gevold door den herdruk van eenige zijner werken, Amsterdam 1901, p.235.

49 Sterk, op. cit. (note 36), p.264: ‘Twee costelicke taffereelkens van de boelscap wel gedaen mit een custodie daer d’een in hoirt ’, with the marginal note: ‘Dese taefferelen heft die here van Boeler’. They came from Philip’s small town house. The other items appropriated

by Daniel included a length of blue velvet, two precious gold rings, one with a cameo, and a great bed; Sterk, op. cit. (note 36), pp.90, 227 and 248.

50 Ibid., pp.227 (‘Een groot taeffereel van een naict vroutken mit een pijl in de hant genoempt Cupido . . .’), 248 (‘Twee groete taefferelen mit naicte figueren van mannen’) and 263 (‘Item eenen marmeren afgod Preapus genaempt’).

51 H. Michelant: ‘Inventaire [. . .] de Marguerite d’Autriche . . .’, Compte-rendu des séances de la Commission royale d’histoire, ou Recueil de ses Bulletins, 3e sér., 12 (1871), pp.5–78 and 83–136, esp. p.110: ‘Item, ung beau tableau auquel est painct ung homme et une femme nuz, estant les pieds en l’eaue; le premier bort de marbre, le second doré et en bas ung escripteau, donné par Mons gr d’Utrecht’.

52 J. Finot: Inventaire sommaire des archives départementales antérieures à 1790 [. . .] Nord, série B, Chambre des Comptes de Lille, VIII, Lille 1895, p.432 (Enghien, 1528: ‘ung grand tableau de deux personnaiges nudz de Mars et Vénus, cloz de feuillet, venant de feu monseigneur d’Utrecht; ung autre grand tableau de paincture d’une belle fille qui se déshabille, venant be feu monseigneur d’Utrecht’).

53 ‘. . . een schoone triomphante hooghe verheven tombe op d’italiaensche maniere . . .’; Béthune, op. cit. (note 14), p.112. Daniel’s wife was dead by 6th October 1523, when he laid down how his property was to be divided between his two daughters. This document, mentioned in Campen, op. cit. (note 33), p.69, belonged to Campen and cannot now be found; I am grateful to Geert van Bockstaele for sending a photocopy of a typed transcript where there is a reference to ‘vrouwe Marie van Luxembourg zaelieger memorie zyne wettelicke gheselnede was’.

Butkens, op. cit. (note 31), III, p.46: ‘Chambellans [. . .] Le Seigneur de Boulers’.

A. Matthaeus: Veteris aevi analecta seu vetera monumenta hactenus nondum visa . . ., 2nd ed., The Hague 1738, I, p.177; J.W.C. van Campen: ‘De intocht van Philips van Bourgondie, Bisschop van Utrecht, Ao 1517’, Jaarboekje van ‘Oud Utrecht’ (1933), pp.73–96, esp. p.95; C.A. van Kalveen: Het bestuur van Bisschop en Staten in het Nedersticht, Oversticht en Drenthe 1483–1520, Utrecht 1974, p.320; and J. Sterk: Philips van Bourgondië (1465–1524) Bisschop van Utrecht als protagonist van de Renaissance, zijn leven en maecenaat, Zutphen 1980, p.34.

37 Ibid., pp.36–37.

38 Matthaeus, op. cit. (note 36), I, pp.224 and 226–27; Sterk, op. cit. (note 36), p.243; and H.A. Enno van Gelder: Gegevens betreffende roerend en onroerend bezit in de Nederlanden in de 16e eeuw, The Hague 1972–73, I, p.110.

39 See note 16 above.

40 Sterk, op. cit. (note 36), pp.86–88.

41 Van Asch van Wijck, op. cit. (note 31), III, p.119.

42 Ibid., p.145; Drossaers, op. cit. (note 27), III, p.171, no.1584; Maris, op. cit. (note 25), pp.414–15; and H. van Ongevalle: ‘De baronnen en de baronie van Boelare van ca.1377 tot 1563’, licentiaat dissertation (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, 1987), p.61.

43 For these family connections, see Galesloot, op. cit. (note 25), pp.267–86; Drossaers, op. cit. (note 27), ad indices; D. Schwennicke: Europäische Stammtafeln, N.F. VIII, Marburg 1980, and XVIII, Frankfurt 1998; and Van Trimpont, op. cit. (note 24), pp.162–73.

44 Galesloot, op. cit. (note 25), pp.284–85; and R. Fagel: De Hispano-Vlaamse wereld.

De contacten tussen Spanjaarden en Nederlanders 1496–1555, Brussels and Nijmegen 1996, p.109. Alvaro knew Diego Flores, treasurer to Margaret of Austria; see his will of 1534, summarised in ibid., p.85.

45 J. Helbig and Y. Vanden Bemden: Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Belgique, III. Les vitraux de la première moitié du XVIe siècle conservés en Belgique: Brabant et Limbourg, Ledeberg and Ghent 1974, pp.24–53; and X. Duquenne: ‘La famille Scheyfve et Jérôme Bosch’, L’Intermédiaire des généalogistes 59 (January–February 2004), pp.1–19, esp. p.4.

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Three drawings attributed to Wouter Pietersz Crabeth II

by XANDER VAN ECK

THE BRITISH MUSEUM owns two drawings illustrating scenes from the parable of the Good Samaritan, The Samaritan carrying the wounded man on his horse and The Samaritan paying the innkeeper (Figs.22 and 23). Each measuring 27 by 40 cm., they have a monumentality that derives from the closeness of the figures to the picture plane, clear contours and an elaborate modelling through hatching, dark washes in ink and white highlights. The first of these drawings is signed ‘WCrabeth’. In 1932 A.E. Popham attributed them to Wouter Crabeth (died 1589), the famous glass-painter from Gouda who, together with his brother Dirck (died 1574), played a major part in the stainedglass decoration of Gouda’s St John’s church between 1555 and 1571.1 They still carry this name in the online inventory of the British Museum, although Zsuzsanna van Ruyven-Zeman, who painstakingly established a core of smaller drawings and glass panels attributable to the master, rejected this authorship outright.2 The drawings she accepts (such as Fig.21) show the same dynamism, elongated figures and Frans Floris-like bearded heads as Wouter Crabeth’s well-documented cartoons (life-size working drawings) for the Gouda church windows – features which are clearly absent in the two Good Samaritan drawings.3 Although the present drawings have some features that at first sight appear to belong to the late sixteenth century, such as their Heemskerck-like compositions,4 the ‘body stockings’ the figures wear, the elaborate, slashed clothes and the grotesque decorations of the boots, they reveal a draughtsman who is closer to somewhat later artists such as Abraham Bloemaert, whereas the classical ruins in the background look much like the ones Pieter Lastman and Bartholomeus Breenbergh produced in Rome around 1620. Apart from that, the signature would be a one-off, as neither of the glass-painting Crabeth brothers ever signed any of their known works.

There is another logical candidate with the same initials – indeed the same name – as the glass-painter: Wouter’s grandson Wouter Pietersz Crabeth II (Gouda 1594–1644), the foremost painter in the city of Gouda in the first half of the seventeenth century. He has figured in art-historical literature mainly as one of the Dutch Caravaggists on the periphery of the Utrecht school5 and played a major role in publications by the present writer about paintings made for clandestine Catholic churches in the Northern Netherlands.6 According to Houbraken, Crabeth was apprenticed to Cornelis Ketel before he travelled to France and Rome.7 Archival

records confirm these travels: in 1615 he was in Paris and between 1619 and 1622 he was in Rome. We find him back in Gouda in 1626, where he stayed until he died. His known œuvre until now consists solely of paintings, including five large religious works (four of them traceable to a clandestine Catholic church in Gouda) and half a dozen genre paintings of card sharpers and shepherds. Crabeth also received portrait commissions from a Gouda family (a portrait-historié of The wedding at

I am grateful to Zsuzsanna van Ruyven-Zeman, who put me on the right track in this research. Furthermore I would like to thank Truus van Bueren, Marten Jan Bok and Marijn Schapelhouman for their comments.

1 A.E. Popham: Catalogue of drawings by Dutch and Flemish artists preserved in the Department of prints and drawings in the British museum, V, London 1932, p.152.

2 Z. van Ruyven-Zeman: ‘Some drawings attributed to Wouter Crabeth, the glass painter from Gouda’, Master Drawings 23–24 (1985–86), pp.554–51 (the British

Museum drawings are discarded in note 6); and idem: ‘De gebroeders Crabeth en Willem Tybaut, nieuw werk van de kunstenaars van de Goudse Glazen’, Delineavit et sculpsit 31 (2007), pp.2–22.

3 X. van Eck, C. Coebergh-Surie and A. Gasten: The stained-glass windows in the Sint-Janskerk at Gouda, II: The works of Dirck and Wouter Crabeth, Amsterdam 2002, nos.6, 8–9 and 11.

4 Compare The Good Samaritan carrying the wounded man, by Dirck Coornhert after

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21. The Supper at Bethany, by Wouter Pietersz Crabeth I. 1567.

Pen with brown wash, 41 by 14 cm. (Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris).

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DRAWINGS ATTRIBUTED TO CRABETH II

22. The Samaritan carrying the wounded man on his horse, by Wouter Pietersz Crabeth II. c.1635. Pen and brown ink, with grey-brown wash, over black chalk, heightened with white, 27 by 40 cm.

(British Museum, London).

23. The Samaritan paying the innkeeper, by Wouter Pietersz Crabeth II. c.1635. Pen and brown ink, with grey-brown wash, over black chalk, heightened with white, 27 by 40 cm. (British Museum, London).

Cana; MuseumgoudA, Gouda) and the Gouda militia (Harmanus Herberts and his officers; MuseumgoudA, Gouda).

Some of these paintings are signed and carry dates between 1628 and 1641. Whereas the genre paintings are without exception dependent on Caravaggesque examples, the history

paintings draw on a much broader stylistic range. The only Caravaggesque ones are his two versions of the Doubting Thomas (c.1626; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and private collection, Belgium), whereas his Assumption of the Virgin (1628; MuseumgoudA, Gouda) is clearly based on Carracci and Reni. His Adoration of the

Maerten van Heemskerck, repr. in I.M. Veldman: The New Hollstein. Dutch and Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts 1450–1700: Maerten van Heemskerck, Amsterdam 1993, no.352.

5 A. von Schneider: Caravaggio und die Niederländer, Karlsruhe 1933, p.48; and B. Nicolson: The International Caravaggesque movement, Oxford 1979.

6 X. van Eck: ‘Wouter Pietersz. Crabeth II en de parochie van St. Johannes

de Doper in Gouda’, Oud Holland 101 (1987), pp.35–49; idem: Kunst, twist en devotie. Goudse katholieke schuilkerken 1572–1795, Delft 1994; and idem: Clandestine splendor. Paintings for the Catholic church in the Dutch Republic, Zwolle 2008, pp.70–75.

7 A. Houbraken: De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, Amsterdam 1718–21, I, pp.178–79.

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24. Adoration of the Kings, by Wouter Pietersz Crabeth II. 1631. Canvas, 84 by 182 cm. (MuseumgoudA, Gouda).

26. Detail of Fig.22.

27. Detail of Fig.25.

25. St Bernard of Clairvaux converting St William of Aquitaine, by Wouter Pietersz Crabeth II. 1641. Canvas, 143 by 239 cm. (MuseumgoudA, Gouda).

Kings (Fig.24) and St Bernard of Clairvaux converting St William of Aquitaine (Fig.25) are more difficult to categorise, with their eclectic mix of Mannerist and early Baroque features.

Crabeth’s signatures vary somewhat: in 1628, shortly after his return from Italy, he signed his Assumption of the Virgin with a Latinised version of his name (‘Gualterus Crabeth f. 1628’), but soon after he reverted to his Dutch initial. His Adoration of the Kings of 1631 and his St Bernard of Clairvaux converting St William of Aquitaine of 1641 carry a signature that is compatible with the one on the drawing of The Samaritan carrying the wounded man on his horse (Figs.26 and 27).

There are many elements in Crabeth’s paintings that support the hypothesis that the Good Samaritan drawings are indeed his. In the Adoration of the Kings (Fig.24) we observe a similar awkwardness in the stance of the figures and the use of clear, theatrical cast shadows under the figures, implying a light source located over the left shoulder of the viewer. In all his history paintings, as in the two drawings under discussion, the figures are very close to the picture plane, their heads almost reaching the frame. There are also some striking similarities in details, such as the use of old-fashioned slashed clothing, leather boots with flaps and grotesque ornaments at the front and metal spurs attached with a strap over the shoe. The handle of the Good Samaritan’s sword has an eagle’s head for a pommel, with a crossguard that curls up on one side and down on the other, just like the sword of William of Aquitaine in Crabeth’s picture of 1641 (Fig.25).

A drawing in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig expels any doubts that might remain: The prodigal son taking leave of his parents (Fig.28), marked ‘WPC’, has the same clear contours and sparse hatching as the British Museum drawings, with which it also shares the robust figures of men and animals, the slashed clothing and turbans to suggest biblical times and places, and the combination of classical and vernacular architecture, with Bruegelian houses in the background. This time we can be sure that Wouter’s grandfather was not involved, since this drawing was clearly based on a design by David Vinckboons of 1608, a composition that was engraved by Claes Jansz Visscher (in reverse to the drawing). Crabeth may have used this print and mirrored the composition, but he could also have used the original drawing, now in the British Museum (Fig.29).8 Typically, he moved the figures closer to the picture plane to increase their monumentality.

Given the Roman features in Crabeth’s drawings, a date before his stay abroad seems out of the question; it is more likely that they belong to the period after his return home. It seems that the example of Ketel and Vinckboons started to play an ever more important role in his paintings from the period 1630–42, after the strongly Italianate period just after his return from Italy in 1626. An indication that, for example, the Vinckboons drawing was still of interest to the painter later in his career, is the fact that he borrowed its compositional framework, with a receding building on the right with a group

8

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F.W.H. Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts c.1450–1700, Amsterdam 1949, no.5.1.

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U. Mielke: The new Hollstein. German engravings, etchings and woodcuts, 1400–1700: Heinrich Aldegrever, Amsterdam 1996, nos.40–43.7

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28. The prodigal son taking leave of his parents,

by Wouter Pietersz Crabeth II. c.1635.

Pen and brown ink, with grey-brown wash, over black chalk, heightened with white, 26 by 39 cm. (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig).

29. The prodigal son taking leave of his parents,

by David Vinckboons. 1608. Pen and brown ink, with grey wash, 22 by 30 cm.

(British Museum, London).

of people in front of it, for his St Bernard of Clairvaux converting St William of Aquitaine (Fig.25).

The finished execution of all three drawings discussed here and the squaring of The Samaritan paying the innkeeper seem to indicate that they were not just sketches but models of some kind. Considering Crabeth’s œuvre as we know it, it would only be logical to assume that they were preparatory studies for oil paintings, although the fact that only one of the drawings is squared is puzzling.

Considering the iconography of the Good Samaritan drawings, it seems likely that a series of more than two was intended – a print series of the story by Aldegrever from 1554 has the same two

scenes preceded by The traveller falling among thieves on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho and The Good Samaritan tending to the traveller’s wounds.9 As Crabeth’s circle of patrons until now has proved to be purely Gouda-based, we might speculate that a series of paintings about the Good Samaritan could have been destined for a Gouda institution that took care of the sick and disabled. The first candidate that comes to mind would be the Catharina Gasthuis, at the time housed in a building that was to become the municipal museum in the nineteenth century. Ironically, Crabeth’s most important paintings have been gathered there over the years, but until now no trace has been found of paintings of the Good Samaritan, nor, for that matter, of the Prodigal Son. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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Rubens’s lost ‘pocketbook’: some new thoughts

by DAVID JAFFÉ

TWO FOLIOS FROM

what is known as the Antwerp sketchbook, plausibly attributed to Anthony van Dyck, show a series of sketches of a Boy boxer and a Boy with a goose, both of which are drawings after sculpture (Fig.31). Whether or not the sketchbook can indeed be attributed to Van Dyck is not our concern here, but it is important to note that these sketches are almost certainly copied from Rubens’s so-called pocketbook, as has been observed by other scholars, and the present writer has argued elsewhere that the Antwerp sketchbook is largely a compilation after Rubens’s lost pocketbook and other drawings by him.1 The sketches on these two folios, and the sculptures represented, are a source for figures in a number of works by Rubens, and so help date this part of the original Rubens pocketbook. The drawings are of particular interest because Rubens singled out these images in an important early tract he wrote on exemplary antique sculpture portraying children.

Fol.65r records a series of views of the famous classical sculpture Boy with a goose, and it is likely that Rubens was copying the example from the Cesi collection in Rome (Fig.30), which he visited in the early 1600s.2 On the previous sheet (fol.64v) there is another image of the Boy with a goose, this time among various sketches of the Boy boxer, a small Paduan bronze of c.1500 (Fig.32), which was thought by Rubens – and still by eighteenthcentury scholars – to be an antique work. The recto of the same sheet presents further views of the Boy boxer (Fig.33), making up a survey of six studies in all of this figure. Both sheets demonstrate Rubens’s interest in recording how each sculpture looked from a variety of angles as he rotated the statue, intently exploring the stance and torso of each of these child figures.

When Michael Jaffé first published the Antwerp sketchbook in 1966, he concluded that the Boy boxer studies it contains were derived from Rubens’s lost pocketbook because they also occurred in the Johnson manuscript, which is acknowledged as a transcription of Rubens’s pocketbook and is now in the Courtauld Gallery, London. Marjon van der Meulen subsequently

drew attention to the similarity of this figure with the Renaissance bronze in Vienna (Fig.32), and a comparison of the drawings confirms that tentative identification, revealing as it does precise matching details such as the ties for the boxer’s knee protectors.3 These tell-tale ties behind the knees are only visible in the sketchbook at Chatsworth.

It has not been noted that the drawings after this sculpture were the source for the rather muscular Cupid who accompanies his mother, Venus, in Rubens’s Judgment of Paris in London (Fig.34). This work was probably painted before May 1600 when Rubens left Antwerp for Italy and so he must have begun this section of his pocketbook before he left for Italy. It is significant too that his interest in using sculpture as models for his painting is evident so early on in his career.4 Rubens was certainly intrigued by the figure of the Boy boxer and it is possible that he knew it from the collection of his friend and Antwerp patron, Nicolaas Rockox, as a sculpture of the type in Vienna is cited in the inventory of Rockox’s collection: ‘puer paratus pugnam committere cestu’ (‘a boy ready to start fighting with a boxing glove’). That inventory was prepared by NicolasClaude Fabri de Peiresc, the famous antiquarian and learned correspondent who was a friend of Rockox (and later of Rubens too); he had come from his home in Aix-en-Provence in 1606 on an extended visit to view Northern humanist collections.5 If Rubens’s sketches were indeed made from Rockox’s sculpture then this would confirm the idea that the pocketbook was started before Rubens’s trip to Italy and provide further evidence of an Antwerp provenance for the Judgment of Paris, as Rubens’s Antwerp patron would surely have recognised the visual citation of this sculpture in the painting.6 Jan Brueghel’s and Rubens’s Sense of Sight (1617; Museo del Prado, Madrid) includes two all’antica sculptures from Rockox’s collection, which suggests that there was a tradition of quoting specific items, although there the works are not ‘disguised’ as living models.7

1 For the sketchbook, see M. Jaffé: Van Dyck’s Antwerp sketchbook, London 1966, where the Johnson copy of the pocketbook, now in the Courtauld Gallery, London, is cited; J. Bolten: Method and practice: Dutch and Flemish drawing books 1600–1750, Landau 1985, pp.101–16; A. Balis: ‘Rubens und Inventio. Der Beitrag seines theoretischen Studienbuches’, in U. Heinen and A. Thielemann, eds.: Rubens Passioni; Kultur der Leidenschaften im Barock, Göttingen 2001, pp.11–40; D. Jaffé with A. Bradley: ‘Rubens’s “Pocketbook”: An Introduction to the Creative Process’, in D. Jaffé et al.: exh. cat. Rubens: A Master in the Making, London (National Gallery) 2005, pp.21–27; T. Meganck: ‘Rubens on the Human Figure: Theory, Practice and Metaphysics’, in J. Vander Auwera et al.: exh. cat. Rubens: a genius at work, Brussels (Royal Museums of Fine Arts) 2007–08; and J. Barone: ‘Rubens and Leonardo on Motion: Figures, Inscriptions, and Texts’, in C. Farago, ed.: Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550–1900, Farnham 2009, pp.441–74.

2 The invention survives in many replicas, sadly all without the original heads; see M. van der Meulen: Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part 23: Rubens, copies after the antique, II, London 1994, pp.87–88, no.70, who argues that a copy in Copenhagen after Rubens’s drawing proves Rubens saw the Cesi version.

3 See ibid., I, London 1994, pp.250–53, esp. p.253, note 9. L. Planiscig: Kunst historisches Museum Wien, Sammlung für Plastik und Kunstgewerbe: Die Bronzeplastiken, Statuetten, Reliefs, Geräte und Plaketten, Vienna 1924, p.53, no.97. The silver eyes in the Vienna bronze suggest Padua, c.1500. There is a companion in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; see A. Radcliffe, M. Baker and M. Maek-Gérard: The

Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Renaissance and later sculpture, with works of art in bronze, London 1992, p.169. There was considerable interest in the late sixteenth century in ancient boxing. I am not aware of any images showing ancient boxers wearing knee protectors, which may have more to do with Renaissance parade armour. The leather cap was standard headwear for Greek boxers; see C. Tovar: ‘Battered but unbeaten: a new Getty acquisition’, Apollo 167 (February 2008), pp.63–67, citing Z. Newby: Greek athletics in the Roman world, Oxford 2005.

4 Rubens possibly also used the Boy boxer in his Nature adorned by the Graces (c.1618; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow), where the figure appears as a flying putto.

5 R.W. Scheller: Nicolaas Rockox als oudheidkundige, Antwerp 1978, p.69 (fig.23 on p.50). Peiresc visited Rockox in 1606; see D. Jaffé: ‘Rubens’ Samson and Delilah, an Antwerp Chimney Piece in Context’, in idem et al.: exh. cat. Samson and Delilah: a Rubens painting returns, Antwerp (Rockoxhuis) and Vienna (Liechtenstein Museum) 2007–08, pp.11–18. Rubens’s brother Philip knew Rockox from an early date and it is possible that Peter Paul met him when assisting Otto van Veen.

6 See Balis, op. cit. (note 1), where it is postulated that many of Rubens’s early inventions are preserved in the Chatsworth sketchbook. F. Healy: Rubens and the Judgement of Paris: a question of choice, Turnhout 1997, p.67, argues for a date of 1601 for the Judgment of Paris; on pp.56–57 she dates the pocketbook to before Rubens’s Italian journey.

7 Unless one accepts that the Cupid in that painting is also based on the Boy boxer.

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30. Boy with a goose. Roman copy of Hellenistic original. Marble, 85 cm. high.

(Museo Palazzo Altemps, Rome).

31. Fols.64v and 65r of the Antwerp sketchbook, by Anthony van Dyck. Pen on paper, 20.6 by 32 cm. (Duke of Devonshire collection, Chatsworth).

32. Boy boxer. Paduan, c.1500. Bronze, silver and enamel, 28.5 cm. high.

(Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

33. Fol.64r of the Antwerp sketchbook, by Anthony van Dyck. Pen on paper, 20.6 by 16 cm. (Duke of Devonshire collection, Chatsworth). the burlington m a g a z i n e

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36. Detail of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and his family adoring the Holy Trinity, by Peter Paul Rubens. c.1604–05. Two canvases, each 185 by 462 cm. (Palazzo Ducale, Mantua).

34. Detail of Judgment of Paris, by Peter Paul Rubens. c.1597–99.

Panel, 133.9 by 174.5 cm.

(National Gallery, London).

35. Detail of Judgment of Paris, by Peter Paul Rubens. c.1602. Copper, 34 by 45 cm.

(Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna).

The Antwerp sketchbook studies of the Boy with a goose were even more influential for Rubens’s early work. Unlike the Boy boxer, the studies of the Boy with a goose do not appear in the Johnson manuscript, but Rubens’s authorship is clearly established by their quotation in some of his earliest Italian paintings.

The artist inserted two of these views (the first side view and the penultimate rear view) into his Judgment of Paris in Vienna (Fig.35). Another side view of the Boy with a goose can be seen in the angel holding up Christ’s cloak in Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and his family adoring the Holy Trinity (Fig.36),8 and a schematic rendition of a rear view of the boy occurs on the right of the sarcophagus below Christ in the Lamentation over the dead Christ (Fig.37). These early citations again point to Rubens’s authorship of the drawings recorded in the Antwerp sketchbook and indicate that this section of the original Rubens pocketbook was certainly in existence before 1602.

Rubens later found uses for the Boy with a goose as a rather awkwardly kicking putto in his St Jerome in his study (1610; Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam), then as a putto aiding the disrobing of Mars in The return from war: Mars disarmed by Venus (Fig.38) and, as has been observed, in his Statue of Ceres (c.1616; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg).9 Unlike the early paintings, these last two display the more obvious, classic poses. We also know that around 1628 Willem Panneels copied three conventional frontal views of the sculpture drawn by Rubens, suggesting that the surprising twisted angles appealed more to the younger Rubens.10 The artist’s borrowing of such ‘antique’ images is not merely incidental, as Rubens outlines a comprehensive scheme for

8

9

Rubens’s painting was clearly inspired by Mantegna’s fresco of putti holding an inscription on the west wall of the Camera degli Sposi in the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua. Van der Meulen, op. cit. (note 2), II, p.87, notes that the sculpture also informed a putto in his Statue of Ceres in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and Venus mourning Adonis in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, but the latter could, like Rubens’s Horrors of war in Palazzo Pitti, Florence, be indebted instead to Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael of the Judgment of Paris. The print was also copied in the pocketbook.

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For the St Jerome, see H. Vlieghe: Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part 8: Saints, London 1973, II, pp.97–99, no.120; for The return from war, see A.T. Woollett: exh. cat. Rubens & Brueghel: a working friendship, Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum) and The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2006–07, pp.52–59, no.2. The connection with the Statue of Ceres was made by Van der Meulen (see note 8 above).

10 See Van der Meulen, op. cit. (note 2), II, pp.87–88, no.70.

11 P.P. Rubens: Théorie de la figure humaine, considérée dans ses principes, soit en repos ou en mouvement. Ouvrage traduit du latin de Pierre-Paul Rubens, avec XLIV planches

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illustrating children by reference to antique sculpture in his brief essay on children (‘de pueris’) in his pocketbook, which is cited in full below. Indeed, this passage identifies as ideal models for mature infants both the Boy boxer and the ‘Boy with a swan’ – undoubtedly the famous Boy with a goose. Rubens’s original Latin text is preserved in the Johnson manuscript and was first published, in French translation, in 1773 by C.A. Jombert, who illustrated it with engravings of Rubens’s sketches of the Boy boxer (though not the Boy with a goose).11 Van der Meulen also connected the Rubens tract on children to these pocketbook drawings and noted the absence of any ancient example of a Boy boxer.12

37. Detail of the Lamentation over the dead Christ, by Peter Paul Rubens. c.1601–02.

Canvas, 180 by 136 cm.

(Galleria Borghese, Rome).

When taking statues as models, the best ones should always be selected and imitated as models of the different ages concerned – infancy, say, of which the nicest example is provided by the putti on the statue of the Nile and of the Tiber in the Vatican Gardens. Self-contained in their smooth rotundity, they are playful in their gestures, crawling on the ground and clambering over the massive limbs of their father as if they were mountains. Similar to these are the ones next to the Tiber statue in the same place, being suckled by the she wolf. Next a slightly more advanced age, but still that of a baby, was illustrated by the ancients in the Cupid asleep on an outspread lion skin, with a torch in his left hand. A later stage than this is shown in the boy next to Leda where he is struggling with the swan, and in the Hercules crushing the serpents in his cradle. Finally, a somewhat more substantial age is represented in the little Greek boy fighting with boxing gloves. All these children of different kinds, yet still possessing the chubbiness of infancy, can be seen in ancient marbles in Rome.13 It is probable that Rubens wrote this passage during his first stay in Rome in 1602 as it exudes the artist’s excitement at encountering these ancient monuments. The nomenclature and structure of some of the references, such as that to the Leda and the boy struggling with a swan, closely follow the mistaken identifications of both these figures in Mauro and Aldroandi’s 1556 guidebook to ancient sculpture in Rome.14 It is interesting to consider why Rubens thought the Boy boxer was Greek. Elizabeth McGrath has demonstrated that in the decoration of the façade of his own house Rubens chose to show Alexander the Great naked because he knew from Pliny that the Greeks portrayed their heroes nude, unlike the Romans. Thus the lack of dress, and the fact that it was bronze and archaically frontal, may all have suggested to Rubens a Greek origin.15 Athletic feats were celebrated in the literature and art of the ancient world: Pindar wrote poems which celebrated victorious Greek boy boxers and Pausanias described many commemorative statues around the temple of Olympia and elsewhere. As a scholar of such ancient texts, Rubens may naturally have

assumed that this sculpture was antique both because he knew that such sculptures existed in the ancient world and because he was persuaded by the work’s detailed and informed representation of antique boxing gloves and cap.

gravées par Pierre Aveline, d'après les desseins de ce célebre artiste, ed. C.A. Jombert, Paris 1773.

12 Ibid., I, p.253, note 9. Curiously Van der Meulen does not seem to realise Jombert had already made the same link (she notes that the Vienna bronze is illustrated in P. Gauricus: De Sculptura [1504], ed. A. Chastel, Geneva 1969, fig.44. Chastel’s illustration is without any reference). Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen describes the match as very close in her commentary in P.P. Rubens: Théorie de la

figure humaine, ed. N. Laneyrie-Dagen, Paris 2003, p.157.

13 Van der Meulen, op. cit. (note 2), I, pp.65, 71–75 and 251–52.

14 L. Mauro and U. Aldroandi: Le antichita de la Citta di Roma, Venice 1556; Van der Meulen, op. cit. (note 2), I, p.49; and II, p.88, mentions the guidebook without drawing attention to its influence on Rubens’s text.

15 E. McGrath: ‘The Painted Decoration of Rubens’s House’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978), pp.245–77, esp. p.254, note 38.

38. Detail of The return from war: Mars disarmed by Venus, by Jan Brueghel and Peter Paul Rubens. c.1613. Panel, 127.3 by 163.5 cm. (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles).

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It is tempting to view the Antwerp sketchbook sheet, where the infant figures are interwoven in sequence, as an accurate copy of Rubens’s illustrations for his essay on antique models for the depiction of children. In this case the original sketches were probably made around 1598–1602 and, perhaps a year later, the painter appears to have inserted an unrelated image of the nailing of Christ to the Cross. This previously uniden tified sketch records Pellegrino Tibaldi’s fresco from the Cloister of the Evangelists (c.1587–90) in the Escorial (Fig.39).16 Rubens was in Spain as a representative of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, from 22nd April 1603 until the end of that year,17 and his letter of 24th May indicates that he had just visited the Escorial.18 It can be concluded that Rubens was the author of the original study on which this sketch was based, as well as the rest of the sheet: it bears all the hallmarks of his abbreviated draughtsmanship. Van Dyck never travelled to Spain and it is highly unlikely that he would have known the Tibaldi invention.

Rubens’s written and visual codification of ancient sources for the depiction of children and his enthusiastic application of these sources to his early paintings, gives an insight into his disciplined search for a humanistic language of art. The age of an infant must fit the context, be it a Cupid or an angel. Rubens was aware of the drawbacks of copying sculpture. In his essay ‘On the imitation of Sculpture’, probably written a few years after his essay ‘On Children’, he warned against ending up with images that looked like painted sculpture.19 A painter could learn much from studying great ancient statues, especially about athletic physiques, but in the end nature was the best guide. In one of his last letters he praises casts of putti made by the sculptor François Du Quesnoy for looking as if they were formed by nature, not art.20 We should remember that both Rubens and his brother married in the same year, 1609, and they soon had their own family models for infants, of which there are many life studies in Rubens’s work. On 9th May 1640 he reminded his pupil Lucas Faydherbe that making a family was more important than finishing the ivory child for him.21 Rubens’s depictions of infants show that ancient sculpture was an influence on his invention but it became less dominant after the impact of his early encounters was moderated by observation as well as imagination.

39. Detail of Crucifixion, by Pellegrino Tibaldi.

1587. Fresco.

(Escorial, Spain).

16 S. Béguin and M. Di Giampaolo: ‘Pellegrino Tibaldi e gli affreschi del sagrario e del chiostro’, in M. Di Giampaolo, ed.: Los frescos italianos de El Escorial, Madrid 1993, pp.146–49, fig.20. For a drawing for the fresco, see C. van Tuyll van Serooskerken: The Italian drawings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Teyler Museum, Haarlem, Ghent and Doornspijk 2000, pp.379–80, no.396.

17 A. Vergara: Rubens and his Spanish Patrons, Cambridge 1999, pp.7–9. His letters show that he was based at Valladolid, the new home of Phillip III’s court, from May 1603 to the end of that year, and he probably accompanied the court to Ventosilla (sixty kilometres east of Valladolid).

18 The visit probably took place on his journey from Alicante to Valladolid (Madrid is around two thirds of the distance from the port to Valladolid); see M. Rooses and C.L. Ruelens: Codex Diplomaticus Rubenianus. Documents relatifs à la vie et aux œuvres de Rubens, Antwerp 1887–1909, I, pp.223–24; R.S. Magurn, ed.: The letters of Peter Paul Rubens, Cambridge MA 1955, p.33: ‘. . . the Duke of Lerma. For he is not without knowledge of fine things, through the particular pleasure and practice he has in seeing every day so many splendid works of Titian, of Raphael and others, which have astonished me, both by their quality and quantity, in the King’s palace, in the Escorial, and elsewhere’. The copies in the pocketbook of Navarrete’s Beheading of St James (fol.11r) and Titian’s Adoration of the Magi (fol.21v) may well have been made during the same visit to the Escorial. Evidence that Rubens may

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have made use of the horse rubbing its nostrils with its foreleg in the latter painting, a version of which is in the Escorial, is cited by I. von zur Mühlen in C. Syre et al.: exh. cat. Tintoretto: The Gonzaga cycle, Munich (Alte Pinakothek) 2000, p.185 and note 49. It has been observed that Rubens saw Giambologna’s Samson and a Philistine (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), then in the collection of the Duke of Lerma, as he responds to the sculpture in a drawing in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum; see R.-A. d’Hulst and M. Vandenven: Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part 3: Rubens, the Old Testament, London 1989, p.105, no.29, fig.70.

Rubens’s Philistine closely follows the marble, and the example seems to have been used for the Amazons subdued by Hercules in the artist’s Battle of the Amazons of c.1602–03 (Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam).

19 R. de Piles: Cours de peinture par principes, Paris 1708, pp.139–47; translation from English edition (The Principles of Painting, London 1743) quoted in J.R. Martin: Baroque, London 1977, pp.271–73. See also G. Waagen: Peter Paul Rubens, his life and genius, London 1840, pp.123–26; and J. Muller: ‘Rubens’s Theory and Practice of the Imitation of Art’, Art Bulletin 64 (1982), pp.229–47.

20 In one of Rubens’s last letters of 17th April 1640 he thanks Du Quesnoy for models and plaster casts, praising the way the marble is softened into living flesh; see Rooses and Ruelens, op. cit. (note 18), VI, p.271; and Magurn, op. cit. (note 18), p.413.

21 Ibid., p.415.

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Hendrick ter Brugghen’s ‘Bagpipe player’ acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

by ARTHUR K. WHEELOCK Jr.

40. Bagpipe player, by Hendrick ter Brugghen. 1624. Canvas, 100.7 by 82.9 cm. (National Gallery of Art, Washington).

(1588–1629) captured the rhythms of music in the very way he composed his paintings. His musicians lean into their instruments, their bodies alive with the joy of the sounds they make, whether coaxed from a violin, lute, recorder or bagpipe. In the remarkable painting under discussion (Fig.40), a bagpipe player, seen in strict profile, squeezes the leather bag between his forearms as he blows through the instrument’s pipe and fingers a tune on the chanter. Two large drones, composed of different wooden sections, rest on his bare shoulder. The interlocking rhythms of this ensemble – the broad, round shapes of the musician’s shoulder, beret and brown bag-

HENDRICK TER BRUGGHEN

pipe bag, the flowing patterns of folds in his creamy shirt and taupe robe, the pronounced diagonals of the drones and pipe, and the verticality of the chanter – parallel those of a musical score. Broad, fulsome notes, quickly cadenced flourishes and strong beats not only punctuate melodies with dynamic accents but also culminate in a well-defined and emphatic finale.

This masterpiece, which the National Gallery of Art, Washington, acquired in 2009, came to the art market after it was restituted by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, where it had hung between 1938, when the Museum acquired it in a forced sale of the collection of H.W. Lange in Berlin, and 2008, when the burlington m a g a z i n e

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it was returned to its rightful owners. Subsequently, the painting was auctioned in January 2009 at Sotheby’s, New York.1 Ter Brugghen’s Bagpipe player is muted in tonality but bold and forceful in its scale and painting techniques, qualities that have been fully revealed after the careful restoration treatment by David Bull.2 The artist’s sure, broad brushstrokes flow across the canvas, reflecting in their energy the bagpipe player’s passion for his music. The numerous adjustments made by the artist in the folds of the shirt and robe, as well as in the shape of the bagpipes, indicate the freedom with which he approached his subject. Also astonishing is Ter Brugghen’s control of light, which falls most strongly on the bagpipe player’s shoulder, shirt and fingers while leaving his face in shadow – evidence that the painting focuses primarily on the sensuality of music and not on a specific individual.

The bagpipe player is a muscular, rough-hewn type, hardly an ideal of grace and refinement. His head is large, his nose round, and he sports a shepherd’s moustache and beard. His hands and knuckles are thick, yet from the manner in which he fingers the chanter, leaving the vent hole uncovered, it is clear that he understands how to play the instrument. Bagpipes were traditionally viewed as folk instruments, played by herdsmen and shepherds wiling their time or at country dances. However, Ter Brugghen does not depict a local peasant or shepherd whom the artist may have encountered on a foray into the countryside: shepherds did not play bagpipes with drones resting on a bare shoulder. The bagpipe player’s loosely draped robes reflect a manner of dress based on antique fashions (all’antica). This mode of dress alluded to an Arcadian ideal of country existence that was popular in aristocratic and court circles, and among the urban elite, particularly in Utrecht and The Hague. Essential to this mythology was not only the purity and bounty of country existence, but also the romantic ideals of love and beauty that derived from Renaissance literary and pictorial traditions.

Bagpipes were often included in these odes to pastoral life, which may help explain the appeal of paintings of musicians for aristocratic patrons during the early to mid-seventeenth century.3 In Daniel Heinsius’s poem ‘Pastorael’ of 1616, the shepherd Cordion sits quietly in the countryside dreaming of his beloved while he soulfully plays his bagpipe and sings his lover’s lament.4 Two extremely popular pastoral plays of the period, Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido of 1590 and Pieter Cornelisz Hooft’s Granida of 1615, similarly evoked an Arcadian ideal of bucolic existence quite different from the profligate ways

of urban and courtly existence.5 Musicians playing bagpipes, flutes and other pastoral instruments created the auditory ambiance for such plays. In 1637, for example, Anthony van Dyck depicted François Langlois playing a bagpipe and dressed as a Savoyard, an itinerant shepherd and musician such as one would have found in performances in French aristocratic circles.6 The specific character of the Bagpipe player – a single, over-life-size musician depicted against a plain greyish-ochre background – owes much to the influence of Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, Dutch Caravaggist painters who returned to Utrecht from Rome in 1620. They brought with them stylistic and thematic predilections appropriate for expressing the sensuous, idealised concepts of Arcadian subjectmatter that they adapted from paintings by Caravaggio and his followers, particularly Bartolomeo Manfredi. Even though Ter Brugghen had earlier been in Italy, and had presumably seen some of Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians, these additional pictorial sources probably inspired his initial foray into this subject-matter in 1621, when he painted the Flute player and the Shepherd flute player, both in Kassel.7 It was not until 1624, however, the date of the Bagpipe player, that Ter Brugghen fully turned his attention to the depiction of musicians. In that year he painted no fewer than five separate compositions devoted to music, featuring not only bagpipe players but also musicians – sometimes singing – who play the lute and the violin.8 Although no commissions for these works are known, the similarities in subject, style and size of the canvases have led to the supposition that Ter Brugghen conceived of a number of these paintings as pendants.9 He continued this interest in the years to follow. Just what prompted this output is not known, but the appeal of this subject was such that Ter Brugghen and/or his workshop made a number of replicas of these works, including the Bagpipe player.10 Ter Brugghen’s Bagpipe player should be seen as part of a broad cultural interest during the early seventeenth century in the pastoral’s evocation of the idyllic pleasures of country existence, particularly as experienced through music. Ter Brugghen fully embraced this theme in a series of remarkable paintings of musicians and singers that capture both the joy and the sensuality of life. As with this masterpiece, these engaging images invite us into a world where, through the boldness of the artist’s brush and the rhythms of his forms, we feel the enduring power of music on the human spirit.

1 It was purchased by a consortium of dealers consisting of Johnny van Haeften, London, Otto Naumann, New York, and Colnaghi-Bernheimer, Munich, from whom the Gallery acquired it. The first painting by one of the Utrecht Caravaggisti to enter the Gallery’s collection would not have been possible without the generous and enthusiastic support of Greg and Candy Fazakerley.

2 Aside from some thinness in the background, the painting is in remarkably good condition. Since its acquisition the painting has also been reframed.

3 E. Winternitz: Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art: Studies in Musical Iconology, New Haven and London 1979, pp.78 and 80.

4 D. Heinsius: ‘Pastorael’, in idem: Nederduytsche poemata, Amsterdam 1616, pp.34–36: ‘Oock heb ick veel vreucht bedreven, / En mijn lullepijp gestalt / Naer de deunen van het veldt’.

5 See A. Kettering: The Dutch Arcadia: pastoral art and its audience in the Golden Age, Montclair 1983, esp. pp.101–13.

6 Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, and National Gallery, London; see A.K. Wheelock Jr. and S.J. Barnes: exh. cat. Anthony van Dyck, Washington (National Gallery of Art) 1990, p.304, no.81.

7 L.J. Slatkes and W. Franits: The Paintings of Hendrick Ter Brugghen, 1588–1629. Catalogue Raisonné, Amsterdam 2007, pp.176–77, nos.A61–A62, argue that the paintings are pendants ‘with antithetical types rather than two young musicians playing in harmony’.

8 Ibid., nos.A63–A72, RA2 and W16.

9 Ibid., nos.A70–A72, RA2 and W16; Slatkes and Franits propose that the Bagpipe

player has a pendant, the so-called Pointing lute player, now in a private collection.

They argue that the two works, which are identical in size, are signed and dated 1624, and have complementary compositions, are also thematically conjoined. They believe that the lute player’s laughing demeanour and pointing gesture mock the bagpipe player as he plays this rustic instrument, a mocking gesture that draws its bite from ancient mythology – the musical contest between Marsyas, who played Pallas Athene’s cast-off aulos (which was occasionally depicted as a bagpipe in fifteenthcentury publications), and Apollo, who won the contest by playing a lyre, a stringed instrument. Even though wind instruments were certainly considered to be less refined and elegant than string instruments, their hypothesis is not entirely convincing. While the Pointing lute player must have had a pendant, it probably was not the Bagpipe player. The compositional relationship between the works is not as compelling as they initially seem. The scale and disposition of the figures are different: the bagpipe player is larger than the lute player, higher in the picture plane and more fully fills the space around him. It should also be noted that the only seventeenth-century reference to one of Ter Brugghen’s paintings of a bagpipe player did not have a pendant. Most importantly, however, the Bagpipe player is an image of quiet grandeur and dignity. Nothing about the figure’s pose, expression or gestures suggests that Ter Brugghen conceived this image as the focus of a lute mockery.

10 The Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston TX. The painting, which measures 89.3 by 83.2 cm., has been trimmed on all sides; see ibid., nos.W16 and RA2.

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Books Pre-Eyckian Panel Paintings in the Low Countries. Edited by Cyriel Stroo. 2 vols.

504 + 224 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2009), €90. ISBN 978–2–87033–014–2.

41. Wings of a Crucifixion triptych, by Melchior Broederlam. c.1395–98.

Panel, 166.5 by 502 cm. (with frame). (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon).

Reviewed by JAN PIET FILEDT KOK T H I S P U B L I C A T I O N P R E S E N T S the first results of a research project devoted to Pre-Eyckian panel paintings in the Low Countries, a collaboration between the Centre for the Study of Fifteenth-Century Painting in the southern Netherlands and the Principality of Liège and the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (IRPA/KIK). It describes ten such paintings in Belgian public collections, all of which underwent conservation treatment at the IRPA after the Second World War; the Tower retable (Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp) and the St Ursula shrine (Bruges) are currently being treated again.

The ten works belong to a larger corpus of about forty Pre-Eyckian paintings made in the northern and southern Netherlands between c.1350 and 1435. This includes the wings

by Melchior Broederlam for the Crucifixion triptych in Dijon (c.1395–98; Fig.41); the Antwerp–Baltimore quadriptych (c.1400); and the Norfolk triptych in Rotterdam (c.1415–20). In their introduction Cyriel Stroo and Dominique Vanwijnberghe rightly characterise the surviving works as ‘glimpses of a lost splendor’; the Walcourt panels in Namur – an Annunciation and a Visitation – are not only fragments but miss much of the original paint layers. The St Anne with the Virgin and Child in Neerlanden was completely overpainted (until the restoration at the IRPA in 1994–98), and although parts of the paint layers have survived, the pastiglia and inlays in the gilded background have completely gone.

Gilding, refined pounced decoration of the background details and the imitation of costly textiles are characteristic of most Pre-Eyckian panel painting. In addition to punchwork and pastiglia, prefabricated reliefs in metal foil (mostly tin-foil) were glued onto the panel and gilded. These older techniques disappear in the paintings of the Flemish Primitives, who mostly suggested gold with (lead-tin) yellow paint.

The second volume with essays puts the Pre-Eyckian paintings in a broader context, which is necessary to understand fully the ten individual works of art discussed in the first volume. An essay by Barbara Baert examines the importance of the use of gold. The technique of relief decorations, applied brocades and inlay work, among others, are discussed by Ingrid Geelen and Delphine Steyaert. Gilding and embellishment of gold surfaces is also one of the subjects in Christina Currie’s essay.

Not all new insights presented in this publication can be summarised, but a few paintings deserve brief mention. The technical aspects of the outside wings of Broederlam’s Crucifixion altarpiece, commissioned with the altarpiece of Saints and Martyrs by Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy for the Charterhouse of the Carthusian monastery outside Dijon, were newly studied by Currie in August 2006 and are discussed here again in an essay which presents a better understanding of the data and which benefits greatly from new infra-red and photographic documentation. Closest in style to Broederlam’s Dijon wings is the Tower retable, dated to c.1395 and located in the southern Netherlands. Already described at length in 2003 by Stroo and Nicole Goetghebeur,1 here it receives a more extensive technical analysis, supplemented by an essay in the second volume by Livia Depuydt-Elbaum, who treated the painting in 2000–03. The conservation treatment recently begun on the large Carrand diptych in the Bargello in Florence, dated c.1385–90, is important for our understanding of the Tower retable because it shows strong technical similarities. One of the more surprising discoveries includes the extensive underdrawing in the figures in the Kortessen panel in Brussels, which infra-red reflectography has now revealed; they are similar to Broederlam’s underdrawing in his Dijon Crucifixion and suggests the artist is an experienced draughtsman. The Crucifixion with Sts Catherine and Barbara in Bruges, here extensively investigated for the first time, is generally dated between 1390–95 and 1415, but dendrochronology makes a dating of c.1425 or later more plausible. It proves, as in the case of the Walcourt panels and the Neerlanden St Anne, that the archaic technique of the Pre-Eyckian painters survived when Jan van Eyck and the Master of Flémalle were developing their new technique. The stylistic similarities with the wings of the large Passion in the St Reinold’s church in Dortmund, which is dated by the authors c.1420–25, makes further investigation of this altarpiece a strong desideratum.

This brings us to a weakness in this publication: the omission of further information

about a number of key works of Pre-Eyckian painting. They have so far not been inves tigated by the Brussels research project, even though a few have recently been published elsewhere.2 According to the acknowledgements, preliminary examinations of some other Pre-Eyckian paintings were carried out by the research team: for example, the Trinity triptych (c.1400) and the Holy Family, both in Berlin; the Passion altarpiece in Dortmund; the large Carrand diptych in the Bargello, Florence; and the Norfolk triptych (c.1415–20) in Rotterdam. Hopefully more paintings will be added and investigated in future publications, including works from the northern Netherlands, for example the Calvary of Hendrik van Rijn of 1363 (currently on loan to the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, during the renovation of the Antwerp museum); the Memorial tablet for the lords of Montfoort (c.1400; now also on loan to the Centraal Museum); and the Eighteen scenes from the life of Christ, known as the Roermond Passion (Gelre; c.1430–40), both in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Another quibble is that the question of technical innovations in the use of binding media is hardly touched upon.3 The authors conclude that although oil paint was used, the handling was archaic. It was the next generation – Van Eyck and his contemporaries – who exploited the properties of oil in their quest for illusionistic representation. Until recently it was supposed that a complex range of binding media – oil, protein and tempera – was used by the Pre-Eyckian painters. Whereas the investigation of the Broederlam panels in Dijon in the 1980s found a protein binder in the underpaint layers and oil in the glazes and greens, the analyses of binding media presented here seldom provide straightforward results. Both protein and oil binding media are found in a limited number of cases, but the stratigraphy is seldom clear.

The works of art have mostly been studied in situ, and the possibility of comparing them in the context of an exhibition is rare. For a better understanding of the technical and stylistic developments, an exhibition of key works from the Pre-Eyckian period, including

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works in other media such as polychrome sculpture and illuminated manuscripts, is essential; plans for such an exhibition are being developed in Louvain and Rotterdam, and this excellent publication, although still incomplete, offers a very useful starting point.

1 In H. Mund, C. Stroo, N. Goetghebeur and H. Nieuwdorp: Corpus of fifteenth-century painting in the Southern Netherlands and the Principality of Liège, vol.20: The Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp, Brussels 2003, pp.202–53.

2 For example, the two Antwerp panels of the Antwerp–Baltimore quadriptych in ibid., pp.254–87, and the Last Judgment from Diest in A. Diest, R. Slachmuylders, G. Patigny and F. Peters: Catalogue Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Volume V: The Flemish Primitives, Anonymous Masters, Brussels 2009, pp.57–107.

3 The most recent and extensive publication in this respect is Melanie Gifford’s technical study of the Antwerp–Baltimore quadriptych, which turned out to have been painted in a medium that was primarily linseed oil; M. Gifford: ‘Interpreting Analyses of the Painting Medium: A case Study of a Pre-Eyckian Altarpiece’, in M. Faries and R. Spronk, eds.: Recent Developments in the Technical Examination of Early Netherlandish Painting. Methodology, Limitations & Perspectives, Turnhout 2003, pp.107–16.

Hans Memling: Master Painter in Fifteenth-Century Bruges. By Barbara G. Lane. 386 pp. incl. 27 col. + 277 b. & w. ills. (Harvey Miller Publishers, London and Turnhout, 2009), £140.

ISBN 978–1–905375–19–6.

Reviewed by TILL-HOLGER BORCHERT

on Memling appears fifteen years after the comprehensive exhibition devoted to the artist at the Groeningemuseum, Bruges, in celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Memling’s death, and the simultaneous publication of Dirk de Vos’s book that contained an extensive catalogue raisonné of Memling’s known œuvre.1 Since 1994 there has been a significant number of studies devoted to Memling, and this fully justifies Lane’s efforts. Her monograph avoids fashionable rhetoric and bravely leaves the discussion of, for example, aspects of painting technique to other experts. Instead, her book offers a lucid and concise narrative that presents us with a critical discussion of recent literature, while Lane’s own valuable contributions on the artist are expanded as part of a well-organised argument.2 The book consists of four parts. The first, entitled ‘Wanderjahre’, discusses Memling’s artistic origins and training (chapters 1–4).

Lane cautiously weighs the circumstantial evidence in support of his possible association with Rogier van der Weyden – both Vasari and Guicciardini mention his training with the Brussels master – but wisely refrains from attempting to define the relationship or that with other members of the Brussels workshop. She continues to examine the BARBARA LANE’S MONOGRAPH

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influence of Cologne painting on Memling’s pictorial vocabulary. Lochner, the city’s leading painter, once more emerges as an important source of inspiration, while Memling’s synchronous narratives (‘Simultanbilder’) point to even earlier local conventions and, presumably, to an extended early stay by Memling in the city. Perhaps more interesting and hitherto rarely recognised are the links between Memling and Bouts that Lane convincingly establishes (chapter 3). She concludes her remarks on the artist’s ‘Wanderjahre’ with a cogent analysis of the impact of both Van Eyck and Petrus Christus on the development of Memling’s Bruges style.

The book’s second part focuses on Memling’s workshop and his patrons in Bruges (chapters 5–6). Lane gives a succinct account of the painters’ main activities during three decades of his career in Bruges and addresses the possible organisation and structure of his workshop. While only two apprentices are documented – neither of whom can be associated with any existing painting – other artists may have worked with Memling, and Lane examines the facts with regard to Schongauer, Sittow, the Master of the St Bartholomew Altar and Dürer.3 There is no compelling evidence to support the idea of direct contact between Memling and any of these artists, but her observations amount to a stimulating study in the reception of Memling’s art outside the Netherlands.

After all, Memling’s fame – as Lane correctly stresses – must have made his workshop a likely destination for aspiring painters from the Low Countries and beyond.

The chapter on Memling’s clientele that follows is a concise survey of patronage in Early Netherlandish painting and serves as an introduction to Lane’s remarks on Memling’s ‘Major Commissions’, the third, and perhaps most persuasive, part of Lane’s book (chapters 7–9). Three of Memling’s most important commissions – the Gdansk Last Judgment, the Bruges Moreel altarpiece and the Passion altarpiece from Lübeck – are discussed as ‘funerary altarpieces’ and their iconography is thoroughly analysed. Rather than examining the altarpieces’ specific functions within the context of the patrons’ foundations, Lane focuses on the pictorial strategies Memling applied to satisfy the demands of his clients.

Memling’s synchronous narratives – the subsequent focus of the book – are considered to aid the beholder in a ‘spiritual pilgrimage’.

Although there is no factual evidence of any indulgences having been attached to Memling’s ‘Simultanbilder’, there can be little doubt that in the artist’s lifetime such narratives were meant to evoke mental images and served as visual stimuli for mental pilgrimages. Lane reconstructs the way in which simultaneous depictions of consecutive biblical events would have functioned within a spiritual context, while acknowledging the inherent social and commemorative significance of the commissions. The third part concludes with Memling’s paintings made between 1474 and 1489 for the Bruges Hospital of St John, one of the leading charitable institutions

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in the city. When discussing Memling’s St John altarpiece (pp.179–86), Lane correctly reminds us that the four saints depicted on the exterior were not only the patron saints of the altarpiece’s donors, but also had ‘intercessory powers against diseases’; it should be pointed out that the Hospital possessed relics of all four saints, which might have added to their pictorial significance.

In the fourth and final part consisting of two chapters entitled ‘Memling and Italy’, Lane first focuses on Memling’s Italian commissions and analyses Italian responses to his painting.

Her second chapter takes an equally fresh and thorough look at how Italian artists – Ghirlandaio, Leonardo, Perugino and Raphael in particular – attempted to emulate Memling’s paintings. It expands on arguments in her previous articles on the subject and offers valuable new insights, and although both chapters greatly benefit from recent studies by Michael Rohlmann and Paula Nuttall, she adds new material to the ongoing debate of Italian reactions to Northern painting.

Lane concludes her book with a concise and very useful catalogue of Memling’s works, conveniently arranged by location instead of using more problematic categories, such as chronology or function. Contrary to De Vos, whose monograph primarily consisted of a catalogue raisonné, Lane’s listing of Memling’s works functions more as a supplement to the impressive scope of her narrative.

She accepts seventy-five works as autograph, a further fourteen works are disputed (B) and four are rejected (C). With its updated bib liography and discussion of recent literature, it supplements De Vos’s catalogue of 1994 (who accepted ninety-three works as autograph). A few remarks are in order. The fragment of an Ecce Homo (no.75), until recently on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, has never been explicitly doubted in the literature, but its lamentable state of preservation should prevent us from a definite attribution to Memling. There is no reason to assign the exquisite little tondo of the Virgin nursing the Christ (B.12) to Memling’s workshop and to withdraw it from the catalogue of accepted works, the more so since its stylistic peculiarities can be explained by the fact that it copies an earlier, Flémallesque prototype. It was shown in the Groeningemuseum in Bruges in 2005–06 and is now on long-term loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Leaving aside the question of whether late medieval workshop practice actually supports the notion of a clear distinction between master and workshop, caution is certainly needed in this respect. It might be useful to include here some information that was not yet available when Lane’s book went to print. The conservation treatment of the three panels from the Najera altarpiece in Antwerp (no.1) has revealed that each of them shows a distinctive manner of painting; it was also established that the groundlayer contains gesso, indicating that this monumental work was presumably executed by Memling and/or members of his workshop in Spain. Recently discovered fragments from an altarpiece made

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by Memling (and workshop), possibly for a Franciscan monastery in Spain, may have been produced at around the same time and during the same sojourn.4 Future technical examination of these panels may help to establish a connection to one of the Najera panels and point to activities of workshop members in Spain during this time.

Given the broad scope of Lane’s monograph, however, these remarks are certainly of minor concern. Her beautifully designed book is a thorough, well-conceived study that will not only satisfy the specialist but also those looking for a useful introduction to the artist’s work and the problems attached to the study of Early Netherlandish painting.

1 D. de Vos et al.: exh. cat. Hans Memling, Bruges (Groeningemuseum) 1994; and idem: Hans Memling: the complete works, London 1994.

2 B.G. Lane: ‘The Patron and the Pirate: The Mystery of Memling’s Gdansk “Last Judgment” Altarpiece’, Art Bulletin 73 (1991), pp.623–40; idem: ‘The Question of Memling’s Training’, in H. Verougstraete, R. van Schoute and M. Smeyers, eds.: Memling Studies, Leuven 1997, pp.53–70; idem: ‘Memling and the Workshop of Verrocchio’, in H. Verougstraete and R. van Schoute, eds.: Le dessin sous-jacent et la technologue dans la peinture. Colloque 12, Leuven 1999, pp.243–50; and idem: ‘Memling’s Impact on the Early Raphael’, in I. Alexander-Skipnes, ed.: Cultural Exchanges between the Low Countries and Italy: 1400–1600, Turnhout 2007, pp.179–92.

3 See J. Nicolaisen: ‘Martin Schongauer – ein Mitarbeiter der Werkstatt Hans Memlings?’, Pantheon 57 (1999), pp.33–56; S. Kemperdick and M. Weniger: ‘Der Bartholomäusmeister: Herkunft und Anfänge seines Stils’, in R. Budde and R. Krischel: exh. cat.

Genie ohne Namen: der Meister des Bartholomäus-Altars, Cologne (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum) 2001, pp.26–43; and H.G. Evers: Dürer bei Memling, Munich 1972.

4 See the entry by A. Muntada I Torrelas in L. Chamorro, ed.: exh. cat. Paisaje interior, Soria (Concatedral de S. Pedro) 2009, pp.430–38, no.II.3.

Conrad Laib. Ein spätgotischer Maler aus Schwaben in Salzburg. By Antje-Fee Köllermann. 204 pp. incl. 62 col. + 123 b. & w. ills. (Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, Berlin, 2007), €78.

ISBN 978–3–87157–217–3.

Reviewed by MARK EVANS T O G E T H E R W I T H L U K A S Moser, Konrad Witz and Hans Multscher, Conrad Laib belongs to the first generation of German artists who were acquainted with Netherlandish realism. He is documented as ‘cuntz layb moler’ (Conrad Laib, Maler) in 1431 at Nördlingen in Bavaria. In 1448 Laib became a citizen of Salzburg.

Laib had probably arrived earlier in Salzburg, as wall paintings dated 1446 and 1447 of the Man of sorrows and the Agony in the garden in its parish church (subsequently Franciscan church) are attributed to him. Its lofty choir, completed in 1452, may have been the original location of one of his principal works,

a dispersed triptych of the Crucifixion. The central panel, dated 1449, is now in Vienna and its wings, with four scenes from the life of the Virgin on the inside and images of St Korbinian and St Florian on the outside, are divided between Padua and Venice. Further panels of St Hermes and St Primus, still in Salzburg, probably belong to its upper tier.

In the Crucifixion, the saddlecloth on the Good Centurion’s horse bears the inscription ‘d. PFENNING 1449 ALS ICH CHUN’. The term ‘pfenning’ may indicate that the work was payment for Laib’s citizenship, while the phrase ‘as I can’ includes a shortened form of his first name. Similarly self-congratulatory inscriptions are found on works by Moser and Multscher. The equestrian figures in the Crucifixion have been likened to those in Altichiero’s fresco of the Crucifixion in the Oratorio di S. Giorgio in Padua and on medals by Pisanello.

Laib revisited the theme of the Crucifixion in a larger work, signed ‘LAIB’ and dated 1457, painted some 240 kilometres to the south-east, at the court church (now cathedral) of St Aegidius in Graz, the capital of Styria. While this lacks the claustrophobic intensity of its predecessor, its taste for the grotesque is even more marked. Some time after 1450, Laib also painted a triptych for the church of St George in Pettau in Lower Styria (now Ptuj in Slovenia), some one hundred kilometres south-east of Graz. This represents The death of the Virgin, flanked by wings with St Jerome and St Mark, which fold one over another to reveal the Crucifixion and fixed outer wings with St Nicholas and St Bernardino. Suggestions that the latter saints, as well as the unusual shape and configuration of this altarpiece, derive from earlier Italian pale are endorsed with reservations in the book under review. Köllermann points out that Laib’s use of Netherlandish motifs – derived principally from Van Eyck and the Master of Flémalle – is actually quite meagre, stressing instead the Swabian elements of his style, with particular reference to the sculptor Hans Multscher of Ulm. In an interesting excursus, the author shows how Laib exploited a range of standardised figure types which were modified for re-use from one work to another. However, his use of this procedure seems not to have been associated with life study, as it was in the work of academic draughtsmen from Perugino to Ingres and beyond.

Laib’s adoption of Van Eyck’s celebrated motto ‘Als Ich Can’ may indicate that the early Netherlandish masters enjoyed a celebrity in south Germany which exceeded the availability there of their work. There also seems to be a disjuncture between the Italianate features which have been divined in Laib’s paintings and his lack of concern for the relative scale of figures, apparent in the variations from one panel to another of the Pettau altarpiece, or the group around the bad thief in the Graz Crucifixion. Such inconsistencies seem resolved in the dramatic hybrid style of Michael Pacher, Laib’s principal successor as the leading painter in the Austrian Alps.

Laib was the subject of a dossier-type exhibition and a volume of collected essays in 1997.1 The present publication is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, submitted in 2004 to the Freie Universität, Berlin. Its academic origins are apparent in a rather elaborate recapitulation of previous literature, which can make for heavy reading and obscures the author’s personal contribution. Nevertheless, students of late medieval art will benefit much from this conscientious monograph.

1 A. Saliger, ed.: exh. cat. Conrad Laib, Vienna (Museum Mittelalterlicher Kunst, Unteres Belvedere, Orangerie) 1997.

The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age. By Mia M. Mochizuki. 399 pp. incl. 179 col. + 35 b. & w. ills. (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008), £65. ISBN 978–0–7546–6104–7.

Reviewed by SIMON WATNEY

of iconoclasm has been largely the province of sociology and social psychology rather than art history. On the one hand there is a tendency to seek generalised explanations of iconoclasm understood as a potentially explosive force in every society and directed at many types of imagery, and on the other hand lies an increasing number of case studies of specific outbreaks of iconoclasm, particularly those associated with the Reformation in northern Europe, reflecting varying types and degrees of violent Protestant hostility to the outward expressions of late medieval Catholic piety. This handsomely illustrated new book shares aspects of both approaches, while addressing the subject in an

THE MODERN STUDY

42. Framed text of the New Testament description of the Last Supper. c.1581. (St Bavo Cathedral, Haarlem).

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original manner by focusing mainly on the newly made fittings and furnishings introduced by the Dutch Reformed church to facilitate appropriate forms of Calvinist worship in churches designed for Roman Catholic use and lately robbed of their offending devotional and liturgical contents.

Mochizuki takes as her central subject the transformation of the interior of St Bavo’s Cathedral in Haarlem following the expulsion of occupying Spanish forces from the city in 1578, five years after the famous siege by Habsburg forces which cruelly decimated the population and was followed by harsh reprisals. In such tragic circumstances, about which she writes surprisingly little, it is hardly surprising that victorious Dutch Protestantism was intimately associated with the identity of the newly established United Provinces, where, however, a substantial proportion of the population remained loyal to the old faith of their ancestors. The looting and desecration of St Bavo’s was in fact remarkable for the relatively limited scale of violent triumphalism, and many painted altarpieces were simply removed to safety and survive elsewhere to this day. Many of the other older furnishings were also spared, including the choir screen, although purged of its newly offending statuary, and the choir stalls. One measure of the Reformed Church’s confident outlook was reflected in the fact that Catholics continued to be buried inside St Bavo, albeit with the addition of a handful of consecrated earth, and even the temporary ringing of funeral bells was permitted for an extra charge (p.279). The new Calvinist church leaders were evidently quite as keen to accrue income from interments as their Catholic predecessors had been.

It is perhaps surprising in this context that so little attention is paid in these pages to the magnificent polished black ledger-stones which still floor the entire church and contribute so much to its appearance.

The book’s central subject is the series of framed religious texts, most of which are housed around the east end of the church.

The largest and most important of these, dating from c.1581, reproduces the New Testament description of the Last Supper (Fig.42), facing west, together with a poem on the other side in a triptych format describing the hardships endured during the Siege of Haarlem. This was provocatively displayed on the site of the former high altar as a permanent affront to Catholic and, for that matter, much other Protestant liturgical practice. These texts are confidently described as ‘paintings’ (following the Dutch term ‘tekstschilderijen’ rather than ‘tekstborden’) although they consist of nothing more than lengthy quotations in large classical wooden frames (p.7). This approach, however, allows the author to regard them as ‘a lost alternative paradigm for picture-making [. . .] with the same basic materials as the late medieval devotional image, oil on panel’ (p.127). But was this in fact ‘picture-making’ in any meaningful sense? Surely the defiant display of such texts was by contrast intended to celebrate the repudiation of all traditional forms of repre-

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sentational ecclesiastical art, which Calvinist orthodoxy deemed idolatrous? Indeed the argument advanced here of some essential underlying pictorial continuity between the older culture of devotional images and the purely verbal texts which replaced them seems to me fundamentally mistaken. It is, however, in keeping with Mochizuki’s insistence that iconoclasm should be acknowledged not only for the damage it caused, ‘but also for its generative power and the remarkable creativity it unleashed’ (p.7). Far from being merely destructive, iconoclasm, she argues, should be recognised as a distinctly creative process, ‘a positive, constructive deed’, and a vital, if neglected, component of the Golden Age of Dutch art (p.116).

It may well be the case that the various other texts set up in St Bavo by local professional guilds after the Reformation may be con sidered as, at least in some sense, descendants of the demolished altars which they had previously commissioned and at which they had formerly worshipped, such as the Linen Weavers’ biblical lineage of the weaving trade or the suspended models of ships which the Shippers’ Guild maintained on the site of their previous altar, doubtless invoking some form of Provident blessing in regard to the perilous seas on which Dutch trade and wealth so depended. Costly brass chandeliers donated by the guilds and other institutions similarly doubtless reflect unbroken continuities of pious civic pride. Yet the central thrust of Calvinist theology was of its essence iconophobic rather than merely iconoclastic, to use the helpful distinction introduced by Patrick Collinson in his study of contemporary English religious beliefs and behaviour.1 Taking the Second Commandment literally, it equated all images with idols. As elsewhere, the shifting of the seating alignment to a new north–south axis defied the entire architectural logic of the encasing Gothic building. Such innovations constituted a deliberate insult to the respect in which Catholics and many Protestants held the east end of their churches, and represented a permanent visual profanation of the spatial aura of sacramental Eucharistic sanctity which Calvinism wholly rejected. A massive wooden pulpit on the south side of the nave eventually became the building’s new principal focus, with its own enclosure where baptisms also took place from a small basin rather than a traditional font.

Throughout early Protestant Europe such pulpits celebrated the victory of the Word, and were often much larger than those they replaced, although devoid of religious imagery, with huge suspended testers overhead to amplify the theatrical rhetoric of the preacher’s voice. Pulpits also greatly facilitated the close moral scrutiny of parishioners by church Elders, which was in turn related to regular public rituals of atonement and repentance, not discussed in these pages. This was of course a rigidly hierarchical and deeply patriarchal society, as reflected in every last detail of church attendance. Pulpits were frequently surrounded by biblical texts, often painted over recently whitewashed medieval

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wall paintings. Yet such changes were surely not the products of some innately creative iconoclasm, but straightforward expressions of Calvinist faith, ever vigilant against the heresies of idolatry and superstition. Nor were the texts which dominated the interiors of Calvinist churches in any way commensurate, as the author claims, with contemporary Lutheran narrative devotional art (p.195).

On the contrary, it was precisely its extreme logocentric iconophobia which distinguished Calvinist religious observance from other rival Protestant congregations, which tolerantly retained religious imagery, albeit stripped of Marian and non-biblical iconography. One of the many paradoxes of Calvinist aesthetics not considered here involves the great anxiety concerning all religious imagery, alongside a seeming indifference to the use of contemporary strapwork decoration, often pagan in origin, and bustling with winged cherubheads, fruit, flowers, hovering putti and so on, framing epitaphs and sacred texts and pulpits alike, as if compensating for an otherwise intolerable visual austerity.

Such Reformed fittings and furnishings evidently embodied an anti-sacramental creed which emphasised obedience and uniformity and, as Mochizuki points out, were examples of a ‘material religion that was a result of re-imagining the invisible’ (p.321). It is, however, difficult to accept her further conclusion that iconoclasm split the trunk of late medieval devotional art into two branches, one of which was supposedly the imagepurged art of the Reformed Church, with the other branch divided between the new genres of secular painting and the evolving Catholic tradition (p.325). For the Reformed Church certainly had its own artists, and another central question not addressed in these pages concerns how it was that Christian art and iconography remained widely popular and acceptable for private Calvinist households, but not for public churches. In many respects it is the body of this book which seems at times split in two, with a timely and fascinating study of post-Reformation St Bavo rather uncomfortably hinged to a wider and much more generalised survey of the entire ecclesiastical visual culture of Dutch Calvinism. Frequently the text lapses into fullscale postmodern Derridean obscurantism, which greatly distracts from the welcome focus on the neglected history of early Protestant church furnishings. A deeper problem furthermore remains, for iconoclasm creates nothing but a violent registration of the iconoclasts’ fears, and surely there is no real artistic equivalence whatsoever between the creative imaginative skill of the trained mason’s or wood-carver’s chisel and the destructive work of the iconoclast’s hammer?

To claim otherwise runs the risk of justifying the project of iconoclasm by other means, and privileging the radiant severity of the vandalised kirk over the entire artistic tradition of the West.

1 P. Collinson: From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia; the Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation, Reading 1986.

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Die Zeichnungen von Adam Elsheimer: Kritischer Katalog. By Joachim Jacoby.

420 pp. incl. 184 col. + 87 b. & w. ills.

(Graphische Sammlung, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 2008), €78.

ISBN 978–3–935647–40–3.

Reviewed by LUUK PIJL

Elsheimer exhibition that was held three years ago in Frankfurt, Edinburgh and London,1 it was strongly felt that our understanding of his draughtsmanship was still limited, despite the extensive studies devoted to the subject by art historians such as Wilhelm von Bode, Heinrich Weizsäcker, J.G. van Gelder and Ingrid Jost, and Keith Andrews. Especially at the Frankfurt venue, where a few drawings and gouaches were displayed alongside the paintings, this lacuna was very much apparent. The announcement during the event of a new research project concerning Elsheimer’s works on paper was therefore welcome. The Städel deserves full praise for this initiative, the scope of which stretches far beyond the Museum’s holdings. In fact, the Städel owns just two autograph drawings by Elsheimer, one of which was acquired as recently as 2005 (cat. no.18). The acquisition was supported by the Gabriele Busch-Hauck Foundation, who also financed the research and production of the book under review.

The independent German art historian Joachim Jacoby was entrusted with the task and he produced his rich and monumental study with admirable speed.

The first reference to Elsheimer’s draughtsmanship is by Karel van Mander, who in 1604 stated that the artist did not busy himself much with drawing, but instead sat in churches and elsewhere to absorb the works of the great masters. In more recent times Johan David Passavant and Von Bode covered new ground defining Elsheimer’s drawn œuvre. Von Bode attributed no less than three hundred sheets to the master. This large number is all the more surprising since Von Bode was to some extent aware of the problematic distinction between drawings by Elsheimer and the prolific draughtsman and printmaker Hendrick Goudt. Central in the Elsheimer–Goudt discussion is the attribution of 179 drawings in the so-called Frankfurter Klebeband. This volume was acquired by the Städel in 1868 and all drawings were initially considered to be by Elsheimer, despite Goudt’s Utrecht address on one of them. Gradually more and more drawings were attributed to Goudt, until Van Gelder and Jost proposed that all, except two by an unidentified hand, were by Goudt, a view that is now generally accepted.

Compared to Goudt’s drawings, we detect that with Elsheimer everything has form, structure and a clear arrangement, however free the lines of the pen, while with Goudt the individual elements often become formless and unresolved.

In what is modestly called the ‘introduction’, Jacoby succinctly and lucidly discusses DURING THE IMPRESSIVE

the history of the study of Elsheimer drawings, the artistic relationship between Elsheimer and other artists, as well as the function of the drawings. The author describes Elsheimer’s draughtsmanship as dependent on the sixteenth-century German tradition of Philip Uffenbach and Hans Mielich and also argues that the drawings by the Bassano family played a role in Elsheimer’s formative years in Venice. His interaction with artists working in Rome, such as Paul Bril, Agostino Tassi, Carlo Saraceni, David Teniers the Elder and Martin Faber, is also explored. The core of Jacoby’s book, however, is the catalogue in which the pros and cons concerning attributions are discussed. The author considers twenty-two drawings and five gouaches to be autograph. In the last critical catalogue of Elsheimer’s work by Keith Andrews (1977), a total of twenty-five sheets were attributed to the artist. Five formerly unknown drawings

by Elsheimer have reappeared during the last three decades (nos.12, 13, 14, 16 and 19), while Jacoby rightly rejects three drawings that were accepted by Andrews (nos.A2, A3 and GK7br). The catalogue is chronologically arranged. Only five drawings are dated to before 1600, which means that they must be from before Elsheimer’s Roman years. Based on the assumption that the drawings are crucial for our understanding of Elsheimer’s working method, much attention is devoted to the function of the sheets.

Jacoby discriminates between no less than six different types of drawings: finished album drawings (six sheets); pure sketches (four); composition studies (six); composition designs (three); chiaroscuro studies (six); and autonomous drawings (two). This diversity within a small œuvre makes attributions a complicated matter.

Five gouaches are included among the autograph works (nos.23–27), all representing figures such as Ceres, Bathsheba and Salome. Unfortunately, the authorship of none of these can be documented, which makes firm statements about them very

difficult. Therefore, as Jacoby acknowledges, the gouaches present a special challenge in terms of connoisseurship. As early as the eighteenth century several gouaches were attributed to Elsheimer, but later many of these were given to Hendrick Goudt, Gerrit van Battum and Pieter de With. No rendering of a pure landscape in this medium can today be ascribed to the master.

The description of individual sheets is exemplary; technical aspects, provenances, references, stylistic observations, dating and remarks concerning their relationship with works in other media by Elsheimer and others are discussed by Jacoby with great insight. A relatively large part of the book (pp.271–315) is devoted to drawings after Elsheimer’s paintings. These (mostly anonymous) sheets are above all an indication of the popularity of Elsheimer’s paintings and underline the assumption that he is an artist’s artist, but for obvious reasons they are not very informative about his draughtsmanship.

It is telling that only one sheet (no.GK7b) of this sizeable group was considered as a preliminary drawing by Andrews, although it was generally doubted by earlier writers, among them its former owner Heinrich Weizsäcker. For this section Jacoby took Elsheimer’s extant painted œuvre as his guide, and as a result interesting drawings after lost paintings by Elsheimer are omitted. For example, a sheet in the Louvre by Moses van Uyttenbroeck based on a lost composition by Elsheimer (Fig.43) is not mentioned. Van Uyttenbroeck, whose output is closely connected with that of Elsheimer, is one of the few artists who would have merited more attention in the present study.

The book also contains interesting excursions on the term ‘gouache’ and on the album of Abel Prach, in which Elsheimer’s contribution, a dedication dated 21st April 1600, provides the earliest documentary evidence of his stay in Rome. In addition, there are two useful lists, one chronological and one ordered by collections, of references to 43. Mercury and Battus, by Moses van Uyttenbroeck. c.1625. Pen and brown ink, 14.9 by 19.8 cm.

(Musée du Louvre, Paris).

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Elsheimer’s drawings in inventories, sale catalogues and other sources. It attests to the general thoroughness of this study that only very few critical remarks can be made. For example, Jacoby mentions the ‘Utrechter Goltzius-Schule’ (p.23), which does not exist.

A few minor remarks concern the literature: ‘Negro/Ruby 2003’ should read ‘Hendriks 2003’ and Adriaen Waiboer’s exhibition Northern Nocturnes. Nightscapes in the Age of Rembrandt, held in Dublin in 2005, is not mentioned despite the ample attention paid in it to night scenes by painters such as Lastman, De With and Van Battum. But these are only small quibbles, which in no way detract from the importance of this publication.

Jacoby identifies two key moments in the study of Elsheimer’s drawings: Weizsäcker’s publication in 1923 on the ‘Frankfurter Klebeband’ mentioned above, and the groundbreaking exhibition held at the Städel Museum in 1966 and Van Gelder’s and Jost’s subsequent review of that show in Simiolus.

With the publication of Jacoby’s book a third key moment has been added. This beautifully designed and excellently illustrated work will be an indispensable tool for Elsheimer studies for many decades to come.

1 Reviewed by the present writer in this Magazine, 148 (2006), pp.567–69.

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens and their Contemporaries. By Margaret D. Carroll. 280 pp. incl. 172 col. ills. (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park PA, 2008), $75. ISBN 987–0–271–02954–0.

Reviewed by MARK MEADOW I N T H I S B O O K Margaret Carroll offers an illuminating overview of her research into the art of the early modern Low Countries and its socio-political resonances. Discussing works of art ranging from Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait of 1434 (National Gallery, London) to Otto Marseus van Schrieck’s Forest floor with lizard, snake and butterfly of 1664 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier), the author explains that her six essays collectively form a narrative arc concerning ‘the emergence of “modern” theories of politics and natural law . . .’. This trajectory divides the book into two sections. In the first three chapters, treating Van Eyck and Pieter Bruegel, Carroll refers to political models that equate the natural order with harmonious social relations and stable political structures. Moving in the final three chapters into the seventeenth century and the age of absolutism, she presents the art of Rubens, Snyders and Van Schrieck as exemplary of a contrasting ideology in which natural order is predicated upon violent struggle as a necessary response to political instability.

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Two leitmotifs run through the book: the first, signalled in the book’s title, is the nature and constitution of political power in early modern Europe; the second is a feminist analysis of male/female power dynamic, especially in regard to the institution of marriage.

Carroll links these two themes by alluding to the habit of ancient and early modern political philosophers, from Aristotle to Budé, Bodin and Lipsius, to liken the body politic to domestic marriage and the ‘natural’ relationship of husband and wife. Each chapter, however, successfully stands as an independent essay, and the book’s ultimate connective thread is Carroll’s scholarly engagement with politics and gender.

In the process of weaving these independent studies into an effective whole, Carroll offers her readers the rare opportunity to contemplate an overarching conceptual framework for Netherlandish art spanning nearly three centuries. The topic of gender and politics allows the author to synthetically and intriguingly link Burgundian portraiture, Flemish genre scenes, Rubens’s grand narrative history paintings and Dutch still-life paintings.

Carroll proposes a number of novel readings of canonical works. Thus, Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait in her view is concerned not with a wedding or a betrothal, but with a mandate – akin to a power-of-attorney – between a merchant and his wife that allows her to manage his business affairs when he is absent. Building upon this, she suggests that the image in fact served a rhetorical function in establishing the credentials and social virtues of the sitter. Carroll brings into her analysis her substantial knowledge of fifteenth-century property and marital law, trade and political philosophy.

In her second chapter, she proposes that we see Bruegel’s Netherlandish proverbs (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and Battle of Carnival and Lent (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), both of 1559, as an antithetical pair, respectively presenting a biting critique of the oppressive foreign rule from the Spanish, on the one hand, and a celebratory view of Netherlandish local rights and traditions on the other.

Strangely, she does not mention where we are to place the compositionally and thematically related Children’s games (Kunsthistorisches Museum) in relationship to this pair. In the third chapter, working out from a brilliant analysis of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel 0f 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum), Carroll links the image specifically to the indignities visited upon the Netherlands by the enforcement of Spanish Catholicism, and sees that artist’s engraving of Skating outside St George’s Gate in Antwerp as a commentary on the imposition of taxes and other financial hardships that followed the construction of new civic fortifications by the Spanish authorities.

The fourth chapter takes on Rubens’s Rape of the daughters of Leucippus (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and compellingly suggests that it should be read in the context of the politically expedient betrothals of Louis XIII and the future Philip IV of Spain to each other’s

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sisters, addressing the tendency of monarchs to regard the subject of rape as a way of legitimising absolute power and noting that the actual results of such strategic alliances are not always successful. Carroll’s reading of Rubens’s cycle for Marie de Médicis, while researched as meticulously as the rest of the book, is in many ways the least surprising, perhaps because it concerns the most unabashedly political imagery she explores.

The most surprising of her chapters is the final one, in which she discusses a variety of paintings depicting fighting animals as illustrative of a political philosophy espoused by authors such as Justus Lipsius and Hobbes, which sought the origins of human and state aggression and bellicosity within nature itself.

As with any political discourse, other scholars will certainly find various points of disagreement with details of Carroll’s argument. Nonetheless, her combination of careful visual scrutiny and thorough, wideranging research ensures that her readers will learn a great deal and, more importantly, see these and other Netherlandish works of art in a new light.

Rembrandt’s Faith. Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age. By Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver. 532 pp. incl. 28 col. + 203 b. & w. ills. (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park PA, 2009), $100. ISBN 978–0–271–03406–5.

Reviewed by XANDER VAN ECK

Romantics saw Rembrandt as someone who directly translated his deeply felt understanding of the Bible onto canvas and was sympathetic to the Jews living in his neighbourhood, modern art historians such as Bruyn, Veldman and Tümpel have shown how much Rembrandt depended on the visual tradition of biblical illustrations and religious prints, as well as on non-biblical sources such as the works of Flavius Josephus.

It is today common wisdom among art historians that sixteenth-century humanism and the Reformation made much larger parts of the Bible eligible for depiction. In medieval Catholic art, the choice was usually restricted to scenes from the New Testament that related to the liturgy and Catholic articles of faith, and the Old Testament was mainly relevant insofar as it could provide ante-types of those scenes. However, the new philological discipline led to the appreciation of these stories in their own right. Exemplary value all but replaced typological and sacramental value in Dutch art. Old Testament stories functioned as examples of unwavering belief in God or correct civic behaviour, and Christ’s actions and his parables showed people how to be good Christians. Much of the attention art historians devoted to this phenomenon can eventually be traced to the wish to solve

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the problem of Rembrandt’s extraordinarily broad choice of biblical subjects.

At the heart of Perlove’s and Silver’s undertaking that resulted in the book under review, a hefty volume that treats Rembrandt’s religious imagery from his entire career, lies the conviction that typology had not lost its relevance and was, after all, the driving force behind his religious work.

They argue that Rembrandt’s reading of the Bible was based on the supposition that both the Old and New Testament are part of one integrated revelation. He ‘roamed through the bible with his fingers, mind, memory, and imagination to create his freshly innovative images of the Temple and the Christian religion, linking the entire scriptural text into a coherent vision of divine provenance and covenant theology’ (pp.8–9).

The authors argue that Rembrandt’s brand of typology was heavily influenced by the kind of Pauline theology that was practised by sixteenth-century humanists and reformers such as Erasmus, Luther and Calvin, and which left its mark on the Statenbijbel, the official Dutch Bible translation of 1637. Pauline theology had a dark view of mankind living ‘Under the Law [of Moses]’ and painted a negative picture of Jews, who failed to recognise the importance of the coming of Christ and held on to their rigid Temple rituals and old beliefs. There was a topical element to this: starting with Erasmus, parallels with the ritualism and materialism of the Catholic Church were often drawn. Of course, reformist theologians did not neglect the Old Testament; the Jews were the chosen people whose covenant with God was an essential element of humankind’s path to Salvation. Since the beginning of the Eighty Years War with Spain (1568–1648), Dutch Protestants strongly identified with the Jewish people who overcame hardship and tyranny through God’s help.

In addition to being a rich and informative guide about all things Jewish in Rembrandt’s work, the most important merit of this book is that it shows that both strands of typology were indeed relevant for Rembrandt’s work – the first one, for instance, in the etching of the Presentation in the Temple, where the dark, looming figure of the priest in the middle ground can convincingly be argued to represent the non-believing Jews, whereas the figure of Simeon in the foreground represents the enlightened; several scenes from the Esther story clearly fit into the second category.

The greatest weakness of the book is the obligation the authors took upon themselves to identify the typological elements in virtually all Rembrandt’s religious prints and paintings. It is not just the tiresome effect of reading more than two hundred catalogue entries welded together, but also the fact that most of the arguments are speculative.

Typology is a tricky field, especially when we realise that the interdependent relationship between the Old and the New Testament is at the heart of Christianity. Almost every Old

44. Adam and Eve, by Rembrandt van Rijn. 1638.

Etching, 16.2 by 11.6 cm. (British Museum, London).

Testament story can be seen to foreshadow some part of the New, and every scene depicting Jesus can be seen as a part of the fulfilment of the promise of the Old Testament. Whatever we may think about Rembrandt’s exact denomination – a question that remains, wisely, unanswered by the authors – we can assume that he considered himself a Christian or, if one wants to be cynical, at least catered to a Christian public. But it is a problem that he never actually painted scenes from the Old and New Testament side by side, so that any typological references can only be implicit. The iconographer who is set on teasing out these references will always find something, the Bible notoriously being a book that holds everything. In an interpretation of Rembrandt’s etching of Adam and Eve of 1638 (Fig.44), for instance, the authors focus on the only paradisiacal animal visible, the lone chunky elephant in the background.

After considering several textual references to elephants suggested in earlier literature, the authors finally settle for the comment in the Statenbijbel to a passage in Job 40:10–18, where Behemoth (a wild elephant) is said to show God’s power in taming savagery, which the authors consequently relate to God’s victory over Satan through his sending of Christ.

Another result of this over-eagerness to demonstrate typological elements are the inferred cross-references from one work to another. The fact that the salver in the foreground of Rembrandt’s etching of Abraham’s sacrifice (1655) has the same shape as the oblong pans in two Lamentation grisailles of 1634–35, is taken as a sign that ‘the artist visually associated the Bloodless Sacrifice of Isaac of the Old Covenant with the lifegiving blood shed by Christ in the new Dispensation’ (p.366). Who on earth was supposed to notice this, apart from a twenty-

first-century art historian who has the luxury of leaning on 150 years of research into Rembrandt’s œuvre? Surely the similarity of these salvers is much more a matter of visual repertory or studio props than of theological considerations.

Not only biblical Jews play a role in this book; there is ample attention for Rembrandt’s personal relationships with Jews as patrons and the interest in Jewish and biblical history expressed by local scholars and amateurs. Much is made of a group of intellectuals and Christian religious leaders with millenarian ideas who around 1650 were trying to find ways to convert the Jews to Christianity, to help prepare the world for the Second Coming. The starting point for research in this direction is Rembrandt’s series of illustrations for rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel’s Piedra Gloriosa of 1655, which was based on the apocalyptic visions of Daniel.

The importance for Rembrandt of the group of Christian Hebraists who were in a dialogue with Ben Israel was first pointed out by Perlove in 1997 and supported by thorough research in Michael Zell’s Reframing Rembrandt (2002).

This certainly does not mean that Rembrandt is monopolised for that group – the authors are fully aware that the artist mingled with Remonstrants, Counter-remonstrants, Catholics and Mennonites alike. But while we have a specific provenance for many portraits, or know the identity of the sitter, only in very few cases do we know the first owner of a religious work. Research into inventories has taught us that the iconography itself can never be trusted to be indicative of a specific denomination, yet the authors do just that a fair number of times, thereby undermining their own thesis that Rembrandt’s own ‘coherent vision’ was what shaped the iconography. Rembrandt’s Baptism of the Moor used to be considered a Mennonite subject because an adult is baptised, but recent research has shown that it could just as easily decorate a baptismal chapel in a Catholic church. Perlove and Silver make a renewed effort to claim this painting for the Protestant side, because the eunuch stands back from the water while a dog is drinking from it, the message apparently being that Protestant theologians do not consider the water as holy in itself, whereas Catholics do.

In itself this kind of speculation could be useful, if it were treated as a hypothesis that was later corroborated by further research into the provenance of the painting and the specific ideas that the first owner had about baptism, but standing by itself, as it does here, it remains a non sequitur.

Although nearly every page in this book is an illustration of the sheer impossibility of presenting Rembrandt’s religious œuvre as a theological unity, the ‘Conclusion’ insists that it can be done if we declare the artist a ecumenist. He ‘undertook a mission to bridge the Old and the New Testament’, answering to a ‘special vocation [. . .] aimed to forge a consensus religion’ (p.363). It is true that Rembrandt’s religious work was

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appreciated by many people from different walks of life. However, this was not because they picked up on a theological message aimed at bringing them together, but because Rembrandt devised his pictures in such a way that any person who had read the Bible could identify with them. Surely, for all Rembrandt cared, as long as all Christians thought of the Bible as the foundation of their belief, they could comfortably stay within whichever religious community to which they happened to belong.

Jan van Noordt. Painter of History and Portraits in Amsterdam. By David A. de Witt. 398 pp. incl. 42 col. + 152 b. & w. ills.

(McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2008), £53. ISBN 978–0–7735–3275–5.

Reviewed by ERIK SPAANS J A N V A N N O O R D T is something of an odd man out among seventeenth-century Dutch painters for he does not seem to fit into any specific school or category. He probably studied with Jacob Backer in the late 1630s and, like his master, specialised in history paintings and portraits. Stylistically, however, he was also influenced by Rembrandt, Rubens and Jordaens. Some of his paintings are reminiscent of Flemish rather than Dutch art.

Van Noordt was (probably) born and (definitely) raised in Amsterdam at a time when the art market was booming. But by the time he had become a master in his own right, the artistic climate had shifted. The economy of the Dutch republic was shaken by a series of Anglo-Dutch wars, and artists (and other manufacturers of luxury goods) were the first to suffer the consequences. In the third quarter of the seventeenth century the art market became increasingly saturated, and competition among painters was fierce. Van Noordt was not very successful as a history painter but appears to have fared better as a portraitist.

However, in 1675 he left Amsterdam with heavy debts, never to return.

A few decades later he was all but forgotten.

Arnold Houbraken in his Groote schouburgh (1718–21) mentions Van Noordt only in passing – as the teacher of Johannes Voorhout.

Voorhout provided Houbraken with biographical information on various artists but apparently did not take the trouble to include his own teacher among their number. This is hardly the picture David de Witt draws in this monograph. Van Noordt is described as a highly esteemed and moderately successful artist who rubbed shoulders with the cultural elite of Amsterdam. De Witt states: ‘Having emulated the energy and refinement of the foremost Flemish models in history painting, Van Noordt proceeded in the 1670s to develop a more powerfully dynamic style that eventually achieved an extreme with no parallel in the Dutch or Flemish Baroque’. This is a remarkably bold claim, unless of course the word

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‘extreme’ signifies that Van Noordt’s efforts at emulation were somewhat overblown. In defining the unique qualities of Van Noordt’s history paintings, the first thing that jumps to mind is their awkwardness. Some of his figures and compositions are downright clumsy. It is fair to say that Van Noordt was a painter whose aspirations did not quite match his talent.

The quality of his paintings is very uneven. In the best (portraits mostly) he comes across as a ‘missing link’ between Rembrandt and Jordaens. But on other occasions viewers might find themselves dumbfounded by his illmatched colours and grotesque figures. To be fair to De Witt, he does not deny these limitations: ‘Occasionally his works suffer from a visual surfeit’. All this does not make Van Noordt less interesting. On the contrary, to some extent these failures are precisely what make him such an intriguing artist.

A monograph on such an unconventional painter can contribute to a better understanding of what is arguably the most lively and important period in Dutch art, and De Witt deserves credit for pushing Van Noordt into the limelight. He gives a vivid description of the milieu in which Van Noordt was raised. His father was a schoolteacher and – later – a musician. Two of Jan’s brothers were also musicians (and composers) employed by the city of Amsterdam.

Anthoni van Noordt was organist of the Nieuwe Kerk and as such had good contacts with Amsterdam regents, including the Van Hinlopen family who were portrayed by his brother. Although De Witt provides some interesting material on the contacts between contemporary painters and musicians, when it comes to defining the position and influence of Van Noordt among his colleagues he is somewhat less convincing.

De Witt stresses that Van Noordt was called ‘famous’ by Houbraken and makes much of

45. Rest on the flight into Egypt, by Jan van Noordt. c.1650? Canvas, 92 by 68.8 cm. (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg).

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the fact that he was among a group of painters who were asked to judge the quality of an Italian painting owned by the art dealer Gerrit Uylenburgh, which apparently ‘lends further support to Houbraken’s assertion concerning his reputation’. If so, why was Van Noordt unable to obtain prestigious commissions throughout his career? The decoration of the new Town Hall provided plenty of work for contemporary painters, including relatively obscure artists such as Willem Strijcker and Cornelis Brisé and foreigners such as Erasmus Quellinus and Jürgen Ovens, but Van Noordt was not among them. Neither is there any evidence that he received lucrative commissions from the countless public institutions or was ever asked to paint a group portrait of Amsterdam regents.

Van Noordt did, however, receive commissions to paint portraits of powerful regents from the Van Hinlopen and Huydecoper families, but the claim that he thereby ‘established a market in Amsterdam’s social élite’ seems somewhat inflated. De Witt is perhaps too eager to count Van Noordt among successful colleagues such as Bartholomeus van der Helst, Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol and Nicolaes Maes. He assumes Van Noordt must have had a studio of some stature which ‘may have been the site for a kind of Academy for drawing from the nude’. This assumption is based on a single line from Houbraken that mentions Johannes Voorhout and Dirck Ferreris as drawing nudes at an academy (‘oeffenschool’). Why this should have been in Van Noordt’s studio remains unclear, especially since his skills in anatomical drawing were very limited, as De Witt himself acknowledges: ‘his most serious weakness is a casual approach to human anatomy’.

De Witt assumes Van Noordt owned (or rented) a studio and lived in a separate house.

The inventory of his possessions ‘strongly suggests that he was using the premises on the Egelantiersgracht as an atelier only and was living elsewhere’. There is no indication that in the 1670s Van Noordt could afford two separate premises – in fact quite the opposite.

Yet somehow De Witt persists in describing him as the head of a studio. This becomes most clear in the chapter on rejected paintings, which has some surprising choices. De Witt rejects the Jupiter and Mercury (Sinebrychoff Museum, Helsinki) and the Juno, Jupiter and Io (Musée du Louvre, Paris) and ascribes them to ‘the same anonymous artist’, while the Rest on the flight into Egypt (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; Fig.45) is also rejected. One can easily understand why these museums might be reluctant to accept these rejections: all these paintings seem to represent the qualities and – even more telling – the limitations so typical of Van Noordt’s style. The Hermitage picture is ascribed to ‘a follower or pupil, perhaps even working in the artist’s workshop’. The number of artists in seventeenth-century Amsterdam who ran a workshop where pupils or assistants actually kept on working (in their master’s style) after their training, is limited, and it seems unlikely Jan van Noordt was one of them.

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Vermeer: The Complete Paintings. By Walter Liedtke. 208 pp. incl. 116 col. + 76 b. & w. ills. (Ludion, Antwerp, 2008), €100.

ISBN 978–90–5544–742–8.

Reviewed by QUENTIN BUVELOT AFTER TITIAN AND BRUEGHEL,

it is the turn of Vermeer in the Classical Art Series, a commendable initiative by Ludion to publish beautifully produced new monographs on great masters, which follows in the footsteps of the famous Klassiker der Kunst volumes. The series serves specialists and the general reader alike.

Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an expert on the Delft school, took up the challenge to write a book about an artist who has been the subject of a plethora of publications, not all of which are equally serious.

It was thus necessary to distinguish between fact and fiction and in this Liedtke has succeeded. His factual approach has resulted in an annotated catalogue of the thirty-six paintings that are now widely accepted as by the artist, with Young woman seated at a virginal (no.36) as the latest addition to Vermeer’s œuvre. Although it was included in older monographs as an authentic work, it had gradually disappeared from the Vermeer literature, only to resurface after the death of its owner. Doubts about its attribution were removed after a thorough technical examination, whose results were published in this Magazine after the picture’s public auction in 2004.1 Liedtke’s comment in his introduction (p.7) that ‘circumstances are so different today that rejections from the corpus of authentic works require no mention in our catalogue’ is somewhat bewildering because it was exactly this latest addition that had been ignored in some publications devoted to the artist. Liedtke in his turn ignores the attribution to Vermeer of St Praxedis which, like Young woman seated at a virginal, is still in private hands. This attribution has proved to be untenable – Jørgen Wadum convincingly demonstrated that the history painting is of Italian origin2 – but it should at least have been mentioned in the book under review.

Vermeer’s early years remain shrouded in mystery and it is still not clear who was his teacher. With the deattribution of St Praxedis, any ‘evidence’ of his entirely hypothetical stay in Italy has also disappeared. Liedtke’s proposal for the chronology of Vermeer’s earliest works is convincing: he places Diana and her nymphs (Mauritshuis, The Hague) before Edinburgh’s Christ in the house of Mary and Martha, with the Dresden Procuress (dated 1656) as the artist’s earliest genre painting. These three works will be included in an exhibition devoted to the young Vermeer opening in May at the Mauritshuis.

Although Liedtke above all tries to be informative and to avoid any possible debate – he even writes that ‘the proper arena for crossing pens on academic points is a scholarly journal or a symposium’ (p.9) – he cannot always escape the need to express an opinion.

He has thus dedicated an entire appendix to the

rather controversial subject of Vermeer’s possible use of a camera obscura. Where some authors, such as Philip Steadman, believe that Vermeer used this device, others are less convinced, including the present reviewer.3 When using a camera obscura, the image is displayed upside down and in mirror image, which must have been highly impractical. Whoever thinks that Vermeer’s paintings show exactly what the painter had before him and thinks that the measurements of the rooms depicted in his paintings can be reconstructed will be disappointed. In view of certain optical effects in his paintings, such as the reflections on the armrests adorned with lion heads in some works, Liedtke concedes that Vermeer must have been interested in the possibilities of the camera obscura, but he refrains from taking a definitive stance and ends with the observation that the ‘rest of it – genius – cannot be explained’. But is that not exactly the task that the author of a monograph such as this must set himself?

Vermeer can be properly understood if one considers his technique: for him painting was to a large degree a matter of tireless reconfiguration. It is widely known how he made changes in many of his paintings: in Young woman with a water pitcher (no.13) the map was originally placed behind the head of the woman and later to be shifted to the right; a seat with lion heads originally placed in the foreground was entirely painted out by the artist. Both interventions improved the composition: in the present composition the woman is set to great effect against the light surface of the wall. Just how scientific Vermeer’s approach to his compositions was is demonstrated by the pioneering research of Jørgen Wadum,4 who showed how the artist constructed the required perspective by placing a pin or nail in the canvas at the vanishing point, to which he attached a cord covered in chalk. The taut cord was subsequently pulled back against the canvas to leave a thin line that could be traced with a pen. In many paintings

by Vermeer such a hole was discovered at the exact vanishing point for the first time in 1949

by Karl Hultén in The art of Painting (Vienna) and provided evidence that Vermeer used this method. Recent conservation treatment of Vermeer’s paintings has yielded a wealth of new information and there are few artists whose work is so thoroughly researched as that of Vermeer, whose technique can hardly be said to harbour many secrets.

Liedtke has managed to condense all this knowledge in his readable account of the artist’s work. The decision not to discuss the rediscovery of the artist in the nineteenth century, especially through the work of the French art critic Etienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré, is regrettable, as it remains a compelling story that certainly appeals to the general public.

1 L. Sheldon and N. Costaras: ‘Johannes Vermeer’s “Young woman seated at a virginal’”, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 148 (2006), pp.89–97.

2 J. Wadum: ‘Contours of Vermeer’, in I. Gaskell, ed.: Vermeer Studies (Studies in the History of Art, vol.55), Washington and New Haven 1998, pp.214–19.

3 See Walter Liedtke’s review of P. Steadman: Vermeer’s camera: Uncovering the truth behind the masterpieces,

Oxford 2001, in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 143 (2001), pp.642–43, and Jørgen Wadum’s review in ArtMatters: Netherlands Technical Studies in Art 1 (2002), pp.126–27.

4 Idem: ‘Vermeer in perspective’, in B. Broos and A.K. Wheelock et al.: exh. cat. Johannes Vermeer, Washington (National Gallery of Art) and The Hague (Mauritshuis) 1995–96, pp.66–79.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Collection of Dutch Paintings XVII–XIX Centuries. By Marina Senenko. 504 pp. incl. 150 col. + 252 b. & w. ills. (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and Red Square Publishers, Moscow, 2009), €125. ISBN 978–5–91521–020–1.

Reviewed by MARJORIE E. WIESEMAN THE NEW CATALOGUE of Dutch paintings in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, the first scholarly catalogue of this collection, is a monument to persistence, dedication and triumph over adversity. Marina Senenko, the Pushkin’s curator of Dutch paintings, devoted nearly twenty years of her life to this project, which was first published in Russian in 2000.1 Almost immediately, plans were made to translate the catalogue into English so that it might reach an international public. Thanks to generous funding from various private and governmental agencies in the Netherlands and the strong initiative of the Foundation for Cultural Inventory (SCI) in Amsterdam, this has now been beautifully achieved, although sadly not before Senenko’s death in 2006.

At times overshadowed by the Hermitage, its grand and glorious imperial cousin in St Petersburg, the Pushkin Museum houses a remarkable collection of approximately 420 Dutch paintings that range from masterpieces

by Rembrandt and Van Gogh to scores of intriguing works by the ubiquitous Dutch ‘minor masters’. That the collection exists at all is something of a miracle – its complex history, concisely and lucidly outlined in the catalogue’s introduction, echoes the tumultuous history of Russia itself from the second half of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century.2 The first public museum opened in Moscow in 1862, cobbled together from the private museum established in St Petersburg by Count Nikolai Rumyantsev, plus two hundred Western European paintings transferred from the Hermitage. During this same period, wealthy middle-class Muscovites channelled their cultural aspirations into the formation of great art collections, often making them available to the public: Tretyakov, Zubalov, Brocard, Morosov, Shchukin and Trofimovich are among the most significant names in this regard. Following the October Revolution, many of these private owners temporarily stored their collections in the Rumyantsev Museum for safekeeping, but in 1922 the Moscow Soviet prohibited the Museum from actually returning works to their owners. The

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Rumyantsev and other city museums also became repositories for paintings unearthed by the People’s Commissariats of Property and Enlightenment in abandoned estates, banks and pawnshops. So many artworks were gathered during a brief span of time that eight district (‘Proletariat’) museums sprouted up; most did not last long, and their contents eventually reverted either to the State Museum Fund or to one of the more established museums. In 1923 Moscow’s vast, migratory collections were divided into three, with the newly formed Museum of Fine Arts (the Pushkin Museum) to house the collection of Western European paintings, including the core of the original Rumyantsev collection. In the 1920s and 1930s the Pushkin’s collection grew with additional transfers (or purchases) from the Hermitage and other public or private museums; but it was also thinned by sales and transfers to other museums. The Museum was closed throughout the Second World War, its collection evacuated to Novosibirsk and Solikamsk, and reopened to the public in 1946. When in 1948 Moscow’s Museum of Modern Western Art was closed ‘for ideological reasons’, distribution of that collection between the Hermitage and the Pushkin added an exceptional group of nineteenth-century pictures to the latter, including five paintings by Van Gogh. The Pushkin Museum’s collection has continued to grow throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Senenko’s catalogue of this remarkable collection is an enormous achievement and an indispensable resource, but as with most collection catalogues, some minor shortcomings are inevitable. While each painting is illustrated with a good-sized colour or black-and-white illustration, unfortunately the book’s compact format does not allow for comparative illustrations, which occasionally hampers appreciation of Senenko’s thoughtful connoisseurship. With the exception of paintings by Rembrandt, technical information about the pictures is minimally conveyed or altogether lacking, although most entries include useful notes on seals and inscriptions found on the reverse of the paintings. Entries have been updated from the 2000 Russian publication to take account of subsequent research, but a handful of important publications seem to have slipped through the cracks (recent monographs on Karel du Jardin and Jan Mijtens, to cite just two examples). The reader should exercise caution with the frequent (and otherwise very useful) citations of comparative examples, as these references are not always entirely accurate or up to date with regard to owner or location. Still, the Pushkin Museum and the Foundation for Cultural Inventory are to be applauded for making Senenko’s careful research of this rich collection accessible to an international audience.

1

M.S. Senenko: Gosudarstvenny muzey izobrazitelnykh iskusstv imeni A.S. Pushkina. Sobranie zhipovisi: Gollandiya XVII–XIX veka, Moscow 2000.

2 See also idem: ‘Late 19th-century private collections in Moscow and their fate between 1918 and 1924’, in L. Gorter, G. Schwartz and B. Vermet, eds.: Dutch and Flemish Art in Russia, Amsterdam 2005, pp.10–41.

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In Another Light. Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century. By Patricia G. Berman. 272 pp. incl. 205 col. + 5 b. & w. ills. (Thames & Hudson, London and New York, 2007), £38.

ISBN 978–0–500–23844–8.

Reviewed by JAN GORM MADSEN OVER THE LAST twenty-five years nineteenthcentury Danish art has been presented to an international audience in various exhibitions which, with their accompanying catalogues, have successfully contributed to a broader understanding of the period. Works by the enigmatic artist Vilhelm Hammershøi were recently shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and at the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, while an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Musée du Louvre, Paris, devoted to Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809), who taught Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, gave French and German audiences the opportunity to become acquainted with the work of this overlooked Danish artist. In other words, Denmark is now clearly visible on the art-historical map.

Until recently the only survey exclusively devoted to Danish art was as a short introduction written by Vagn Poulsen in 1976, commissioned by the Danish Institute for Information about Denmark and Cultural Cooperation with Other Nations. In the book under review, the north American art historian Patricia Gray Berman introduces to an English-speaking audience the research that, for the most part, has been written since then in Danish. This in itself is a very good idea.

Berman’s book is dedicated to Kirk Varnedoe (1946–2003) and Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006) and the author pays tribute to the writings of these two great ambassadors of northern European art by resolving to study Danish art in their spirit. The author thus states in her introduction, which also includes a brief historiography, that the reader should not expect to find the nineteenth century construed as the history of successive avant-gardes and more or less well-defined movements advancing from Neo-classicism towards Post-Impressionism and abstraction.

No such distinct movements and generational transformations are apparent in Danish art, Berman states; instead she proposes that the history of Danish painting is best understood as a series of tensions between nationalism and internationalism. No doubt it would be refreshing to read a book about nineteenthcentury Danish art examining it from a new angle, but as Chekhov once advised, you should not show the audience a rifle at the beginning of a play if no one is going to fire it at some point in the performance.

The author has done a remarkable job of working her way through the vast literature thus far unavailable to a non-Danish speaking audience and it is very conscientiously presented. Now that much of the research on the subject has been summarised one can only

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hope that it will lead others to go further. A survey that relies exclusively on material by others runs the risk of never reaching the point of contributing to the understanding of the subject itself and although the author makes an effort, it never transcends the rhetorical gesture. For each of the seven chapters Berman has chosen a painting intended to act as a springboard for the understanding of the period or theme dealt with, but this dramatic device only seems to draw attention to the fact that more consideration could favourably have been given to the paintings that so richly fill the pages of the book. Most of the text never touches on the paintings as such, an ironic failure in light of the fact that it is exactly the high quality of the works of art that has surprised and won over so many people. This aspect is all the more relevant since the book clearly promotes the collection of nineteenth-century Danish art – the largest of its kind outside Denmark – of John L. Loeb Jr., formerly US Ambassador to Denmark.

Naturally a survey can omit certain things to drive home some of its points, but when Berman leaves out several artists and their works which could have illustrated her idea of looking at the tensions between nationalism and internationalism, it is curious. One of the best-known paintings is no doubt the Portrait of the landscape painter Frederik Sødring of 1832 by Christen Købke in The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen. This painting, which is considered briefly in the book, is one of many possible examples offering Berman the opportunity of leaving the general storyline in order to look into a specific tension between nationalism and internationalism. Although Frederik Sødring (1809–62) is one of many painters often left out of accounts of nineteenth-century Danish art, Berman does include a couple of his paintings but says nothing about how his works were considered too close to what was seen as a German aesthetic and why he fell out of favour for so long. Nevertheless Sødring managed to build a career as a painter in Denmark, as did many others who looked to the German tradition for inspiration.

Another obvious example is the group of painters who left Copenhagen to study and work in Munich. These painters did not fit the picture that Danish historians habitually construed of the nineteenth century and it is regrettable that a study published on this subject in 1997 by Ejnar Johansson is not considered by Berman. The picture that is presented of the first half of the Danish nineteenth century is very one-sided and simplified, which is unfortunate because the very complexity of this period is crucial for the understanding of what happened in the later part of the century.

Much art-historical writing in Denmark has evolved around a very specific national self-representation through visual culture and thus another perspective would have been welcome. Unfortunately Berman never leaves the surface of things and it remains a weakness of the book that it relies so heavily

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on questions asked by others. The problem here, of course, is whether or not a survey book should go further than simply presenting primary and secondary literature to its readers who are assumed to be unfamiliar with nineteenth-century Danish art. In this particular case it would not only have been most interesting to have the view of an art historian from another background, but it also remains a mystery why no questions are raised when the title clearly creates expectations about seeing something in another light.

In spite of this promise the author presents a very traditional story.

Florence 1900. The Quest for Arcadia.

By Bernd Roeck, translated by Stewart Spencer. 317 pp. incl. 28 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009), £25. ISBN 978–0–300–09515–9.

Reviewed by ALISON BROWN T H I S B O O K ’ S N O V E L and absorbing theme is the clash between the harsh reality of life in Florence at the turn of the last century and the arcadian dream of its foreign visitors.

Florence around 1900 was in the throes of a belated modernisation process. Its population had risen dramatically since 1860 and the city was gradually being transformed – not only by boulevards and grandiose squares but also by gasometers, railway stations, sewage systems, gas street lamps and electrically operated trams (a subject of great controversy, then as now). Yet despite the improvements, an economic downturn in the last decade of the century brought strikes and demonstrations among a population that registered as many as eighty thousand poor (of a total population of 190,000) – and also helped to make Florence a leading world centre of suicide, one of ‘the least known facts’, we are told, about the city at this time.

Nevertheless, this was the mecca to which Anglo-Americans and Germans flocked, its ‘every turn [. . .] invested with poetic legend; every hour with beauty’. Among them was the eminent scholar Aby Warburg, the story’s anti-hero in illustrating the angst that mingled with the pleasures of fin de siècle Florence.

Although the Arcadian theme is somewhat overstretched in gathering so many diverse personalities into its embrace, Bernd Roeck’s book’s great merit is its breadth of approach. The Anglo-Americans – who borrowed nearly half the books lent by the Gabinetto Vieusseux’s lending library in 1897, according to its interesting register – include familiar figures such as Herbert Horne, Roger Fry, Vernon Lee, Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe, William and Henry James, as well as the Brownings, Trollope and Dickens, who get a brief listing.

Less familiar, and given greater prominence, are the German visitors, whose translated

diaries and letters enliven and enrich our picture of Florence around 1900. Meeting in salons, libraries, cafés, birrerie and restaurants – Doney’s, the Café Gambrinus, the Buca Lapi – the visitors included such artists as Arnold Böcklin and the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand (in whom ‘antiquity lived on’, according to Warburg, as its ‘Dionysian’ and ‘Apollonian’ elements), Karl and Jesse Hillebrand, with their musical salon on the Lungarno, historians and scholars like the ‘documentarian’ Robert Davidsohn, Alfred Doren, Henry Thode, Heinrich Brockhaus, director of the newly founded German arthistorical Institute in Florence, Wilhelm Bode, later general director of the Art Collections in Berlin, free spirits like Isolde Kurz, sister of the Germans’ doctor, Edgar Kurz, and even Sigmund Freud (a bad sightseer, whose feet were ‘shot to pieces’), as well as many others. The index lists them all.

Based on wide reading of archival and literary sources, newspapers and secondary printed material, the book is well informed about the social and economic life of Florence, as well as about other topics like art dealing and art collecting in Florence, both unarcadian activities in this post-unification era that laid the basis of the national collections of Renaissance art in London, Washington, New York and Berlin. Only Warburg, it seems, regarded commercial art dealers with some suspicion, and especially the ‘iconic’ Berenson, whom he thought pushy and a snob. Although both men founded libraries which – with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – form the cornerstones of Renaissance studies today, their attitude to art could not have been more different, as Roeck says.

This raises the question of the role played

by Warburg in the book. Surprisingly, he was its original inspiration (we are told in the preface) and provides a sort of narrative link as he weaves his way through its chapters. It is well known that Warburg had a ‘troubled psyche’ and suffered a mental breakdown during the First World War, subsequently being helped to return to sanity through his self-identification with the myths and astral images that played so important a role in his world view and in the formation of his library. Already in the opening mise-en-scène, the Warburgs’ New Year’s Eve party on 31st December 1899, he is described as ‘a little too manic’ as he hops around singing Schiller’s ‘Ode To Joy’ and distributing scraps of paper with poetry and horoscopes on them, a baby doll (the New Year) in his arms. Valuable though Roeck’s social approach is as a supplement to Gombrich’s more austere ‘intellectual biography’,1 both authors are in danger of letting Warburg’s subjectivism detract from his achievement instead of seeing it (as Joseph Mali has done, in his sympathetic and balanced account of Warburg)2 as a key for unlocking the past and for confirming what the hard evidence of the past’s ‘images’ had already indicated. It was in the summer of 1900, a few months after the New Year’s Eve party, that War-

burg first discussed with his brother his idea for creating a cultural library (Bibliothek für Kulturwissenschaft), which his family agreed to fund by the end of the year. Established in Hamburg, perhaps as a rival to Florence’s German art-historical Institute, as Gombrich suggested (it is scarcely mentioned by Roeck), his library now survives in London as a fitting monument to Warburg’s inspiration and originality. Neither Mali nor the English translation of Warburg’s collected works 3 is listed in the bibliography. Both should be read for a more balanced evaluation of Warburg’s legacy.

1 E.H. Gombrich: Aby Warburg: an intellectual biography, Oxford 1970, repr. 1986.

2 J. Mali: Mythistory: the making of a modern historiography, Chicago 2003.

3 A. Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles 1999.

Edvard Munch, Complete Paintings. By Gerd Woll. 4 vols. 1,696 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Thames & Hudson, London and New York, 2009), £395.

ISBN 978–0–500–09345–0.

Reviewed by JILL LLOYD

1963, WHEN the Munch-museet opened in Oslo to house Edvard Munch’s bequest of his work to the city, plans have been afoot to compile a catalogue raisonné of the paintings. As well as cataloguing their own works, generations of curators at the Museum have systematically collected photographs and information about Munch’s paintings in other private and public collections. The Museum nevertheless lacked the funds to bring the project to fruition until two art dealers, Kaare Berntsen and Jens Faurschou, provided backing for a special project group which worked intensively on the catalogue raisonné for three years. The result is the present publication, compiled by Gerd Woll and her team, which provides for the first time a complete overview of Munch’s painted œuvre.

Besides financial constraints there are several other reasons why the catalogue of the paintings lagged so far behind the scholarly attention paid to Munch’s graphic work. As early as 1907 Gustav Schiefler published the first volume of Munch’s prints, followed by another in 1927 and then by an updated and revised prints catalogue by Gerd Woll in 2001. The painted œuvre presented a more challenging task, not least because of its sheer scale: 1,789 paintings are included in the final catalogue, plus a supplement of eighty-two works where the motif is simply outlined in charcoal or a few brushstrokes and is thus patently ‘unfinished’. In itself the question of finish presents a further challenge, as Munch rarely completed paintings in a traditional sense. He preferred the look of matt paint left in an unfinished state, as this allowed him to SINCE

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avoid the oily, lush, overworked surfaces he associated with academic painting. To this end he also frequently used mixed media – pastel, crayon and charcoal are often combined with paint – making the actual definition of what constitutes a ‘painting’ by Munch controversial. On top of this, many paintings are in an extremely fragile state.

Munch is renowned for his rough treatment of his work: his ‘kill-or-cure’ remedy even involved leaving his paintings outdoors, exposed to the elements for long periods of time. Opinion is divided over whether this was a deliberate attempt on Munch’s part to ‘distress’ the surfaces of his paintings or whether it was mere carelessness. The former argument is more convincing, but whichever view one takes it is undeniable that Munch’s actions had a catastrophic effect on the conservation of his paintings.

Dating is also an issue that has dogged attempts to publish a scholarly overview of Munch’s paintings. The many different versions that the artist made of his bestknown motifs are frequently undated or retrospectively and unreliably dated, which has made establishing a systematic chronology extremely complicated. As recently as 2001 controversy raged, for example, over the redating of the Munch-museet’s version of The scream from 1893 to 1910 (although the new date is followed by a question mark in the catalogue to indicate that there are still unresolved problems). It is now generally understood that Munch painted this new version of The scream to replace the 1893 motif that he had sold in 1910 to Olav Schou, who immediately donated the famous painting to the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo. As Patricia Berman points out in her interesting essay that introduces volume four of the catalogue (‘The Many Lives of Edvard Munch’), pragmatic concerns like replacing an important painting he had sold in order to guarantee that it would still be available for exhibition may well underlie Munch’s practice of painting several versions of his best-known motifs. This challenges the romantic view that Munch obsessively repeated images associated with the traumas of his childhood, thus throwing radical new light on his artistic practice – a revision that is much needed given the plethora of romantic myths that have grown up around him. In 1910 a new version of The scream might also be associated with the, by then, middle-aged artist’s dialogue with Expressionism and Fauvism, or even viewed as a response to the emergence of young Norwegian ‘Matisse students’. As Berman concludes: ‘When located within a systematic chronology, Munch’s inspiration for what to create, and his choices of when to do so, become clearer’.

Throughout this four-volume publi cation, Woll clearly intends to produce a catalogue that is not just a convenient tool for art dealers and collectors but also provokes art-historical reflection and debate.

Each volume has an introductory essay: first a general meditation on ‘Munch’s Painted Works’ by Woll, which lucidly sets out the

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46. Puberty, by Edvard Munch. 1895. Canvas, 150 by 110 cm. (Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo).

history of the project and discusses topics such as authentication, dating and various categories of motif in Munch’s œuvre. In volume two there is an essay on technical aspects of Munch’s paintings, followed by an essay in volume three on Munch’s monumental decorations for the aula of Oslo University. In the fourth volume we find Berman’s essay, which might usefully have been placed alongside Woll’s introduction in volume one, as it provides a helpful conceptual framework and guide for the nonexperts and students who will be interested in this catalogue. Not only does Berman give an overview of the different trends in Munch scholarship, but she also ‘deconstructs’ the romantic myths that have tended to equate Munch’s life and work and ‘explain’ his paintings by referring to the artist’s own poetic, autobiographical prose. She points out that Munch participated actively in the construction of his own myth and was indeed a relentless self-publicist. Interestingly, Munch approached writing and imagemaking in a similar way, endlessly returning to his literary motifs across the years to forge repetitions and variations so that the original experiences he recounts become ‘veiled by poetic recapitulation’ (p.1,288). Rather than use these literary fragments to ‘explain’ the paintings – a trap that many commentators on Munch’s work have fallen into – we should be aware that they too were often penned with a particular promotional event in mind such as an exhibition or a new biography. The tendency to isolate Munch as a towering individual and forefather of modern art fails to address the fact that ‘his textual experimentation, as well as his visual expression’ needs to be contextualised within ‘the advanced literary milieu of turn-of-thecentury Scandinavia’ (p.1,289).

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Beyond these areas of art-historical interest the catalogue of paintings functions well as a tool to assist research into Munch’s painted œuvre. The standard of colour reproduction is high (Fig.46), there are many interesting documentary photographs and detailed crossreferences between individual works. The catalogue entries are factual rather than interpretative which, in the case of this particular artist, comes as something of a relief. Despite the vast number of paintings under discussion most of Munch’s mature work has an exhibition history, although there are many paintings from the early years that are far less well known. The first volume of the catalogue contains an informative biography, while the final volume has several supplementary tools, including archive photographs and a price list from the Commetersche Kunsthandlung in Hamburg dating from 1906–07 (which was the first extensive record of Munch’s paintings), a full list of exhibitions, an index of portraits, a chronological index with thumbnail illustrations of all 1,789 paintings, a full bibliography, a list of paintings in museums and public collections and, finally, an alphabetical index of titles, which is reprinted at the back of each volume. The fact that we are dealing with four unwieldy volumes is not made any the easier by the decision to list catalogue and page numbers in this index but not volume number, so that you have to be familiar with the catalogue before you can use this vital tool effectively.

Nevertheless, the abiding impression left by this first catalogue raisonné of Munch’s paintings is its impressive scholarship. As Woll points out, it fulfils in print Munch’s dream that his work should not, in his words, ‘disappear like a small scratch hanging on the wall in a home where only a couple of people can see it’, but rather be judged as a whole, with each work resonating as part of a larger entity.

James Ensor. The complete paintings.

By Xavier Tricot. 480 pp. incl. 845 col. + 145 b. & w. ills. (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2009), €198. ISBN 978–3–7757–2465–4.

Reviewed by PATRICK FLORIZOONE SIXTY YEARS AFTER the death of James Ensor (1860–1949), work on an inventory of his varied œuvre – paintings, etchings, lithographs, drawings, speeches, interviews, letters and music scores – still continues. Five volumes have already been devoted to his graphic work, three of which appeared during the artist’s lifetime. That unknown states of his prints still emerge attests to the fact that Ensor was anything but thorough as a record keeper and provided authors with inaccurate information.

The artist’s lack of thoroughness also plays a role when compiling a catalogue of his paintings. During his long and active career, from

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1873 to 1941, Ensor painted more than 850 works. Xavier Tricot, who has been studying Ensor’s œuvre for thirty years, did not receive a ready guide from the artist himself. On the contrary, Ensor’s writings are not only incomplete but also ambiguous and imprecise. He backdated several works and also made later copies of his own works that nevertheless retained the original date, while he frequently exhibited his paintings with new titles.

Then there is the problem, as with any sought-after painter, of authenticity, and of what exactly constitutes a ‘painting’; he made several works on prepared panel using pencil or watercolour and (almost) no oil. Thus are there plenty of pitfalls before any definitive statements can be made.

The book consists of two parts: a biography and a catalogue, the latter also including an extensive bibliography and list of exhibitions.

The first edition of this work dates from 1992, which was published in two volumes with mostly black-and-white images. The 780 pages of that edition were almost entirely taken up by the catalogue, while the biography was a mere eight pages. The difference with the current edition is remarkable: one volume with many colour illustrations and a catalogue that takes up two hundred of the 480 pages.

Making lists of his own works was important for Ensor, although this was the result of practical rather than scholarly considerations.

Since he did not like to lend his works for fear of damage, or because there was too much work involved in the transportation, or because a painting lacked a frame, he often referred exhibition organisers to collectors, sometimes putting them under pressure, for example, by insisting on a sale with the understanding that the work would be available as a loan to an exhibition.

One of those lists was made by Ensor in 1929 on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition in Brussels. Tricot has made good use of this list, along with correspondence between Ensor and the organisers, as an important source for paintings up to 1929.

After this exhibition Ensor understood the usefulness of an inventory. When in 1929–30 he received a sketchbook as an Easter gift, this became his ‘Liber Veritatis’ (now in the Art Institute of Chicago). In it he recorded in coloured pencils, alongside some older works, almost every new painting. These ‘miniatures’ are usually accompanied by information concerning the dimensions, support and, sometimes, other information, for example the collector who acquired it.

Obviously this is a valuable, if incomplete, source for the preparation of a catalogue raisonné. It also points up certain lacunae; when a painting could not be identified, the miniature from the sketchbook takes its place in the catalogue, which is the case for fortytwo of the 250 works for the period between 1929 and 1941. This means that some seventeen per cent of this part of the artist’s œuvre is still ‘up for grabs’.

The provenance given for each work is impressive, with exhaustive listings of auction

and exhibition catalogues, collectors and dealers, and this goes some way in establishing authenticity. The concordance with the first edition is interesting in that respect; thirty-two new works were added, especially early works, but also a painting of 1896 was rediscovered (Masques jouant aux cartes; private collection). However, thirteen works from the first edition have not made it into the present catalogue, either because they are no longer considered authentic, or that they are no longer considered to be ‘paintings’.

The most spectacular rejection concerns a work from the collection of the former Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ostend: Fille de pêcheur of 1882 entered the Museum’s collection during Ensor’s lifetime, but despite much controversy in Ostend newspapers at the time, the artist never gave his definitive opinion on the matter.

Ensor’s paintings are difficult to reproduce; much of the painter’s touch, subtle use of pearly tints and nuances of colour, as well as the texture of the paintings, is lost in photographs. Moreover, most illustrations are small and therefore mainly useful for verification, although a selection of some 120 works has been reproduced on a more generous scale.

What really adds value to this book is the biographical section. It concerns a chronological account of the wanderings of the works themselves and includes many quotations from exhibition and auction catalogues, letters and articles. The author thus highlights a specific facet of Ensor: by chronicling the artist’s choices and refusals, we encounter Ensor as both a man in doubt and as a man who knew exactly where he was heading; he refused to participate in some exhibitions but could also be hurt because he had not been invited to show in others. In such cases Ensor sharpened his pencil to curse, for example, someone such as Octave Maus. There is also new light shed on the commercial activities of art dealers and of friends. We find the earliest patrons of Ensor, the Brussels Rousseau family (some unknown photographs are reproduced), buying and selling numerous works by their artist-friend. Ensor follows these developments very closely and notes with some resentment how a painting which he had previously sold for 300 Belgian francs was sold a few decades later for tens of thousands.

The biography is rich in new information, especially in the more than four hundred footnotes, even when the frequent and extensive quotations from letters and articles makes it a biography aimed at a very specialised audience. The title of the Dutch edition includes the words ‘Leven en Werk’ (‘Life and Work’), which covers its contents more accurately; the emphasis is on Ensor’s work, even in the biographical part. The only quibble one might have is that there is a lack of critique of Ensor’s writings, so that the manipulative side of Ensor’s character is not always properly understood and exposed. However, this is an exemplary publication that provides a solid basis for further research.

Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater. Edited by Susan Tumarkin Goodman. 226 pp. incl. 130 col. + 105 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), $48.

ISBN 978–0–87334–202–5.

Reviewed by CHRISTINA LODDER SOME EXCEPTIONAL EXHIBITION catalogues do not merely act as aide-mémoires of shows but become important art-historical texts in their own right. This is particularly true of Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater. Those lucky enough to have seen the exhibition in New York or San Francisco will remember it as a vivid display, which used costume and set designs, models, photographs and even films and audio material to evoke one of the most important theatrical experiments of the twentieth century. The centrepiece was the display of Chagall’s original 1920 decorations and murals for the State Yiddish Theatre in Moscow. These canvases lined the walls of the theatre; instead of painting only on the stage, the murals enclosed the whole interior within a painting, and became known as ‘Chagall’s Box’. They had been miraculously preserved in Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, and were unrolled for Chagall when he visited in 1973. In contrast to previous displays, these were now placed into a detailed theatrical context and accompanied by a plethora of theatrical designs by other notable avant-garde Jewish artists such as Natan Altman, Robert Falk, Aleksandr Tyshler, Isaac Rabinovich and Ignaty Nivinsky. The catalogue documents these and all the other elements of the exhibition in an exemplary manner and is a crucial source of information about this hitherto neglected area of Jewish creativity, adding enormously to our knowledge about early Soviet theatre and theatrical design. Susan Tumarkin Goodman provides an illuminating overview of the history of the Soviet Jewish Theatre, while Zvi Gitelman places that history within the political and cultural context of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Vladislav Ivanov probes more deeply into the biblical nature of the Habima’s output, while Jeffrey Veidlinger examines the phenomenon that he calls ‘Yiddish Constructivism’, which is a hybrid of Expressionist fantasy and architectural rigour. Finally, Benjamin Harshav provides an overview of the designs produced for both theatres. These scholarly articles are presented within an exemplary apparatus. They are accompanied by numerous illustrations of good quality, there are shorter essays on Chagall’s murals and each play in an illustrated chronicle; the exhibits are listed, biographies of artists, writers, actors and creative personnel are included, a timeline is provided, a detailed bibliography is supplied and there is even that invaluable tool – an index. The Jewish Museum, the curator, Susan Tumarkin Goodman, and all the experts involved are to be congratulated.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 overturned a repressive regime and for a few years

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47. Set design for The Golem, by Ignaty Nivinsky. 1925. Pencil, gouache, ink and bronze paint on paper mounted on cardboard. (A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

offered an intoxicating vision of liberty. For no single group in the Russian Empire was that sense of liberty more precious than for Jews, who had been victimised, treated as second-class citizens and constantly subjected to crippling restrictions. In the wake of October 1917, independent Jewish cultural institutions flourished. Among them were the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (established in 1919) and Habima (The Stage), which performed in Hebrew and was originally set up in 1912, but moved to Moscow in 1918. Both of these became the scenes of exciting and innovative theatrical experimentation, with sets and costumes designed by avant-garde artists.

The theatres became prominent expressions of Jewish culture and identity, producing plays based on old folk legends and contemporary writings. Ultimately, it was precisely this national ethos as well as the experimental approach that aroused official disapproval.

Habima, with its more spiritual emphasis and use of Hebrew, was less central to the Russian Jewish experience and, in response to increasing government pressure, emigrated in 1926. the State Yiddish Theatre continued to work until its director, Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1948. By then it had adjusted to the officially imposed precepts of Socialist Realism, which sought to convey an optimistic and collective message within a more traditional theatrical format, although it still performed in Yiddish. But until 1928, and Stalin’s First Five Year Plan, the theatre produced distinctive plays, full of vibrant ideas and visual fun, dances, acrobatics and songs.

There is no doubt that Chagall played a decisive role in developing the visual style of the State Yiddish Theatre, with his outstanding murals of 1920 as well as through paintings, which took for their subject-matter the legends, folk tales and proverbs of the Yiddish culture of the shtetl. In the murals his playful and poetic configurations of people, objects and animals were dispersed across the white grounds, regardless of anatomy, gravity and proportion. For the set of Agents (1921), he created a simple stage-space with abstracted elements and multicoloured costumes. This approach was also adopted by Altman in his designs for Habima’s production of The

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Dybbuk (1922), with its planar organisation of the set and generally Cubo-Futurist style, recalling the way in which he had encased the Alexander Column in red and orange flames for the first anniversary of the Revolution in 1918. Rabinovich created a more Constructivist, multi-level set for the State Yiddish Theatre’s The Sorceress (1922). Taking the topsy-turvy world of Chagall to even more fantastic heights are the exuberant and bizarre combinations of highly stylised naturalistic and abstract elements of Nivinsky’s designs for Habima’s staging of The Golem in 1925 (Fig.47). The legend of a mystical creature made out of clay that protects but then turns against its people is complemented by the extraordinary and dazzling costumes in which colourful and grotesque heads of birds, fishes and frogs dominate.

The catalogue’s extensive visual documentation of each play provides an invaluable and comprehensive view of the innovations in set and costume design over this exciting period, making this an indispensable volume for anyone seriously interested in twentieth-century theatrical design.

Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture. Edited by Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus, with essays by Janine A. Mileaf, Francis M. Naumann and Michael R. Taylor. 320 pp. incl. 105 col. + 49 b. & w. ills. (National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, and MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2009), $50.

ISBN 978–0–262–01300–0.

Reviewed by CATHERINE CRAFT MARCEL DUCHAMP’S VISAGE is among the most recognisable of any artist of the last hundred years. That dozens of artists during his lifetime and since – such as Francis Picabia, Frederick Kiesler, Andy Warhol and Gavin Turk – have also used portraits of him to explore questions of individuality, creativity and originality attests to an enduring fascination with the creative tension generated by

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Duchamp’s radical revision of what it means to be an artist. In turning to his image, artists have followed Duchamp himself, who began his own experiments with self-fashioning and identity in the 1910s, in tandem with the development of his most important works.

These early experiments initially culminated in the creation of his notorious feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, but his subversive cultivation in later life of his image as an inactive ‘respirateur’ who had given up art was just as carefully conceived.

Surprisingly, Inventing Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, the exhibition curated

by Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus and shown at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, from 27th March to 2nd August 2009, stands as the first show devoted to the role of portraiture in relation to Duchamp’s œuvre, his artistic identity and his place in contemporary art. To mark the occasion and provide information on the one hundred works by Duchamp and other artists included in the show, the museum published a substantial and handsomely designed catalogue with detailed entries on each exhibited work shown and a group of in-depth, scholarly essays: Francis M. Naumann surveys artists’ portraits of Duchamp; Janine A. Mileaf uses portraiture to trace Duchamp’s friendships with several female artists; Michael R. Taylor examines Duchamp’s own attitudes toward portraiture in portrayals of himself and others; McManus focuses on the creation of Rrose Sélavy; and Goodyear explores the role of portraiture in relation to the mythology that developed around the artist in his later years.

The catalogue reflects the exhibition’s highlights as well as its weaknesses. Among the former is a creative and flexible definition of portraiture leading to the selection of a varied range of works, including Kiesler’s eight-part drawing of Duchamp in a freestanding sculptural frame; a 1945 life mask of Duchamp by Ettore Salvatore, accompanied by two staged photographs of a prematurely aged Duchamp made shortly thereafter; Brian O’Doherty’s quiet pulses of Duchamp’s heartbeat; and a group of rediscovered traditional likenesses of Duchamp from the 1930s

by Daniel MacMorris. These are balanced by unfortunate omissions, such as a trio of works from 1959 including With my tongue in my cheek that are discussed in Taylor’s essay but do not receive detailed catalogue entries.

More grave is the total absence from the catalogue of one of Duchamp’s key works in this context, Wayward landscape. Created in 1946 from his own ejaculate, this small work can also be considered a self-portrait, its startling, ludic physicality bringing an altogether different dimension to discussions of portraiture.

Duchamp revolutionised the practice of portraiture, just as he did other areas of art, by playing on its conventions to undermine assumptions. Portraits of him and self-portraits tend to emphasise the fluid, provisional nature of identity, suggesting that its very formation may be considered a creative act. Although Duchamp exercised considerable, if often

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subtle, control over others’ images of him, so too was his shifting identity given form and definition through these interactions and exchanges with others. This impression gains support from the collaborative nature of many of the portraits in the catalogue; while some three-quarters of the works are portraits of Duchamp by other artists, the dozen or so self-portraits are matched by a similar number where Duchamp shares credit with another artist (usually Man Ray).

It is this element of give-and-take that is largely missing from the portions of the exhibition and catalogue concerning the persistent role of Duchamp’s image in contemporary art. Although some of the works featured, such as Douglas Gordon’s Proposition for a posthumous portrait (2004; cat. no.100), are intriguing in their own right, other recent efforts are rather tired and academic in their approach, self-consciously taking Duchamp and his work as fixed references. The effortless, seemingly offhand nature of many images of Duchamp by himself, his friends and his peers calls for a renewed consideration of the subversive, collaborative irreverence that fed such experiments to begin with. Nonetheless, the multifaceted portrait of Duchamp that emerges from this catalogue provides a richly informative point of departure for such explorations in the future.

In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976. By Christophe Cherix, with contributions

by Rini Dippel, Christian Rattemeyer and Phillip van den Bossche. 170 pp. incl.

46 col. + 56 b. & w. ills. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009), $38.

ISBN 978–087070–753–7.

Reviewed by TON GEERTS I N 2007 T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T , New York, received a bequest of 230 works from the collection of Conceptual art assembled by Geert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn, founders of the famous Amsterdam gallery Art & Project (1968–2001). This donation was the catalyst for an exhibition and catalogue by Christophe Cherix, curator at the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA in 2009. Initially the collection was given on loan to the Cabinet des Estampes in Geneva, but later travelled with Cherix to New York. Another significant part of the collection, more than 1,200 works, is housed in the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede. Smaller selections are on loan to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Central to this publication are some 120 works by ten European and American artists: Bas Jan Ader, Stanley Brouwn, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Gilbert & George, Sol LeWitt, Charlotte Posenenske,

Allen Ruppersberg and Lawrence Weiner.

The catalogue consists of four introductory articles, a catalogue of exhibited works, and a full catalogue of the entire bequest. The book investigates an underexposed aspect of the development of Conceptual art, with Amsterdam as the nexus. In the first contribution, ‘Greetings From Amsterdam’, Cherix outlines how in the early 1960s Amsterdam was an ideal breeding ground for new international artistic developments such as Minimalism, ZERO and Conceptual art. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, but also Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Gemeentemuseum, the Museum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo and the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven organised high-profile exhibitions that attracted international attention. Foreign artists were drawn to these institutions and the new galleries in Amsterdam, as well as to the progressive and tolerant climate of that city with its centuries-old tradition of emigration and immigration, and consequently chose Amsterdam as their domicile. By contrast, Dutch artists such as Van Elk, Ader and Dibbets found Amsterdam too provincial and travelled to Britain and the United States to broaden their artistic horizons. There they met other Conceptual artists who brought them into contact with Art & Project; hence the title In & Out of Amsterdam.

There is also another dimension to this international travelling. Cherix makes clear that Conceptual artists made use of the infrastructure of galleries and museums not only in practical terms (for example by letting their projects travel from gallery to gallery in order to share and thus reduce costs), but that travel itself also became the subject of their art: ‘The act of traveling became an act of creation itself’. Conceptual artists thus discovered new approaches to the mobility, distribution and ownership of the now largely dematerialised work of art, and explored novel opportunities to promote their works. This also applied to the main Amsterdam gallery of the period, Art & Project. Rini Dippel, former curator at the Stedelijk Museum, describes in her contribution how the gallery commanded a valuable network of both Conceptual artists and like-minded foreign galleries. Moreover, exhibitions at Art & Project locked in seamlessly with numerous museum exhibitions devoted to Conceptual art in Amsterdam and beyond.

Van Elk in Los Angeles and Dibbets in London introduced, among others, LeWitt, Richard Long, Robert Ryman and Gilbert & George to the gallery. Art & Project’s owners, meanwhile, questioned the act of exhibiting itself; the gallery refused to organise official openings or send out invitations, and opening hours were variable. The main means of communication was the Art & Project Bulletin, which was distributed at various locations and was ideal in spreading Conceptual art and ideas to an international audience. This publication was designed by the relevant artist and in itself functioned as a work of art and an exhibition, as, for example, the contribution

by Robert Barry in Art & Project Bulletin 17:

‘During the exhibition the gallery will be closed’.

Christian Rattemeyer demonstrates in his contribution that a new approach to art and its presentation was explored in two major exhibitions in 1969: Op Losse Schroeven (Tentative Connections), organised by Wim Beeren at the Stedelijk Museum, and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, organised

by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle, Bern.

Op Losse Schroeven has been unfairly under exposed in the history of Conceptual art.

Rattemeyer’s analysis of the exhibition’s installation, in particular the use by artists such as Weiner, Van Elk, Long and others of alternative spaces in and outside the Museum, shows that Beeren (and hence Amsterdam) was on an equal footing with his colleague Szeemann in Bern.

In his contribution Phillip van den Bossche shows how in the United States artists such as William Leavitt, Ruppersberg, Ader and Van Elk forged a relationship between the old and new world by referring in their works to both Amsterdam and Los Angeles. This intellectual game – a kind of conceptual journey of the mind – was characteristic of American West Coast artists.

These concepts are very well reflected in the excellent descriptions of the 120 works of art here catalogued. There is a brief introduction to each artist and in the case of Dibbets, Van Elk, Ruppersberg and Weiner interviews have been included. The catalogue is beautifully designed by the Amsterdam firm of Mevis & Van Deursen. In & Out of Amsterdam maps an important stage in the development of Conceptual art.

Publications Received Northern art Martin Schongauer. Maler und Kupferstecher. Kunst und Wissenschaft unter dem Primat des Sehens. By Ulrike Heinrichs. 527 pp. incl. 60 col. + 250 b. & w. ills.

(Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich and Berlin, 2007), €68. ISBN 978–3–422–06555–0.

The recent flurry of publications dedicated to Martin Schongauer reflects his status as the foremost German painter and printmaker before Dürer. Coming only three years after the publication of Stephan Kemperdick’s monograph devoted to the artist, the present study, a revised version of the author’s Habillitationsschrift, seeks to place Schongauer’s art in the context of contemporary ideas. The author characterises Schongauer as the epitome of a ‘pictor doctus’, pointing to his attendance of a Latin school in his native Colmar as a precondition for his documented enrolment at the University of Leipzig in 1465. With Schongauer’s status as a learned artist thus established, a range of propaedeutic and encyclopaedic literature is identified as the source for Aristotelian notions of perception zin his art. Neo-Platonic sources are equally drawn upon when, for example, Dionysius the Areopagite’s writings on the hierarchy of angels or negative theology are seen reflected in Schongauer’s engraving of a censer (Hollstein 106). In the absence of any written evidence for the circulation of such ideas in Schongauer’s milieu, let alone proof that the artist owned any of these texts, the arguments appear at times highly speculative.

Nevertheless, the book provides some interesting insights and stimulus for the study of Schongauer’s œuvre in its cultural context.

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Das sah ich viel köstliche Dinge. Albrecht Dürers Reise in die Niederlande. By Gerd Unverfehrt. 261 pp. incl. 42 b. & w. ills. (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2007), €37.90. ISBN 978–3–525–47010–7.

In July 1520 Albrecht Dürer departed from Nuremberg on a year-long journey to the Netherlands, blending his financial mission to achieve the renewal of a privilege from the recently crowned Charles V with his innate Wanderlust. The trip was documented in two sketchbooks and a diary, which survives in two copies, one from the mid-sixteenth and one from the seventeenth century. The diary’s significance as a primary source is undisputed: it chronicles Dürer’s contacts in the Netherlands, his purchases, the gifts he made and received and the festivities he witnessed.

Chiefly, however, it served as an account book, and the resulting repetitiveness, in combination with the difficulties posed by early modern German even to the native speaker, can render its perusal arduous. The author circumvents these drawbacks by selecting excerpts in modernised German (based largely on Thausing’s 1872 edition) and interspersing them with extensive commentaries. The resulting dialogue between primary source and contextualising remarks provides an engaging read for the specialist and general reader alike. The extensive appendix also caters for both types of reader, providing convenient charts of the works of art that are mentioned, as well as explanations of early modern wages or currencies.

While this book cannot replace the study of the primary source itself, its value lies in its ability to introduce Dürer’s diary to a larger readership.

SUSANNE MEURER

Witches’ Lust and the Fall of Man. The Strange Fantasies of Hans Baldung Grien. By Bodo Brinkmann, with an essay by Berthold Hinz. 272 pp. incl. 131 col. + 20 b. & w. ills. (Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg, and Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 2007), €29.95.

ISBN 978–3–86568–225–3.

This bilingual publication (the German title is Hexenlust und Sündenfall. Die seltsamen Phantasien des Hans Baldung Grien) accompanied the exhibition in 2007 of that name at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

Its contents expand upon the catalogue entry on Hans Baldung’s Two witches (Städel Museum; inv. no.1123) published in Bodo Brinkmann and Stephan Kemperdick’s Deutsche Gemälde im Städel 1500–1550 (Mainz 2005, pp.23–47). The Two witches, a dated work of 1523, is one of the most famous early German paintings. However, its celebrity as an illustration of the pan-European craze for witches has deflected attention from its specific meaning. This publication seeks to redress the balance.

The painting’s history is unknown prior to its appearance at Milan in 1878, when it was purchased under the misleading title Heavenly and earthly love from Giovanni Morelli, the inventor of the ‘Morellian criteria’ of attribution. Hans Baldung Grien (1484/85–1545) was untypical of early German painters in that he came from a family of doctors and lawyers.

As a student in Dürer’s workshop in Nuremberg he made studies from the nude and become acquainted with the theory of human proportions. In 1509 he settled in Strasbourg, a city with a liberal attitude to Reformation controversy, where he prospered as an artist and also became a town councillor.

The erotic subject-matter of the Two witches invites comparison with other small-scale nudes by Cranach and Conrad Meit intended for the secular milieu of the Kunstkammer. Baldung’s earliest supernatural subject is the chiaroscuro woodcut of The witches’ sabbath of 1510, which was followed by several finished drawings on coloured paper of witches in lascivious poses, dated 1514/15. A woodcut from Baldung’s workshop of witches casting a spell was published at Strasbourg in 1516 in a volume of homilies by the theologian Johann Gieler von Kaysersberg, who expressed scepticism at the claims of witches that they could fly and control the weather. In the Two witches the figure of Cupid with a flaming torch refers to the power of love. The repre-

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sentation of nudes seen from the front and the back may allude to the comparison of heterosexual and homosexual love in Lucian’s Erotes, a text known to Dürer’s friend Willibald Pirckheimer. The tiny figure of the dragon in the bottle held up by the seated witch identifies its contents as Mercury: the standard remedy for syphilis. The Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro attributed the origins of this disease to Sol’s affliction of the shepherd Syphilus with ‘hostile rays and [. . .] a bitter light’, which may account for the lurid conflagration in the background of Baldung’s painting. It therefore seems that the Two witches alludes ironically to the causes and remedies of venereal disease, a theme familiar from works spanning Dürer’s woodcut of The syphilitic of 1496–97 to Shakespeare’s sonnets 153 and 154, published in 1609.

The contemptuous sidelong glance of the standing witch also appears in Baldung’s representations of The fall of Man. Like his finished drawings and cabinet paintings of Death and the maiden, these emphasise the link between sexual desire and original sin. Bestial sexuality is represented in Baldung’s woodcuts of Wild horses, dated 1534, and sexual violence may be a latent theme in his mysterious late woodcut of The bewitched stable groom.

In two supplementary essays Berthold Hinz contrasts the intellectual character of Dürer’s nudes with Baldung’s humane sensuality, while Brinkmann draws attention to the affinity between the latter’s representation of sex and death and the writings on this subject by the contemporary French author Michel Houellebecq.

This publication demonstrates the strengths of empirical object-based scholarship as well as the limitations of the exhibition catalogue as a platform for more fashionable, speculative modes of enquiry.

Its reinterpretation of Baldung’s Two witches considerably enriches our understanding of this extraordinary painting.

MARK EVANS

Preserving our Heritage. Conservation, Restoration and Technical Research in the Mauritshuis. Edited by Epco Runia. 208 pp. incl. 257 col. + 42 b. & w. ills.

(Waanders Publishers, Zwolle, 2009), €44.50. ISBN 978–90–400–8621–2.

The introduction to this book comprises a short history of the care of the paintings in the Mauritshuis, from the return in 1815 from Paris to The Hague of the original core of the collection (which was confiscated by the French in 1795) to the present day, and is followed by a general essay on the material com position and build-up of the paintings. The bulk of the book consists of extensive descriptions of the restoration treatment of fourteen works in the collection. Most entries are based on research published before in the Museum’s own periodical, Mauritshuis, in focus or the technical journal ArtMatters, as well as in exhibition catalogues, but the results are here brought together on luxurious heavy art paper.

Die Gemäldesammlung des Städtischen Museums Braunschweig. Vollständiges Bestandsverzeichnis und Verlustdokumentation. By Julia M. Nauhaus, with contributions by Justus Lange. 848 pp. incl. 111 col. + 2,257 b. & w. ills. (Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 2009), €68. ISBN 978–3–487–13942–5.

Die städtische Gemäldegalerie in Braunschweig. Ein Beispiel bürgerlicher Sammelkultur vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute. Edited by Julia M. Nauhaus, with contributions by Julia M. Nauhaus, Justus Lange, Gilbert Holzgang and Erika Eschebach. 416 pp. incl. 73 col. + 90 b. & w. ills. (Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 2009), €29.80. ISBN 978–3–487–14233–3.

The first book is a complete catalogue of Braunschweig’s little-known municipal collection of paintings, including documentation for works that were lost during the Second World War. Some of the more interesting works, for example Ferdinand Bol’s Mars and

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Venus (c.1660), are better known as part of the permanent installation at Braunschweig’s Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum. There are vast holdings of interesting landscapes and figure and animal studies in oil on paper by local painters such as Karl Friedrich Adolf Nickol (1824–1905) and Julius Carl Hermann Schröder (1802–1867), published here for the first time. The second book includes a collection of essays exploring the history of the collection.

Rembrandt in Southern California. By Anne T. Woollett. 54 pp. incl. 26 col. ills. + 1 map.

(Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2009), £6.99.

ISBN 978–0–89236–993–5.

This is a tiny guide to the fourteen paintings by Rembrandt in the Hammer Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena and the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego.

Each work receives its own brief entry. There is also a small map with museum locations for those who intend to travel in southern California with this guide but without a road atlas or satellite navigation.

Dutch New York. Between East & West. The World of Margrieta van Varick. Edited by Deborah L. Krohn and Peter N. Miller. 400 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Bard Graduate Center and New-York Historical Society, New York, and Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009), £45. ISBN 978–0–300–15467–2.

This is the catalogue that accompanied the eponymous exhibition held at the Bard Graduate Center, New York (closed 3rd January), which celebrated the legacy of Dutch culture in New York through the person of Margrieta Varick, who arrived with her husband in New York in 1686, and whose goods were recorded in an estate inventory made after her death in 1695, reproduced and transcribed in this publication in an appendix. The many exhibits – clothes, silver, porcelain, furniture, documents, drawings, paintings etc. – evoke her world and the period and are accompanied by extensive entries in a lavishly produced book that is perhaps rather more interesting from a historical than an art-historical perspective.

Anton Mauve 1838–1888. Edited by Saskia de Bodt and Michiel Plomp, with contributions by Renske Cohen Tervaert, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Terry van Druten, Sjraar van Heugten, Ineke de Jong-den Hartog, Jeroen Kapelle, Jan van den Noort, Agnes van den Noort-van Gelder, Michiel Plomp, Emke Raassen-Kruimel, Chris Stolwijk and Robert Verhoogt. 224 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Uitgeverij Thoth, Bussum, 2009), €34.50. ISBN 978–90–6868–521–3.

This is the catalogue accompanying the exhibition devoted to Anton Mauve held at both the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, and the Singer Museum, Laren (closed 17th January). Mauve is perhaps best known for having taught Van Gogh, although he was in his lifetime very popular with American collectors, the subject of an essay in this publication by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, and one of his most impressive works can indeed be found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: the very large Return of the flock (c.1886–87). His best-known image is probably the superb Morning ride on the beach (1876; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). There are some very charming early works, for example the Studio of Pieter Frederik van Os of c.1855–56 in oil on paper (Rijksmuseum), and occasionally his later works are very fresh and engaging, especially the Kitchen garden of 1885 (Rijksmuseum) and another painting of the same subject in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (c.1887). However, the Laren leg of the exhibition demonstrated that for each of these rather impressive works there is a host of lesser paintings, indicating that Mauve belongs to those artists who are better not seen in extenso. The catalogue nevertheless serves as a useful monograph on the artist.

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EXHIBITIONS

Exhibitions David Hockney Nottingham

by MARINA VAIZEY

the Kunsthalle – an organisation housed in a building devoted to changing exhibitions, generally of contemporary art, but which does not own a collection of its own – is a familiar one on the Continent, in Germany above all, as well as in the United States. In Britain, particularly when housed in purpose-built premises, it is relatively rare. Nottingham Contemporary, which opened on 14th November last year, is the latest addition to the select handful of Kunsthalles in Britain, London’s Whitechapel Gallery, founded in 1901, being the most successful and long-lived precursor of them all.

The building in the centre of Nottingham has several levels of spacious and beautifully lit galleries, and the now usual incorporation of spaces for film, video, lectures and workshops, not to mention a café and a small and elegant research area. The architectural press has warmly welcomed the design by the practice of Caruso St John (also responsible for, among other art spaces, the excellent New Art Gallery, Walsall, and the various Gagosian galleries in London, including the magnificent premises at Britannia Street, King’s Cross). The building is functional and exhilarating, looks marvellous at night and subtly grand by day; a witty touch is the lace pattern in honour of Nottingham’s industrial and cultural history, which is incised into the metal decoration and overhang on the façade.

The tone – contemporary, adventurous, but not off-putting or wilfully obscure – was complemented by the pair of inaugural exhibitions. The star show was David Hockney 1960–1968: A Marriage of Styles (closed 24th January).1 This constituted a contribution to art history as well as a revelatory and enjoyable experience. The other show was of work by the witty California-born artist Frances Stark, her first in a public British gallery, and was of work from the past eight years.2 Nottingham Contemporary also picked up on the sensible Tate and Serpentine Gallery notion of artists’ offerings by selling a reasonably priced limited edition print by Stark which is a visual riff on David Hockney.

The Hockney exhibition reminded us once more of what an innovative, energetic and imaginative artist he has been. With canny intelligence, Hockney was able to capitalise, whether consciously or not, on the stability of his Bradford background and familial affection which seems to have stood him in good stead, dazzlingly modified first by the Royal College

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48. We 2 boys together clinging, by David Hockney. 1961. Panel, 121.9 by 152.4 cm. (Arts Council Collection, London; exh. Nottingham Contemporary).

of Art, his peer group there (R.B. Kitaj and Peter Blake among them) and the ‘swinging sixties’, and then by his entry into the earthly garden of Eden, replete with snakes and demons too, of southern California and Los

Angeles. The anthology made an especially poignant impact now that Hockney, in his seventies, while still retaining studios in London and Los Angeles, seems to be based in the seaside town of Bridlington, East

49. The first marriage (A marriage of styles I), by David Hockney. 1962. Canvas, 189.2 by 220.8 cm. (Tate, London; exh. Nottingham Contemporary). the burlington ma g a z i n e

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Yorkshire, and painting the Yorkshire landscape on a vast scale.

In the 1960s Hockney was obsessed with painting, drawing and printmaking, and was able to range among many sources, including photography, as a basis for work in other media (his absorption in making photography as an art in its own right was to begin in the following decade). The early images are consciously artful but there is no attempt to hide their joyous naivety. Perhaps typical is a very early etching, Myself and my heroes (1961), with the bespectacled artist depicted next to the slightly larger figures of the bespectacled Mahatma Gandhi and the bearded Walt Whitman.

In his early work Hockney turned his disadvantages into advantages; his lack of interest and even skill in imitative, mimetic, academic drawing was replaced by his enthusiasm, witty subject-matter, sublimated sensuality and an almost childlike embrace of controversial alliances. We 2 boys together clinging (1961; Fig.48) is a piece of cheerful, slightly sinister graffiti, before graffiti became fashionable, and embraces the new post-Wolfenden freedom (the liberating Report was published in 1957).

Writing on the painting was also a happy device, simultaneously childlike and sophisticated. My bonnie lies over the ocean (1962) was prescient: a miniature drawing of a figure identified as ‘DH’ is holding up an American flag. It was to be in America that Hockney – in common with many a young Englishman who headed West in the 1960s – seems to have become truly liberated, calling on all the conventions and idioms understood from his extensive visual education. He was a visiting teacher throughout the 1960s in the US, working for varying periods at the universities of Iowa, Colorado and California.

The brilliant blue of the south-western American sky and its blazing sun initiated and then enhanced a hitherto unexplored beguiling sense of colour, freed from the duns, ochres and general mud which has so often characterised the English palette.

Moreover, exploiting a passion for drawing, he discovered an energised ability to deploy a stylised but highly intelligible shorthand, most brilliantly seen in the ripples and splashes of water on the surface of a Californian swimming pool in the now acknowledged masterpiece A bigger splash (1967; Tate). The splashes were painstakingly worked on, inspired by a photograph. Ever enthusiastic about innovation, Hockney by the mid1960s was also using acrylic rather than oil paint, signalled in this exhibition by several other masterly images such as Man taking a shower in Beverley Hills (1964), typically started in Santa Monica and completed in Iowa City, which had also involved photography as a starting point, and Peter getting out of Nick’s pool (1966; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), which won first prize at the John Moores Liverpool Competition and Exhibition in 1967.

Some of the undoubted charm, occasionally verging on whimsy, but often agreeably sinewy, is the element of autobiography,

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50. A Rake’s Progress, 3. The start of the spending spree and the door opening for a blonde, by David Hockney. 1961–63.

Etching and aquatint on paper, 30 by 40 cm. (British Council; exh. Nottingham Contemporary).

never far from Hockney’s work, which has always focused on personal incident, a circle of close friends and the emotions they engender. His use of his travels in the 1960s is seductive for the viewer because of the exuberance and enthusiasm with which Hockney transformed what he saw and experienced into an intelligible visual shorthand.

If travel, from Berlin and Egypt to France and perhaps, above all, to the US both expanded Hockney’s personal experiences and sharpened his visual imagination, he also increasingly responded to texts. Among the many pleasures of the Nottingham compilation was the chance to see the illustrations for the contemporary A Rake’s Progress (1961–63; Fig.50) and those for the Fourteen Poems from C P Cavafy (1966), a modern, witty and affecting complement to Cavafy’s intense and sensual poetry. The etchings and aquatints on zinc and on copper exist as prints in their own right alongside the books published by the legendary Editions Alecto.

The exhibition took its title from the painting The first marriage (A marriage of styles I) (1962; Fig.49), in which a formally dressed Western groom stands in profile next to his seated Egyptian goddess bride, with the vertical flare of a palm tree, alarmingly like an oversized feather duster, indicating an imagined exotic setting. This was actually painted from drawings made in Berlin, the marriage of styles a reflection of the contrast between the Western museum visitor and the Egyptian contents of one of Berlin’s great museums.

It neatly summarises, perhaps, Hockney’s continuing preoccupation with the history of art, visible public collections and a generally omnivorous appetite for variations on art into

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art, which irradiates the intensely personal quality of his imagery.

Curiously, however, although the dates for the survey were given as 1960–68, what we did not see were the conversation pieces, single and double portraits in domestic settings and landscapes made from 1967 onwards in a photorealist style, abandoning completely for a while the sketchy and apparently improvised characteristics of the Hockneys that first caught the public imagination.

Nevertheless, the exhibition as a whole is a tribute to Hockney’s formidable gifts, undiluted by the sentimentality and crudeness of colour and execution that has affected some of his later work (notably evident in the early twenty-first-century paintings shown in the 2006 travelling exhibition of his portraits).

Here is an artist at the beginning of a long career already capable of expanding and changing the visual language of his day, not only engaged in serious debate among his contemporaries, but also successfully reaching out and even enlightening that proverbial creature, the general public.

1 Catalogue: David Hockney 1960–1968: A Marriage of Styles. By Alex Farquharson and Andrew Brighton. 88 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Nottingham Contemporary, 2009), £12. ISBN 978–1–907421–00–6.

The two essays, by Alex Farquharson, curator of the exhibition and director of Nottingham Contemporary, and Andrew Brighton, are succinctly energetic. In particular, Farquharson is good on Hockney’s work in relation to his contemporaries and juniors, especially on shared homoerotic themes. Unfortunately, there are no catalogue numbers and the essays are irritatingly printed on baby pink and baby blue coloured paper.

2 The Frances Stark exhibition is at CCA Glasgow from 13th February to 3rd April.

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Matisse and Rodin Nice and Paris

by CATHERINE LAMPERT

which Henri Matisse cast his eye on a still active and controversial master is the focus of the exhibition Matisse et Rodin at the Musée Rodin, Paris (to 28th Feb ruary),1 seen in 2009 at the Musée Matisse, Nice. The story begins in July 1899 when the younger artist acquired from Ambroise Vollard the plaster bust of Henri Rochefort (the copy that Rodin had given to Manet’s widow) as well as a small painting, Les Trois baigneuses, by Cézanne and a head by Gauguin. The probable contact continues to when the two artists were briefly neighbours (for a year from autumn 1908 when Rodin was at the Hôtel Biron and the Académie Matisse was around the corner on boulevard des Invalides). Within the exhibition, themes that pair works (‘l’approche du modèle’) are overtaken by the electric sparks of their distinct sensibilities seen in proximity.

Working with clay, Matisse tended to pinch and twist the material, arching the subject’s back so the buttocks and breasts jut out, sometimes using his modelling tools to define abrupt facets that catch the light. When a photograph from the magazine Mes Modèles (Figs.51 and 54) was his inspiration, the forms seem more organically grown, like a gourd or vine, such as those of La Serpentine (1909; Fig.53) and Nu appuyé sur les mains (1905; Fig.52). Rodin’s figures, many originating in the early 1880s in the context of figure groups for The gates of Hell, suggest abandonment and transgression, via Baudelaire and Dante, while also conveying shame and life-like emotion.

What we know about Matisse’s attitude to Rodin has often hinged on the advice he received when he took his drawings to the sculptor’s studio on rue de l’Université in 1900. In Matisse’s memory the experience was painful and, at least later, educative. André THE PERIOD IN

Gide’s journal for 1906 contains an entry that tells the story via Maurice Denis, Matisse quoting Rodin’s advice that he should add detail to his drawings and come back to show him the results. His words, recalled in 1941, were something like: ‘Il faut faire des dessins extrêmement travaillés, pignochés meme, avec le plus de détails possibles’.2 In French the informal meaning of the verb pignocher is to paint with small strokes using painstaking and polished effort, and is hardly as dismissive as the frequently translated recommendation ‘to fuss’.

By 1941 Matisse remembered the encounter as a significant opportunity for him to better understand his own method: ‘Je me disais que lorsque j’aurais fait des dessins ainsi détaillés je n’aurais pas besoin de personne pour me conseiller, car ma méthode naturelle consistait à travailler du simple au composé, et qu’ajouter un détail à un ensemble me demandait un effort d’ordre très dur et que presque chaque détail qui n’avait pas été prévu dans la conception de mon dessin me demandait une reprise de l’ensemble pour l’y incorporer’.3 Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, in the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, considers the relevance of this statement in 1900, reminding us that Rodin’s inclination at that very time was to reconsider existing works and to simplify their forms without sacrificing the cohesion of the whole, the experience in the round. This tendency was prominent in the exhibition Rodin mounted in the Pavillon de l’Alma, his self-created retrospective located on the borders of that year’s Exposition Universelle, which Matisse almost certainly saw (he later remarked on Eugène Druet’s photographs which hung on the walls). At the entrance stood a naked Pierre de Wiessant, hands and head removed; inside full-length figures like The inner voice (also called Meditation) (c.1894; Fig.55) and Cybele had been turned into fragments by the removal of parts. Set on a slender two-metre column was the plaster Study for St John, probably derived from studies for the large standing figure of 1877, a by-then dried and cracked torso and a set of well-preserved legs joined roughly at a curiously dynamic angle.

51. Photograph, Mes Modèles. See I. Monod-Fontaine: exh. cat. The Sculpture of Henri Mattise, London (Arts Council of Great Britain) 1984, p.16; and A. Boulton et al.: exh. cat. Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, Dallas (Museum of Art) 2007.

This strange work, with its echoes of an antique fragment, was christened The walking man by Rodin’s founders. Matisse’s hard-won sculpture The serf (1900–03) is often seen as a deliberate response to Rodin’s realism. The standing figure had long arms when shown in 1904 but through accident or intent (or both), when it was cast in 1908 they were cut off and the boxer-like physique lightened. Comparison between the sculptures was nurtured by the belief that the model Bevilaqua who posed for Matisse was one and the same person as Pignatelli (born 1845), the professional model from the Abruzzi who inspired Rodin’s original St John the Baptist, the bronze cast of which was acquired by the State in 1884 and long displayed in a dark corner of the Musée du Luxembourg.

A timely account in the catalogue by Hélène Pinet, the curator responsible for the archives at the Musée Rodin, details how the myth began.

Art historians from Alfred Barr to Raymond Escholier and Herbert Read compared the sculptures and the descriptions of the models: Bevilaqua was called an anthropoid type more hideous than an Aboriginal, and Pignatelli, a rough, hairy man who expressed violence in his being, ‘fruste, hirsute’.4 Albert Elsen, writing on Matisse’s sculpture in 1972, asserted that the men were one and the same person: ‘the model for Matisse, known in 1900 under the name of Bevilaqua was in fact the peasant from Abruzzi called Pignatelli’.5 Of course, blame for perpetuating this unlikely coincidence should rest on subsequent writers who ignored the physical discrepancies between the two men despite ample documents, paintings and drawings of both models, as well as photographs.6 Rodin’s milieu was the sculpture studio and a business, populated by assistants, models, would-be collectors and critics. By the end of the nineteenth century, essentially the whole of his œuvre was preserved in plaster casts like stock for new products. Needing an activity that could be practised in solitude and without recourse to outside judgment (the 1890s were the fraught years of the Balzac and Victor Hugo commissions and the break with Camille

52. Nu appuyé sur les mains, by Henri Matisse. 1905. Bronze, 12.4 cm. high. (Musée Matisse, Nice; exh. Musée Rodin, Paris). the burlington ma g a z i n e

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53. La serpentine, by Henri Matisse. 1909. Bronze, 54.6 by 29.2 by 191 cm. (Musée Matisse, Nice; exh. Musée Rodin, Paris).

54. Photograph, Mes Modèles. See I. Monod-Fontaine: exh. cat. The Sculpture of Henri Mattise, London (Arts Council of Great Britain) 1984, p.15; and A. Boulton et al.: exh. cat. Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, Dallas (Museum of Art) 2007.

55. The inner voice (or Meditation), by Auguste Rodin. c.1894. Plaster, 54 by 18.8 by 15.9 cm. (Musée Rodin, Paris).

Claudel), Rodin engaged in daily sessions of drawing from the female model. He preferred to keep his eyes on the nearby figure (and often their eyes on him), his hand registering in graphite their contours, sheet after sheet, afternoon after afternoon, culminating in more than six thousand ‘late drawings’ in total.

Rodin was open to a variety of female types among the hired models, sometimes recalling details of their appearance. ‘Elle avait sur tout le corps de petit poils follets qui, sous l’éclat du jour, l’entouraient de rayonnements dorés: un eût dit qu’elle était vêtue de lumière’.7 Even in two dimensions he could not help but convey his subjects’ corporeality, their distortions underpinned by an assured grasp of the ample female body as weight is redistributed by motion and gravity. When Rodin returned to individual drawings to add gouache and annotations, the sheets become flatter images, closer to poetry and Symbolism, the women given vase-like torsos and names like Psyche.

The young Matisse, allegedly inspired by Rodin’s relaxed distortions, tried sketching from life observed on the street.8 In the studio, however, the model helped him travel inwards, literally to gain access to his inner feelings: ‘Le modèle pour les autres, c’est un renseignement. Moi, c’est quelque chose qui m’arrête. C’est le foyer de mon énergie’.9 Matisse’s state of mind in his own maturity shifted, particularly between 1921 and 1926, and this epoch is the subject of Isabelle Monod-Fontaine’s well-focused catalogue essay. She describes how his rapport with one model, the intelligent, beautiful ex-dancer Henriette Darricarrère, led to Matisse using her favoured reclining pose (‘dont je me rends esclave’) to realise an extraordinary celebration

of beauty in every medium.10 As MonodFontaine puts it in the catalogue (p.74), when the living model was absent from the studio, the clay and plaster versions of Grand nu assis, bras levés (1922–29) replaced her feminine influence, ‘un “alter ego’”.

The curators of this exhibition, MarieThérèse Pulvenis de Seligny and Nadine Lehni, have chosen well and the casts are of the first order. However, the display of the exhibition itself (with its barrier of vitrines) lacks something very modern that Matisse and Rodin shared, the radical projection of the studio ambience, the ensemble underpinning the state of reverie. Rodin arranged his framed drawings in a grid, a sequence sometimes appearing like the shutter clicks of a camera.

Photographers were encouraged to record a mise-en-scène between works using atmospheric natural light, for instance in the confrontation of the Bust of Victor Hugo and two casts of The inner voice. The installation that can never be bettered, and is well known from photographs, is that of Matisse’s first Nice apartment at no.1 place Charles-Félix, into which he moved in September 1921. Here were the changing arrangement of fabric hangings; paintings whose subjects were sculptures seen against decorative grounds; and reminders of the model: ‘the violin, the upright piano, the white ballet dress were not “props”, in any theatrical sense. They were natural to Henriette’.11

2 A. Gide: Journals, London 1947, I, p.174 (entry for 16th March 1906), it became: ‘Fuss over it, fuss over it.

When you have fussed over it two weeks more, come back and show it to me again’. The fuller account, quoted here, is from an interview transcript with Pierre Courthion (16th April 1941); Paris/Nice, Archives Henri Matisse, published in Duthuit et al., op. cit. (note 1), p.62.

3 The exhibition Matisse. Painter as Sculptor, Dallas (Museum of Art) 2007, and Matisse’s writings updated

by Dominique Fourcade (Paris 2005), have added to the accuracy of his quoted remarks.

4 Jean Biette in J. Puy: exh. cat. Retrospective Jean Puy, Roanne (Musée Déchelette) 1985, p.19; and R. Butler: Rodin. The Shape of Genius, New Haven and London 1993, p.116.

5 A. Elsen: The Sculpture of Matisse, New York 1972, p.28. The name Bevilaqua, sculptor, appears on a calling card in the Musée Rodin archives; Duthuit et al., op. cit. (note 1), p.87, and was also the name of someone working at the foundry used by Rodin.

6 Among the documents is a photograph, recently acquired by the Musée Rodin, dating from the time in question (c.1900) and shows Pignatelli again in the famous pose of St John, his curved posture, long legs and grey beard hardly reconcilable with the sturdy, wide-shouldered, short-legged Serf. Writers such as Michael Mezzatesta in Henri Matisse. Sculptor/Painter, Fort Worth 1984, used the supposed connection to argue how Matisse surpassed Rodin’s ‘mimetic surface’ and ‘reformulated the anatomy of Bevilacqua [sic] according to his own feeling’ (p.38).

7 H. Dujardin-Beaumetz: Entretiens avec Rodin, Paris/Bagneux 1992, p.64.

8 Jacques Guenne, writing in 1925, quoted in Duthuit et al., op. cit. (note 1), p.64.

9 Matisse speaking to Louis Aragon in 1939, in D. Fourcade: Henri Matisse. Ecrits et propos sur l’art, Paris 1972, p.162.

10 Ibid.

11 J. Russell: Matisse. Father & Son, New York 1999, p.59.

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1 Catalogue: Matisse et Rodin. By Claude Duthuit, Nadine Lehni, Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Seligny, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Isabelle MonodFontaine and Hélène Pinet. 160 pp. incl. 135 col. ills.

(Musée Rodin/Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 2009), €35. ISBN 978–2–7118–5612–1.

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Jean Baptiste Vanmour Valenciennes

by YURIKO JACKALL THE EXHIBITION Jean Baptiste Vanmour 1671–1737, Peintre de la Sublime Porte at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes (to 7th February), is the first in France devoted to this intriguing painter who in 1699 accompanied the French ambassador Charles Ferriol, baron d’Argental, to Constantinople.

Vanmour subsequently settled in the fabled capital of the Ottoman Empire, where he lived out his remaining thirty-eight years. The show coincides with the ‘Saison de la Turquie en France’ and, as the title implies – ‘Sublime Porte’ refers to the Bâbıâli, or gate protecting the principal state departments in Con stantinople – the emphasis is on Vanmour’s lengthy foreign sojourn.

Indeed, it would have been impossible to do otherwise: nothing has surfaced of Vanmour’s œuvre before his arrival in Constantinople. Yet he was born in 1671 in Valenciennes, was raised in a prosperous and artistic milieu and apparently had already trained as a painter in 1690, the year in which he squabbled with the local art guild, the Confrérie Saint-Luc. It is also thought that Vanmour may have practised in Paris at some point between 1693 and 1699, but this remains unsubstantiated.

Neither is Vanmour’s surviving Turkish œuvre particularly extensive. The show is organised in concert with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, which holds the largest collection of works by Vanmour – sixty-five paintings, the bequest of the Dutch ambassador to Constantinople Cornelis Calkoen (1696–1764). Calkoen acquired not only Vanmour’s rather stiff depictions of official court life but also many of his portraits and genre scenes, presumably to act as souvenirs of contemporary Turkish life. These are depictions of local dignitaries, such as the study of the white-clad Grand Vizir Nevsehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha (Fig.56), and of customs, such as Greek men and women dancing the khorra (Fig.57). Aside from their evident anthropological interest, these are the liveliest and most whimsical of the works shown. Certain compositions, including the dance scene, recall the fête galante tradition, not least for their themes of mysterious and exclusive rites; one might wish that the curators had explored connections between Vanmour and his valenciennois confrères more deeply.

The rather cramped temporary exhibition space is provided with an orientalising decor; excellent lighting promotes the careful examination of the cabinet-sized pictures, and Vanmour’s paintings come off considerably better in life than in the accompanying catalogue’s rather dim, albeit abundant, reproductions: the palettes are luminous, punctuated with unexpected

56. The Grand Vizir Nevsehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha,

by Jean Baptiste Vanmour. Canvas, 33.5 by 27 cm.

(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; exh. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes).

colour combinations perhaps intended to underscore the exotic subject-matter. At the same time, the presence of a shimmering bindalli, or bridal outfit, from the Musée du Quai Branly serves as a reminder that Vanmour’s observations were based on first-hand experience and were not conjured up by a romantic imagination. Vanmour’s skill as a colourist is underlined by a useful discussion of attributions: considerable confusion has

arisen from a longstanding habit of attributing to him any painting with a turquerie theme. Well-chosen comparisons between original works and studio productions show the latter to be very pedestrian.

The paintings are elegantly displayed on walls painted in shades such as dark crimson, which effectively evokes the hushed splendour of the interiors of the city dubbed ‘la nouvelle Rome’. The multicoloured cushions strewn upon the floor before a large screen with a changing display of engravings drawn from the Recueil de cent estampes représentant différentes nations du Levant, or Recueil Ferriol – an exceptional collection of one hundred engravings after paintings of Turkish costumes – also provides a tacit, if not somewhat hackneyed, evocation of eighteenth-century conceptions of exoticism and the Orient.

Notwithstanding these atmospheric touches, it is to be regretted that the exhibition is not more instructive. Some profitable themes – Vanmour’s involvement with Constantinople’s international communities, for instance – are skimmed over, as are individual paintings that would have benefited from more extensive commentary. The portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu with her son, Edward Wortley Montagu (cat. no.205) might have lent itself variously to discourses on the construction of femininity or national identity, particularly as it hung near an engraving of a Persian woman after Vanmour by Gérard Jean-Baptiste Scotin the Elder. The same could be said of the final room devoted to the question of Vanmour’s place in the development of eighteenthcentury turquerie. Clearly numerous artists derived inspiration from the Recueil Ferriol, as

57. Greek men and women dancing the khorra, by Jean Baptiste Vanmour. Canvas, 44.5 by 58 cm. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; exh. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes). the burlington ma g a z i n e

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shown by the formal comparisons between these engravings after Vanmour’s paintings and works by subsequent artists (unfortunately, Ingres, the most notable protagonist of French Orientalism in the early nineteenth century, is palpably absent here, although he owned an edition of the Recueil Ferriol and makes an appearance in the exhibition catalogue). At the same time, it seems insufficient to attach the importance of engravings after Vanmour to their sole function as sources of compositional and iconographic inspiration or artistic copybook, so to speak. In this same vein, the exhibition ends, fittingly, with the Woman with a tambourine in Turkish dress (no.191) by Jean-Etienne Liotard, the other eighteenthcentury European artist to famously frequent the East, but does not take the opportunity to explore the diffuse processes of emulation, appropriation and substitution implied

by Liotard’s work. However, it seems that something has begun to shift in the time elapsed between the two painters: Vanmour’s anthropological scenes are firmly tied to quotidian reality. In contrast, Liotard’s subject is no longer forthrightly designated as a ‘Turkish woman’, suitably clad as such.

Rather, she wears a prototypical costume that may easily be discarded for another.

In the catalogue1 Seth Gopin presents excellent new archival material on Vanmour’s French origins and early life and a detailed, chronologically ordered investigation into the painter’s influence; and Eveline Sint Nicolaas, curator at the Rijksmuseum, has contributed a substantial essay on Vanmour’s collectors. It is, in the end, Gopin’s commentary – instead of the exhibition itself – that argues for Vanmour’s contemporary relevance and invites us to consider anew a painter who, long before globalisation, provided glimpses of a society far from home.

1

Catalogue: Jean Baptiste Vanmour 1671–1737, Peintre de la Sublime Porte. By Seth Gopin and Eveline Sint Nicolaas. 216 pp. incl. 194 col. + 24 b. & w. ills.

(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes, 2009), €33.

ISBN 978–2–912241–17–7.

Hendrick Avercamp Amsterdam and Washington

by QUENTIN BUVELOT

European country do people get so excited about the winter season as in the Netherlands, especially because it involves skating on natural ice. Foreigners are amused by the collective madness, or ‘ice fever’, that takes hold of the population during the socalled Elfstedentocht (journey of eleven towns), when droves of people embark on a two hundred-kilometre race on the frozen waterways of Friesland. The fact that the last one was held in 1997 is perhaps another indication of

IN NO OTHER

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58. On the ice, by Hendrick Avercamp. c.1609. Panel, 36 by 71 cm. (Mauritshuis, The Hague; exh. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

climate change. However, devotees of the season were able to get their fill on the annual ice rink situated in front of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, which this time takes on special significance because of the exhibition in the Museum: Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634): The Little Ice Age (to 15th February; then at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; 21st March to 5th July). It is the first exhibition exclusively devoted to the artist,1 who was the first to specialise in winter landscapes and the activities associated with the season, part of a general trend among artists in early seventeenth-century Holland to focus on specific genres to make themselves stand out in a competitive free market for paintings.

There is a direct relationship between the popularity of this particular genre and the exceptional climatic conditions of the period.

From c.1550 to 1850 north-west Europe went through a period of extremely cold winters and relatively cool summers, also known as ‘the little ice age’. In the Netherlands two thirds of the winters between 1600 and 1700 were so cold that the country would be in the grip of prolonged periods of frost and snow, with thick ice covering the waterways, so important for transport, thus bringing much of public life to a standstill. Indeed, precisely in the period when Avercamp was active, the country endured its harshest winters.

A master at depicting the effects of snow and ice on the intensity of light and colours, Avercamp managed to capture the atmosphere of winter without ever venturing to paint actual snowfall. The early work of the Amsterdam-born Avercamp who, after an apprenticeship in that city with Pieter Isaacsz (1568–1625) and probably also Gillis van Coninxloo (1544–1607), moved to the more remote town of Kampen, displays the unmistakable influence of the Flemish landscape tradition as it had developed in Antwerp, beginning with Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and which enjoyed a final flowering in the northern Netherlands – especially in Amsterdam – after the arrival of Flemish

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immigrants around 1600. Characteristic of these early works is the presence of large trees in the foreground acting as a repoussoir; the theatrical construction of the landscape by placing the horizon high; the localised colour accents; and the anecdotal character of the scene. Gradually Avercamp lowered the horizon to create a more natural space and limited the number of figures, as can be seen in this exhibition in a painting dated 1609 from a private collection and in an undated work from the Mauritshuis, The Hague (Fig.58). The chronology within Avercamp’s œuvre is difficult to determine because he dated very few works, the earliest being 1608. The signatures provide no guidance either because Avercamp almost always signed with the monogram ‘HA’. On the basis of style and composition an attempt has been made to establish a chronology, but the artist’s development proved to be more erratic than expected, if only because certain motifs constantly recur, which also hampers the dating of works in which the architecture or costumes might have provided some indication. In the exhibition catalogue this and many other topics are explored in depth.2 This comprehensive and richly illustrated publication is an extremely important addition to the literature on the painter, especially because the last monograph devoted to Avercamp is now very much outdated.3 Despite the restricted subject-matter – a few summer landscapes such as that in the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, as well as a few drawings, form the exceptions to the rule – the exhibition is an uplifting feast for the eye.

These works bear careful scrutiny as numerous details are discovered only upon closer inspection, while a knowledge of iconography is hardly essential to understand what is depicted. With great attention to anecdotal details, Avercamp paints figures, young and old, whose meticulously rendered costumes make clear that they come from all walks of life. Indeed, contemporaries commented on how activities on ice brought down social barriers, although the various groups in

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Avercamp’s scenes do not seem to engage with each other very much; couples glide hand in hand over the ice, colf is being played (a forerunner of modern ice hockey; in one painting (private collection) the players keep the score in the ice, which the artist has indicated by scratching in the wet paint); a woman does the laundry in a hole in the ice where a half-sunken boat is stranded; and wood is chopped. We find amusing details such as the bare buttocks visible under the skirt of a woman who has just fallen over.

Avercamp shows not only the pleasures of winter in a public space, but also has an eye for the possible risks, such as a horse-drawn sledge that has fallen through the ice, horses and all, or an injured skater who is bleeding.

Here the treacherous nature of the ice may symbolise life’s unpredictability, a comparison made in contemporary literature. We also see in several paintings bodies dangling from the gallows, an everyday reality that does not necessarily have a deeper meaning.

Bystanders, at any rate, do not appear distracted by it.

The drawings provide the major surprise of the exhibition. Not only do they display an unexpected diversity in subject-matter – in addition to winter and summer landscapes we find a night piece and a seascape, from which we may conclude that Avercamp did not shun experiment – but they are also of high quality.

It is striking how Avercamp blurs the boundary between drawing and painting; some paintings lie somewhere between a coloured drawing and a drawn painting, while he employs a remarkably linear technique to indicate the shadows of skating figures. In addition to ‘drawing with paint’, Avercamp does indeed seem to have used a dry medium on top of the paint layer.

The Rijksmuseum’s choice of showing the paintings and drawings together is welcome for various reasons. Not only does it prevent a too-monotonous presentation, but one can easily understand Avercamp’s working procedure, for example through the combination of his Skaters outside the walls of Kampen (Fig.60) – his only painting to show a correct representation of a town – with the drawn profile of Kampen from the English Royal

60. Skaters outside the walls of Kampen, by Hendrick Avercamp. c.1613–15. Panel, 44.5 by 72.5 cm. (Private collection; exh. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

Collection that underpins the composition (Fig.59), or through the juxtaposition of figure studies with paintings in which these figures reappear.4 Avercamp made use of a fixed repertory of motifs from which to draw but avoided repetition by always putting his figures into a different context. Recent technical examination at the Rijksmuseum by Ige Verslype and Arie Wallert has demonstrated that Avercamp did not adhere to a clear-cut preliminary design but invented parts of the composition as he went along. In addition to departing from the underdrawing, he made several adjustments while painting, which explains the lack of underdrawing for some of the figures. The technical examination by Verslype and Wallert also found that the painter made clever use of the optical properties of certain pigments to convey the wet, icy cold.

Seventeenth-century sources inform us that Avercamp was deaf and mute (hence his nickname ‘the Stomme van Kampen’: ‘the mute from Kampen’), and it is thus particularly sympathetic that the Museum has taken the

59. View of Kampen, by Hendrick Avercamp. c.1613–15. Pen and brown ink, wash over graphite, 12.2 by 31 cm.

(Royal Collection, London; exh. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

initiative to provide a programme for deaf and hearing-impaired visitors. In co-operation with the Dutch Centre for Sign Language, signs for more than 150 words dealing with museums and looking at art have been developed, while there are tours in sign language and a special educational programme for the deaf has been initiated.

1 In 1948 the Mauritshuis showed twenty-two Avercamp drawings from the Royal Collection in London; see A.B. de Vries and A. Blunt: exh. cat.

Masterpieces of the Dutch School from the Collection of H.M. the King of England on the Occasion of the 50-Year Reign of Queen Wilhelmina, The Hague (Mauritshuis) 1948, nos.11–33. In 1982 a selection of paintings by Hendrick and Barent Avercamp was seen in Amsterdam and Zwolle; see A. Blankert et al.: exh. cat. Frozen Silence: Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634) – Barent Avercamp (1612–1679), paintings from museums and private collections, Amsterdam (K. & V. Waterman Gallery) and Zwolle (Provinciehuis) 1982. More recently, works by Hendrick were also shown in a general survey of winter landscapes at The Hague; see A. van Suchtelen et al.: Holland frozen in time: The Dutch winter landscape in the Golden Age, The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2001–02.

2 Catalogue: Hendrick Avercamp: de meester van het ijsgezicht. By Pieter Roelofs, with contributions by Jonathan Bikker, Adriaan de Kraker, Bianca du Mortier, Marijn Schapelhouman, Ige Verslype and Arie Wallert. 224 pp. incl. 175 col. ills. (Nieuw Amsterdam Publishers, Amsterdam, 2009), €24.95.

ISBN 978–90–8689–0569 (Dutch edition); ISBN 978–90–8689–059–0 (English edition). Unfortunately, the list of works exhibited on pp.175–79 has no catalogue numbers, which makes it difficult to refer to.

3 C.J. Welcker, revised and edited by D.J. Hensbroekvan der Poel: Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634) bijgenaamd ‘De Stomme van Campen’ en Barent Avercamp (1612–79): ‘Schilders tot Campen’, Doornspijk 1979.

4 The organisers chose not to exhibit works by Hendrick’s nephew Barent Avercamp (1612/13–79), who possibly was a pupil of Hendrick but did not match his talent. In Barent’s work, just as in that of another follower, Arent Arentsz Cabel (1585/86–1631), motifs found in the work of Hendrick Avercamp suggest that both had access to Hendrick’s drawings.

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Beyond the Dutch Utrecht

by TONY GODFREY D E S P I T E I N D O N E S I A H A V I N G the fourth largest population in the world and a thriving arts scene, the country’s art, other than tourist batiks, is rarely seen in the West. It is noted in the catalogue for the exhibition Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands and the Visual Arts, from 1900 until now at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (closed 10th January),1 that symptomatically between 1945 and 1995 the only time Indonesia was represented at an International event was at the São Paulo Biennale in 1955. This exhibition, therefore, was welcome but, as the subtitle suggests, it presented Indonesian art within a particular framework: its relationship to the Netherlands. Whereas for Indonesians the declaration of independence from their Dutch overlords in 1945 was liberating and the subsequent war with the Dutch was the event that, above all, unified an archipelago of disparate islands, for the Dutch this was traumatic: Queen Juliana famously cried when in 1949 she had to sign the granting of independence. The expulsion of all Dutch nationals in 1957 marked both a low point in subsequent relations and a formal caesura in cultural links. Nevertheless, as the catalogue points out, one in ten people in the Netherlands have links to Indonesia by their family history. This exhibition can be said to have had a therapeutic role for a Dutch audience, reuniting them, as it were, with a ‘lost child’.

The exhibition was in two parts: the first gave a chronological survey of Indonesian art, the second a selection of Dutch art that had Indonesia as its subject-matter. There was an obvious mismatch here for, apart from the earliest section of the Indonesian part which contained beautiful Javan landscapes (the famous mooi Indië paintings) made by Indonesian artists such as Abdullah for consumption by exclusively Dutch clients, there was little or no relationship to Dutch art. Although Van Gogh was a probable influence on key expressionist artists such as Affandi (1907–90) and Hendra Gunawan (1918–83) who sought to make a national art, it was, above all, more an opposition to mooi Indië as colonial kitsch that united them.

As a selection of Indonesian post-War art this was inevitably too small (twenty-six large works plus some drawings) to give any real sense of the complexity of the last sixty years. Missing, for example, even though there was an article specifically about it in the catalogue, was Jim Supangkat’s conceptual piece Ken Dedes (1975), which is often taken to symbolise the shift from modernism to a more confrontational form of contemporary art. Nor was there anything from the Bandung School or from Bali, but, rather, a narrow concentration on the more expressionist art associated with the art school and

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61. Guerilla combatants, by Hendra Gunawan. 1949.

Canvas, 185 by 125 cm. (Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam; exh. Centraal Museum, Utrecht).

scene in Yogyakarta. Even within that there were curious omissions – I Nyoman Masriadi, currently the most famous artist there, being one. Nevertheless there were some excellent pieces such as Hendra’s Guerilla combatants (Fig.61), Jompet’s War of Java, Do you remember? #3 (Fig.63) and Agus Suwage’s Pressure and pleasure.

Hendra had been a participant in the rebellion and records this in his typically eclectic style – a mixture of journalese and Gauguin. Both Jompet’s and Suwage’s recent pieces were political although difficult to simplify as allegory: Jompet’s work, which featured a film and a noisy soundtrack of drumming, referenced the partly Europeanised uniforms of the Sultan of Yogyakarta’s army but only as a ghostly and carnivalesque spectacle; Suwage’s work, made at the time when Suharto’s government was collapsing, evokes the fears and

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desires of that period – a military tent is covered inside with paintings of soft-porn films and images of Suwage himself. The soundtrack, of hysterical radio broadcasts of the period, did not seem particularly relevant.

An installation piece by Mella Jaarsma, The square body (Fig.62), was given a central position. As a Dutch woman who has lived in Yogyakarta for many years and has helped co-found the Cemeti art space there, she is presented here as having symbolically bridged the divide between the nations – a fearful responsibility to put on an artist! Nevertheless it was a beautiful piece: at the opening three women wore square dresses with lights attached projecting the shadows of old wayang (Javan puppets) figures. Subsequently the dresses alone and videos of the performance filled the space.

Small though it was, the Indonesian section was far more impressive than the Dutch part of the exhibition. Sadly, Fiona Tan – the most famous living Dutch artist with Indonesian connections – was represented only by a slight work. Other recent examples were interesting rather than compelling. As the chief curator, Meta Knol, laments in her catalogue essay ‘many Dutch artists are still clinging to the images from before the 1949 break’. Certainly much of the older Dutch art on show here were evocations of a sunny Javanese landscape replete with contented peasants.

One place where there was a continuing post-War influence of the Dutch on Indonesia was the art school at Bandung where artists such as Ries Mulder taught. But although several paintings by Mulder were shown – very competent cubistic landscapes in the style of Jacques Villon – oddly there were no examples of his Indonesian followers, such as Ahmad Sadali.

However, for all one’s cavils about the exhibition, there is no gainsaying the usefulness and quality of the catalogue, which describes itself as a book, and which puts an acknowledged emphasis on Indonesian art because it ‘is still virtually unknown among the Dutch museumgoing public’. Many 62. The square body, by Mella Jaarsma. 2009.

Fabric, stainless steel, lamps, batteries, electricity cables and leather, 180 by 180 by 160 cm. (Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta; exh. Centraal Museum, Utrecht).

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Philips Wouwerman Kassel and The Hague

by LUUK PIJL

of equine subjects were highly appreciated during his lifetime, but they became immensely popular, especially in Germany and France, after his premature death in 1668. Their skilful and varied depiction of horses, elegantly rendered trees and beautifully observed skies are among the best that seventeenth-century Dutch painting has to offer. In the eighteenth century his elaborate hunting scenes full of human incident fetched enormous prices. As a result, there emerged around 1700 a whole legion of followers and imitators working in his style.

Fakes, often carrying Wouwerman’s signature, as well as works in his manner, were produced in large quantities: the well-informed collector Caroline Louise von Baden, anxious to purchase first-rate Dutch works, is reported to have exclaimed around 1760: ‘I fear these Wouwerman copies like fire’. In addition to the many paintings inspired by the master, numerous print series after his designs were produced throughout Europe in order to cater to the appetite for Wouwerman’s inventions.

It comes as no surprise that the first catalogue of Wouwerman’s paintings, printed in 1829, was compiled by the art dealer John Smith, whose initial intention was to promote and consolidate the market for his chosen artist. Every picture listed by Smith ends with a valuation and as such his volumes can be considered as price guides. Smith listed 522 paintings by Wouwerman, a figure that was doubled by Cornelis Hofstede Groot in 1908.

The catalogue raisonné of his paintings by Birgit Schumacher, published in 2006, considers 571 works as autograph.1 Before Schumacher’s book, recent art historians had paid PHILIPS WOUWERMAN’S PAINTINGS

63. War of Java, Do you remember? #3, by Jompet Kuswidananto. 2008. Electronic installation, two fake rifles, four drums, four lights, an LCD monitor, six pairs of boots, six hats and two flags, 300 by 400 by 300 cm. (Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta; exh.

Centraal Museum, Utrecht).

works not in the exhibition – by Ahmad Sadali for instance – are illustrated in it. Some essays look at aspects omitted from the exhibition: the voracious collecting of the first president, Sukarno, the importance of Wayang, the instability caused by the lack of a museum culture in Indonesia and the current dominance of a market chiefly led by the auction house. Remco Raben’s essay is especially useful in attacking many of the normal romanticised assumptions about Indonesian art: he points out that many of the first generation of artists were children of civil servants and hence allowed a Western style education. They looked to Western modernism – not specifically Dutch – as a way of making a new national art, of, so to speak, ‘cutting their clothes from the master’s wardrobe’. He throws doubt on the avowed revolutionary character of the artists of this generation and points out how keen they were to go abroad. Another function of this book is, as the Indonesian co-curator, Enin Suprianto, puts it, to offset the Indonesian lack of historical awareness. Without doubt this is a major contribution to the as yet underdeveloped study of Indonesian art history.

little attention to Wouwerman, in spite of his strong showing on the art market. Although good examples of his paintings have been included in general exhibitions on Dutch art, he has never received the honour of a one-man show. The curators of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel, and the Mauritshuis, The Hague, both collections with important examples by Wouwerman, must have felt it was time to present his work to a new and broader audience and this they have done with On Horseback! The World of Philips Wouwerman, currently at the Mauritshuis (to 28th February).

Every writer on Wouwerman, starting with Arnold Houbraken, reflects on his high output in combination with his originality: indeed it is remarkable what a sustained level of accomplishment he maintained compared with, for example, a similar master like Nicolaes Berchem, whose œuvre is much more uneven.

As far as Wouwerman’s subjects are concerned, he was not a truly great innovator but he perfected the subject-matter of masters of earlier generations. The evident influence of Pieter van Laer, who returned to Haarlem from Rome in 1639, is generally acknowledged and Wouwerman is reported to have owned drawings by Van Laer, who died in or after 1642. Until now the possible impact of Paulus Potter on Wouwerman’s work has been little discussed. Potter, a true prodigy, made use of similar subjects and motifs. Scenes with blacksmiths are found in both masters’ works, and certain motifs, such as a strongly lit willow tree besides an animal or two, are in the same spirit. Given Wouwerman’s great skill in painting horses, it is somewhat surprising that no equestrian portrait by him is known.

Equestrian portraits were not common in the Republic, but there are a few famous examples

by Rembrandt, Paulus Potter, Thomas de Keyser and a few masters of lesser merit.

From an œuvre of over six hundred paintings, the selection of works on view was 64. Hunters near a cistern, by Philips Wouwerman. 1656.

Canvas, 98 by 111 cm.

(Private collection; exh. Mauritshuis, The Hague).

1 Catalogue: Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands and the Visual Arts, from 1900 until now. Edited by Meta Knol, Remco Raben and Kitty Zijlmans. 200 pp. incl. 113 col. ills. (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2009), €24.50. ISBN 978–94–6022–059–3. Available in Dutch and English. The publication contains twenty-seven essays by the editors and other authors.

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Botticelli Frankfurt

by SCOTT NETHERSOLE

more consistently presented as the embodiment of the spirit of late fifteenth-century Florence than Botticelli.

The current exhibition at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (to 28th February), which serendipitously marks the quincentennial of the artist’s death, is no different. The show does not seek to portray the entirety of Botticelli’s output, a goal which would be misguided and fruitless anywhere but at the Uffizi. It aims instead to contextualise the Städel’s Idealised female portrait, the so-called Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as a nymph (cat. no.1; Fig.66) firmly within a culture of myth-making, commemoration and festival; within the various thematic preoccupations of his art; and in relation to the art and concerns of his contemporaries. Judged in these terms, it is a resounding success. The assembled array of paintings, drawings, engravings, books, tapestries, relief sculpture, medals, armour and cameos is truly impressive, their display sensitive and the relationships between them thought-provoking and considered.

The exhibition is arranged in three sections: likeness, myth and devotion. The first two are introduced by pairing, as thematic pendants, the ‘Simonetta’ with the posthumous portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici from Washington (no.5). Simonetta – the regina della bellezza of Giuliano’s joust in 1475 – died prematurely in 1476, only a few years before Giuliano’s assassination. The tragic turn of events, and the political machinations that followed the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478, set the stage for their transformation into cult figures, a process in which portraiture played a seminal role. The game of identifying Simonetta, ‘this sweet Florentine maiden, this unsmirched beauty of the Medici court’, preoccupied Victorian and Edwardian scholars.1 In recent years it has again become fashionable, but rather than seek her actual likeness, art historians are content to find her in images of ideal beauty. On balance, the arguments which are advanced in the accompanying catalogue in favour of the Frankfurt picture are convincing, but they should not be taken as conclusive.2 Nonetheless, that the panel shows an idealised, perhaps even mythologised, beauty can hardly be doubted and so it perfectly introduces the twin concerns of ‘likeness’ and ‘myth’ that unify the first part of the exhibition on the lower floor.

The show is characterised by several rewarding juxtapositions, the first of which is the Washington portrait of Giuliano with the version that once belonged to Giovanni Morelli (no.6; Accademia Carrara, Bergamo).

Botticelli’s elegant shorthand for suggesting a hidden cheek by a brief contour line that rises from behind the philtrum is misunderstood and botched in the Bergamo picture, which is FEW PAINTERS HAVE BEEN

65. Cavalry battle, by Philips Wouwerman. c.1655–60. Canvas, 127 by 245 cm. (Mauritshuis, The Hague).

deliberately restricted. In The Hague thirtythree paintings are on display, thirty-one of which are described in the catalogue, with two recently restored stable scenes from the Mauritshuis’s own collection being included hors catalogue. The rather weak Soldiers on the march (cat. no.29; shown in Kassel), has luckily been replaced by a comparable, but much stronger work (Schumacher A283). The paintings are complemented by a selection of ten fine drawings from the holdings of the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, the British Museum, London, and the Fodor collection in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum. An interesting feature of Wouwerman’s rare drawings is that the sheets are sometimes folded, which probably means that they were sent to patrons to gain approval for a planned work in oil.

Owing to the severe selection, the hang at the Mauritshuis is spacious, doing full justice to individual paintings. Several aspects of Wouwerman’s output are well presented: fine panoramic landscapes, rural scenes, stable interiors, hunting parties, winter landscapes, a stormy sea, an allegory and a scene from Ovid.

In the larger and more elaborate paintings the figures, horses and other animals are often rendered on a similar scale to those in the smaller works. Thus, it is a surprise when Wouwerman sets up a composition on a more monumental scale. The star of the show, Hunters near a cistern (no.20; Fig.64), demonstrates how capable he was of working on a large scale. Here the vibrant execution certainly adds to the suggested movement of the figures and animals. Another highlight of the show is Wouwerman’s largest extant painting, the Cavalry battle from the Mauritshuis (no.18; Fig.65). It was purchased in 1764 by Willliam V for the, at the time, astronomical sum of 4,575 guilders. Both monumental paintings were executed during the second half of the 1650s and they illustrate that during that period Wouwerman was at the peak of his powers.

In spite of the rather limited number of works on show, the richness and variety of Wouwerman’s output is well represented.

However, certain aspects of his œuvre could

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have been more strongly in evidence. For example, in his beach scenes he reaches a very high level in the rendition of the beautifully atmospheric silvery light. This scene is represented in the excellent painting from the National Gallery, London (no.15), but the actual beach in that painting occupies only a quarter of the horizon. Wouwerman’s paintings on copper supports are, due to his highly finished technique and their mint condition, among his most enjoyable paintings. There is one superb example on this support, The stag hunt from the De Mol van Otterloo collection (no.22), but one or two more examples, such as the very beautiful works in the Städel, Frankfurt, or the Louvre (Schumacher A25 and A155) would have strengthened the representation of Wouwerman’s achievements in this particular medium. It seems that the organisers were shy of repetition, but the showing of the National Gallery’s Stable scene (no.19) next to two similar works from the Mauritshuis is indeed instructive of how Wouwerman chose different groupings of figures and of how his work developed.

The very well-designed catalogue2 contains three introductory essays: Frederik Duparc on Wouwerman’s stylistic development; Kathrin Bürger on his influence and the reception of his work; and Gerdien Wuestman on prints made after Wouwerman. The catalogue entries by Quentin Buvelot are exemplary and the illustrations, often with details, are of very fine quality. The organisers should be congratulated on their highly successful attempt to present the work of Wouwerman at its finest. The balanced display in the intimate and cleverly lit spaces of the Maurits huis does full justice to his qualities.

1 B. Schumacher: Philips Wouwerman. The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, Doornspijk 2006; it was reviewed by the present writer in this Magazine, 149 (2007), pp.113–14.

2 Catalogue: Philips Wouwerman 1619–1668. By Frederik Duparc and Quentin Buvelot, with contributions

by Kathrin Bürger, Gerdien Wuestman and others. 207 pp. incl. 167 col. + b. & w. ills. (Waanders Publishers, Zwolle, 2009), €29.90. ISBN 978–90–4008–5925.

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66. Idealised female portrait, known as Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as a nymph, by Sandro Botticelli. Early 1480s.

Panel, 81.8 by 54 cm. (Städel Museum, Frankfurt).

rightly given to his workshop. The proximity of the Berlin and Turin canvases of Venus (nos.34 and 35) is another stimulating comparison that comes quickly on its heels. They are evidently by different hands within the bottega, with only the Berlin version bearing the gilded hair that is encountered in both autograph and shop products. Along with other exhibits, they act as a reminder of the great fluctuations in quality in the Botticelli shop and of the work which still needs to be done in distinguishing these anonymous, and sometimes maladroit, hands.

The section dedicated to portraits is comprehensive and reveals Botticelli’s flowering as a quasi-abstract linear designer. Even so, caution might have been advisable in the attributions of the women from Altenburg

(no.15) and a private collection (no.13), while Riggisberg’s St Thomas Aquinas (no.22) should probably be removed from his circle altogether. By contrast, the Pitti’s Portrait of a lady (no.14; Fig.68) shines as a fully autograph work of the 1480s, despite the questions that have traditionally been raised over the attribution. In decent lighting, the pentiments in the architecture (the removal of the window sill and the cyma moulding to the architrave) show a desire to eradicate all superfluous detail in creating a simplified composition, matched by the change in the profile of the neck and shoulder, such that a single line descends through the centre of the cloth headpiece, down the back of the neck, across the single band of the necklace and around the curve of the breast. Such a developed linear consciousness is surely the hallmark of Botticelli’s art, particularly from the early 1480s onwards.

Upstairs, the rooms are given over to works on a sacred theme, initiated by a display of several ideals of womanhood, from Verrocchio’s black-chalk drawing from Christ Church, Oxford (no.48), to various images of the Virgin, both sculpted and painted. With the exception of the S. Martino alla Scala Annunciation (no.49) which, at over five and a half metres in width, dominates the space, the presence of Verrocchio is strongly felt here, whether because Botticelli may have frequented his workshop in the late 1460s or because of his dominant cultural presence in Florence during the 1470s. Although each attribution has the weight of received wisdom behind it, this section is bound to provoke debate given the near impossibility of reconstructing Verrocchio’s work as a painter.

In the opinion of the present reviewer, for example, the Madonna del mare (no.47; Accademia, Florence) is closer to Filippino Lippi than Verrocchio, with his characteristic hesitancy of touch, silverine palette and a demure Virgin of slight and delicate proportions.

The subsequent section is encircled by tondi, a form in which the Botticelli shop seems to have specialised. It suffers from a lack of high-quality examples, but the visitor

68. Portrait of a lady, by Sandro Botticelli. 1480s. Panel, 61 by 40 cm. (Palazzo Pitti, Florence; exh. Städel Museum, Frankfurt).

quickly passes to the rare nude studies (nos.57 and 58), before arriving at the true highlight of the show in the next room: the four spalliera panels showing the life and miracles of St Zenobius (nos.62–65), assembled for the first time since they were together in the Rondinelli Collection in Florence. While their differences in size and figure scale have long been known, stylistic distinctions between the London and New York panels on the one hand, and the Dresden example on the other, have perhaps not been fully appreciated. The latter is more tightly organised and painted with a greater attention to detail. Compare, for example, the grotesques in the pilasters, which in the Dresden version (Fig.67) are complete with masks and chimerae en grisaille, reduced in the London

67. The life and miracles of St Zenobius, by Sandro Botticelli. Probably late 1490s. Panel, 66 by 182 cm. (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden; exh. Städel Museum, Frankfurt). the burlington ma g a z i n e

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picture to simple rinceau. Similar points could be made about the treatment of drapery and the complete eradication of charming observations such as the keyhole on the chest below the bed, or the still life resting on the bedhead.

It is difficult to account for these changes, which seem to imply an increased speed of execution. It is possible that they were intended for different spaces in the room, but it is also conceivable that the Dresden picture was painted earlier than its London and New York counterparts. Although it represents the final scenes in the narrative, it contains the allimportant event of the miracle of the dead boy (which had previously been represented on the saint’s reliquary by Lorenzo Ghiberti), along with Zenobius’ own death. If the patron had originally only planned one scene, then this would have been it.

The exhibition concludes with Botticelli’s most pious works. It centres on the Wemyss Adoration of the Christ Child (no.66) and the Pitti’s Virgin and Child with the young St John (no.70), two large, vertical-format paintings.

The room thus spans the artist’s career, from the 1480s to the early sixteenth century, and – as elsewhere in the show – presents Botticelli as acutely sensitive to the artistic developments around him, carefully assimilating the lessons of others, whether in the expressions of piety that overtook Florentine art in the 1490s (see the two versions of the Man of sorrows; nos.77 and 78, whose attributions should be swapped on qualitative grounds), or the stylistic monumentality of the new century.

The Pitti canvas, however idiosyncratic, could be read as representing the elderly painter’s response to Michelangelo, whom he is documented as knowing.

The exhibition’s main fault lies in inconsistent and erratic attributions. To choose but one example, the Blaffer Foundation tondo of the Adoration of the Christ Child (no.53), with its ‘frog-like’ child, is surely a workshop product. It must be close in date to the Pitti Virgin and Child with the young St John, but lacks its monumental linearity and complex play of drapery. The yellow cloak of Joseph in the tondo is globular and crudely modelled. It would also have been useful to date the exhibits, if only to guard against the sense that the succession from pagan mythologies to sacred paintings reflected a chronological movement from Laurentian to Savonarolan Florence. But with few documented works and an abundance of opinions, dating Botticelli is problematic.

The catalogue strikes a good balance between succinct summaries of current scholarship and new research, albeit somewhat hastily edited. Of particular note is Lorenza Melli’s essay, which includes the remarkable discovery that the British Museum Head of a youth (inv. no.1895,0915.450; not exhibited) is in fact a study for Mercury in the Primavera, an observation so obvious now that it has been pointed out that one wonders why it has taken so long to realise.

In 1488 the humanist Ugolino Verino compared Botticelli to the ancient painter

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Apelles, for ‘his name is now known everywhere’.3 This has not, as is well known, always been the case. But to judge from the weekend queues both inside and outside the Städel Museum, it is as true today as it was in the late fifteenth century. The curators of that institution are to be congratulated for bravely presenting an artist whose works can seldom travel, whose linear style can be an acquired taste and whose intellectual context is often too recondite to be popular.

1 D. Clayton Calthrop: ‘La bella Simonetta: The spring of the Italian renaissance’, The Connoisseur 8/4 (Jan/April 1904), p.202.

2 Catalogue: Botticelli: Likeness, myth, devotion. Edited

by A. Schumacher. 372 pp. incl. 132 col. + 25 b. & w. ills. (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2009), €39.90. ISBN 978–3–7757–2481–4. The catalogue is also published in German under the title Botticelli: Bildnis, Mythos, Andacht. ISBN 978–3–7757–2480–7. The reviewer consulted the English-language edition.

3 ‘. . . iam notum est nomen ubique suum’, cited and translated in R. Lightbown: Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, London 1989, p.235.

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld Friedrichshafen

by OLIVER TOSTMANN

German Baroque painters are rare, so it is particularly enjoyable to visit a show entirely devoted to Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (1609–84). Little known in Britain, his works are scattered throughout collections in Germany, Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic, a dispersal that reflects the artist’s errant life, wandering from Swabia to Rome and to Naples, where he spent seventeen years from 1633 to 1651, returning to southern Germany via Venice in the spring of 1651 and dying in Augsburg in 1684. Schönfeld’s style was dependent on late Mannerist

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models and is characterised by slender, elongated figures, refined and graceful if somewhat asexual, with small puppet-like heads, often placed in fantastic architectural landscapes.

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld. Welt der Götter, Heiligen und Heldenmythen at the Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen (to 7th Feb ruary), includes approximately fifty paintings, drawings and prints spanning the artist’s entire career.1 As the title indicates, the exhibition focuses mainly on various themes in the artist’s œuvre, and in this respect it breaks new ground, since the last show, held in Ulm in 1967, was concerned more with establishing Schönfeld’s œuvre.2 The present, relatively small exhibition of history paintings, allegories and genre scenes largely confirms Joachim von Sandrart’s elegantly phrased praise of Schönfeld’s inventiveness as an ‘Uberfluss wolaufgeraumter Gedanken’ (‘superabundance of judicious thoughts’). The curators attempted to flesh out Schönfeld’s artistic profile by careful comparisons and combinations, without, however, including works by other artists. Yet the emphasis on subject-matter affects the clarity and chronological coherence of the show: in the course of his extensive travels, Schönfeld altered his style several times and, for the present reviewer, it was not always easy to follow his development. The first gallery is intended to sum up the artist’s œuvre, with works ranging from the 1630s to 1680; it is followed by five galleries devoted to specific themes.

Cupid handing his wings to Time (cat. no.1; Fig.69) dates from 1637–38 when Schönfeld was living in Rome. Peculiarly for this period, a cold blue light envelops the antique ruins, the only colour being provided by the bright red and deep blue of the protagonists’ cloaks.

Schönfeld took care over details: for example the papers lying beside Time incorporate images of flying men, and an antique relief directly above him glimmers in the semidarkness, animating the scene beneath it. The bizarre character of Schönfeld’s paintings was

69. Cupid handing his wings to Time, by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld. c.1637–38.

Canvas, 94 by 129 cm.

(Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome; exh.

Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen).

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70. Christ on the Mount of Olives, by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld. c.1670–75. Copper, 26.1 by 21 cm. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; exh. Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen).

admired by sophisticated collectors such as Flavio Chigi, the notorious nephew of Pope Alexander VII, who owned this work.

Unfortunately, its pendant, also in Palazzo Barberini, its subject so obscure that it has yet to be identified, was not lent to Friedrichshafen. In this context, the pendant from the Sanminiatelli-Odescalchi Collection in Rome was also sadly missing.

The juxtaposition of the Triumph of Venus (no.23) and the larger Triumph of David (no.25) is felicitous. Painted in Naples in 1640–42, the David shows how much Schönfeld’s palette opened up to warmer, earthy colours in these years. Rather than exalting the virtues or martial prowess of the victors, Schönfeld’s triumphs resemble courtly scenes from a ballet depicted in a musical, fairy-tale mood.

Schönfeld’s later Neapolitan period is well represented by the Ecce Homo (c.1644–45; no.30). Combining influences from Titian and contemporaries such as Castiglione and Cavallino, Schönfeld produced a monumental composition yet was sensitive to the drama of the scene and, for the first time, used a wide range of colours accented with light touches.

After he returned north of the Alps in 1651, Schönfeld was expected to fill his compositions with larger figures, which was difficult for him, as is evident from the Christ the Saviour (1670s; no.40) and the Martyrdom of St Laurence (1681; no.31). Whereas the compo sitions in his Italian years were often overloaded, he now simplified them, achieving greater immediacy and abstraction. His brush got bolder, which gave paintings like the Donation of the keys to St Peter (c.1670–75; no.29) an almost expressionistic simplicity. It is startling to compare it with the small copper painting of Christ on the Mount of Olives (no.37; Fig.70), painted at the same time, which refers back to the refinement of his

early Italian period. Unfortunately the two works are not shown together so that it is difficult to grasp the artistic range mastered by Schönfeld in this late period.

The thematic arrangement is not always successful; in the case of the scenes of tomb robbers, some of the pictures were of dubious attribution, others were only minor works, and the most important painting of this group, in Stuttgart, was not lent. But the juxtaposition of four different versions of Gideon choosing his soldiers, a rare subject inspired by Callot and Tempesta with dates ranging from 1637 to 1653, reveals Schönfeld’s approach to the subject changing over time. A comparison of the early versions from Vienna (1637–42; no.44) and Potsdam (1637/38; no.46) with the latest piece from Kremsier (1653; no.47), a highlight of the show, demonstrates how much Schönfeld’s works lost delicacy even as they gained in expressive vigour after his return to Germany.

The great merit of this exhibition is the chance it provides to study Schönfeld’s changes in style and adaptability to his oftenambiguous subject-matter, and to re-examine his undervalued late style; it will provide an excellent starting point for future research.

1

An exhibition, Johann Heinrich Schönfeld – Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik, dedicated to Schönfeld’s drawings and prints, is on show at the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (to 7th March). Catalogue (serving both exhibitions): Johann Heinrich Schönfeld. Welt der Götter, Heiligen und Heldenmythen. Edited by Ursula Zeller and Maren Waike. 280 pp. incl. 114 col. + 9 b. & w. ills. (Du Mont Buchverlag, Cologne, 2009), €39.95. ISBN 978–3–8321–9243–3.

2 H. Pée, ed.: exh. cat. Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, Bilder, Zeichnungen, Graphik, Ulm (Museum) 1967.

well-established scene for contemporary art in Munich. As 2009 drew to a close, several exhibitions by regional and international artists offered a stimulating cross section of recent trends. The most significant of these was held in what is perhaps Munich’s most notorious exhibition space, the Haus der Kunst. A prominent example of Nazi architecture and the site of the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, the Haus der Kunst is today given over to temporary exhibitions, usually of contemporary art.

The building’s dark history and grand interior spaces are inevitably an issue for curators and artists, the most recent response being So Sorry, a retrospective of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s probing, critical examinations of politics, history and identity.2 The exhibition (closed 17th January) included new sitespecific works. The most prominent of these, Remembering, covered the museum’s façade with nine thousand brightly coloured children’s backpacks. The exhibition’s title So Sorry refers to the political tactic of using repeated, empty apologies as a way to avoid accountability, a strategy Ai associated particularly with the Chinese government’s response to the 2008 earthquake in Szechuan, where thousands of children died when their schools collapsed. Ai is an outspoken critic of the government’s failure to give a full account of what occurred, and the backpacks of Remembering form Chinese characters reading ‘she lived happily for seven years in this world’, a comment made by one victim’s mother. While Ai’s intentions are beyond reproach, Remembering’s jarringly bright colours and spectacular emphasis on sheer numbers fell short of conveying the impact of this loss. Two

Contemporary art in Munich Munich

by CATHERINE CRAFT

the Pinakothek der Moderne in 2002 provided Munich with a long-needed home for its collections of modern and contemporary art.1 Last May, the opening of the Museum Brandhorst across the street further raised the city’s profile as a destination for contemporary art. Housed in a large two-part structure sheathed in a dazzling multicoloured façade of ceramic rods designed by the Berlin firm Sauerbruch and Hutton, Udo and Anette Brandhorst’s international collection focuses on large-scale masterworks by such well-established artists as Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol and Franz West. The Museum’s upstairs galleries have been given over to the display of the most extensive holdings of Cy Twombly’s œuvre outside the United States.

Despite the significance of the Brandhorst Museum’s debut, the attention accorded it has somewhat obscured the existence of a THE COMPLETION OF

71. Worldhater’s sculpture garden, by Bo Christian Larsson. 2009. Mixed media, approx. 280 by 280 by 80 cm. (Exh. Steinle Contemporary, Munich).

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photographs shown in the exhibition of the actual disaster, with a few battered backpacks strewn among the wreckage, proved far more powerful.

Ai’s confrontations with Chinese attitudes toward the cycles of destruction and regeneration that have characterised his country’s long history were more convincing. An early series of photographs (1995) show him dispassionately dropping a Han Dynasty urn, allowing it to shatter; many of his sculptures and installations use antique furniture and fragments of architectural elements from old buildings demolished during China’s recent economic expansion. Such works call to mind Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which sought to destroy the past in the name of progress, but in the Haus der Kunst – given the Nazi regime’s responsibility for the Holocaust and subsequent generations’ determination never to forget what occurred – such works take on a more complex resonance. In one of the building’s most imposing galleries, Rooted upon (2009; Fig.73), a forest-like installation of ancient tree trunks, rested upon Soft ground (2009), a carpet specially woven in China to mimic the Haus der Kunst’s floor of large travertine marble tiles, with every irregularity, crack and chip carefully reproduced. The pattern of the floor tiles and of the placement of the tree trunks is echoed by the wallpaper lining the hall, a photographic grid showing the 1,001 Chinese who visited the 2007 documenta as part of Ai’s Fairytale project. The overall effect was powerful yet poetic, a mingling of German Romanticism with Chinese traditions of landscape painting that brings both nature and humanity into an otherwise dauntingly chilly space.

Like the Museum Brandhorst, a private museum provides the raison d’être for the Sammlung Goetz, which shows selections from Ingvild Goetz’s holdings of contemporary art in a sleekly compact building designed by Herzog and de Meuron. Open to

73. Rooted upon, by Ai Weiwei. 2009. One hundred tree trunks, dimensions variable. Soft ground, by Ai Weiwei.

2009. Wool carpet, 3,560 by 1,060 cm. Fairytale, by Ai Weiwei. 2007. Wallpaper made from digital photographs, dimensions variable. (Exh. Haus der Kunst, Munich).

the public since 1993, the Sammlung Goetz usually presents exhibitions by individual artists whom Goetz collects in depth, such as Mike Kelley, Richard Prince and Rosemary Trockel. The current exhibition of works by the Munich-born Andreas Hofer (to 1st April) continues this general trend.3 The show offers a concentrated overview of Hofer’s ‘multiverse’ of humans, robots and fantastic creatures taken from comic books, pulp fiction and B-movies. Hofer’s drawings, collages and paintings suggest worlds poised between intensely private dreams and sensationalist marketing appeals to lovers of science fiction.

Despite the resultant professions of impending doom, Hofer’s drawings and collages often

72. Fat convertible, by Erwin Wurm. 2004. Resin and varnish, 34 by 63 by 105 cm. (Exh. Lenbachhaus, Munich).

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have an almost naive character. The spidery quality of his line and his penchant for cutting and tearing appropriated book illustrations and covers suggest an art rooted in childhood obsessions. In general, Hofer’s small canvases, such as Una (2006) or Forever monster (2004), convey the claustrophobic intensity of his vision more effectively than his forays into large-scale painting. He often combines and recombines these smaller works in installations such as Infinity crisis (2009), where the sheer accretion of imagery generates the impression of a dizzyingly complex personal mythology.

The import of these banal yet evocative images is intensified by Hofer’s use of the pseudonym ‘Andy Hope 1930’, an anglicisation of the artist’s name and a reference to the year of the Nazi Party’s first election victories. Themes of dystopia, alienation and the threat of technology accordingly take on more sinister historical undertones, yet Hofer’s art, while often unsettling, is rarely truly disturbing.

Hofer’s art came to Goetz’s attention in a 2005 exhibition at the Lenbachhaus, which is currently closed for renovations. However, the museum’s Kunstbau, a smaller exhibition space in the U-bahn station next to the Lenbachhaus, will continue to present exhibitions until the museum reopens in 2012.

Recently, the Kunstbau showed sculptures, photographs and videos made over the past two decades by the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm (closed 31st January).4 Wurm has defined sculpture as being ‘work on volumes’, a concept that encompasses the human body: for him, losing or gaining weight, for example, can be a sculptural act. As a result, many of Wurm’s sculptures attain presence through adiposity: distended, swelling forms, often sheathed in stretchy knitwear; ‘fat cars’ (Fig.72) whose sleek lines are obscured by bulging protuberances; and human figures

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whose ‘stress bumps’ and ‘anger bumps’ push against the constraints of their clothing.

The body’s potential as a site for sculpture extends to the role of the viewer in Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures, documented in videos and photographs and in the form of doit-yourself instructional drawings. The body becomes the site of intervention and intrusion, with pens, bananas, chairs, bicycles and other objects stuck into orifices, tucked under arms and between legs and balanced on the head or shoulders. In addition to their absurdist wit, such works not infrequently suggest an element of aggressiveness that counteracts their potential whimsy. A photograph of a One Minute Sculpture showing a young woman with the leg of a chair resting on her clenchedshut eye is particularly unsettling. (Unfortunately, the slightly unpleasant edge to such works is largely absent from Wurm’s recent, high-fashion reprise of the sculptures, using model Claudia Schiffer, in German Vogue.)

In 2008 the Kunstbau presented Favoriten, a group exhibition dedicated to emerging artists who lived or exhibited in Munich. At the end of 2009, two of the featured artists had shows at local galleries, allowing visitors to assess their development over the past year. At Steinle Contemporary, the Swedish artist Bo Christian Larsson presented works on paper and sculptures that have resulted from his work as a performance artist (closed 31st December).5 Larsson has developed a complex family of personae, such as ‘Shadow’ and ‘Worldhater’, who execute sculptures in the context of performances whose darkly compelling, often violent imagery draws on Nordic myth, fairytales and the musical genre of death metal. As with the work shown in the Lenbachhaus exhibition, Larsson’s generative drawings at Steinle rendered archetypal imagery, such as snakes, flames and forest scenes, by combining broadly painted passages with a finely detailed sense of line. The resulting process of performance could be sensed in the three-dimensional works, although individual pieces appeared somewhat bereft when removed from the intensity of their performative milieu. We are all chained to the world (2009), a large plywood armature flanked with chains, resembled a stage set, while a group of sculptures created by Worldhater – including a valise punctured by a small wooden door and a pair of boots filled with knives – conjured associations with Surrealist objets (Fig.71).

Drawing is also crucial to the work of Justin Almquist, whose show at Norwood Fine Arts was his solo debut (closed 12th December).6 As with his presentation in Favoriten, drawings worked in a variety of media showed facility, wit and imagination. Contrary to their installation in the Lenbachhaus in two vitrines, which suggested a programmatic element in their variety, the drawings in the gallery were presented as individual works, creating an impression of diversity, with no single approach or style dominant.

Almquist’s roving imagination takes in tabloid photography, dream imagery, pornography and mundane occurrences from everyday life,

Dutch and Flemish paintings in Geneva Geneva

by JESSICA STEVENS-CAMPOS

combining them in situations that are at once amusing, disturbing and frequently moving: an eruption of papier collé intrudes on our glimpse of a woman undressing; a ‘sick’ letter of the alphabet stretches across the page to infect its ‘healthy’ companion; two fractured, gleaming crystals converge on a dazed and frightened man’s head, ostensibly to heal him. Often, artists with a talent for drawing have difficulty moving into painting, but Almquist’s new paintings showed a pronounced change from the somewhat tentative canvases exhibited at the Lenbachhaus.

Richly, almost hallucinogenically layered and spotted with fragments of yarn, paper towels and in one case two papier-mâché balloons, his Junky fruit paintings (2009; Fig.74) suggested a lurid transformative decay capable of eliciting fevered visions of other worlds.

IN THE CURRENT economic downturn, many museums see their endowments reduced and have to rethink their exhibitions programme.

The current exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, L’Art et ses marchés: La Peinture Flamande et Hollandaise XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (to 29th August), which explores the richness of the Museum’s collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings, might be recommended as a model to follow for the way it reassesses part of the Museum’s permanent collection.1 The factual approach evident in this show has produced many new discoveries and demonstrates that academic art history has not necessarily set aside all object-based considerations in favour of purely theoretical ones and provides a refreshing return to the work of art as artefact. Half of the total of 237 works in Geneva have received new attributions, while eighty-five paintings were restored and a selection of 113 is currently on display, carefully arranged by the various genres that were so much in demand in the seventeenth century (hence the choice of the title of the show).

In addition to being introduced to many new discoveries, visitors also have a chance to see some better-known works such as Jan van Ravesteyn’s Portrait of Pieter van Veen, his son Cornelis and his clerk Hendrick Borsman (cat. no.10) and Karel Dujardin’s Crucifixion (no.70). Works by a number of well-known Dutch and Flemish artists such as Caspar Netscher, Gerrit Dou, Philips Wouwerman, Jan Weenix, Isaac van Ostade, Abraham van Calraet, David Teniers the Younger and Jan van Os are also on display.

1 Reviewed by the present writer in this Magazine, 145 (2003), pp.71–72.

2 Catalogue: Ai Weiwei: So Sorry. With essays by Mark Siemons and Ai Weiwei. 128 pp. incl. 81 col. + 44 b. & w. ills. (Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2009), €19.95. ISBN 978–3–7913–5014–1.

3 Catalogue: Andreas Hofer: Andy Hope 1930. With essays by Ingvild Goetz, Stephan Urbaschek and John C. Welchman. 192 pp. incl. 90 col. ills. (Kunstverlag Ingvild Goetz, Hamburg, 2009), €35. ISBN 978–3–939894–13–1.

4 Catalogue: Erwin Wurm. With essays by Stephan Berg, Helmut Friedel, Gertrud Koch, Friederike Mayröcker, Franz Schuh, Kirsten Claudia Vogt and an interview with the artist by Jérôme Sans. 336 pp. incl.

337 col. + 1 b. & w. ills. (DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne, 2009), €43. ISBN 978–3–8321–9241–9.

5 Catalogue: Bo Christian Larsson: On and On is How We Are. With essays by Adina Popescu, Caroline Dowling and an interview with the artist by Birgit Sonna. 73 pp. incl. 70 col. + 13 b. & w. ills. (Argobooks, Berlin, 2009), €25. ISBN 978–3–941560–17–8.

6 Catalogue: Justin Almquist: Selected Drawings 2002–2009. With introductory text by Alfred Kren. 78 pp. incl. 59 col. ills. (Alfred Kren for Norwood Fine Arts, Munich, 2009), €20. ISBN 978–3–00–029235–4.

75. Portrait of François Le Fort, by Michiel van Musscher. 1698. Canvas, 71.8 by 61.7 cm. (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva).

74. Junkie fruit (with seeds), by Justin Almquist. 2009.

Acrylic, papier mâché and balloons on canvas on wooden board, 62 by 53 cm. (Exh. Norwood Fine Arts, Munich).

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76. The rest of Diana, by Peter Paul Rubens. c.1616. Canvas, 241 by 326.5 cm. (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva).

The exhibition is the result of four years of collaborative research by the University of Geneva, the restoration studio of the Museum, and the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), The Hague. The catalogue presents data from the technical examination of works during conservation treatment, archival research on provenance and extensive research on iconography, a full bibliography for each work and the opinion of leading specialists.

No doubt some attributions will change in the future and certain anonymous works will find a name, but evidently the catalogue is the result of rigorous study. The exhibition illustrates why empirical groundwork remains necessary before one can even make a start exploring broader social and cultural questions. As such it serves as a salutary corrective to art historians too steeped in theory.

The current reappraisal follows a long period of neglect. Many works in the show have not been on display since the 1930s. About ninety per cent of the collection is the result of private donations, the most significant from Gustave Revilliod (1817–90), whose gift in 1890 accounts for nearly half of the Dutch and Flemish paintings. Only ten per cent were Museum purchases, most importantly the Rest of Diana (no.41; Fig.76), bought in 1852 in Paris. Over the last two centuries this painting has experienced a roller-coaster of attributions: in 1839 it was attributed to Rubens with the participation of Frans Snyders, but by the end of the century it was demoted to a studio work. After a series of attributions and de-attributions, it was catalogued as Flemish school and later as a seventeenth-century French copy. But recent technical examination has enabled the work to go full circle and offers a better understanding of Rubens, his studio and Snyders. The measurements of the painting are based on the

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Antwerp yardstick and analysis of the stratigraphy of the paint layer confirmed that the technique is typical of Rubens’s studio, as is the application of paint. It is usefully compared to its ‘twin’ painting in the Royal Collection, and both works should be dated to c.1616.

As for the portraits, the recent cleaning of the Portrait of a man (no.25) previously attributed to Bartholomeus van der Helst, revealed the original monogram ‘JAB’ in the top righthand corner. This enabled the painting to be newly ascribed to Jacob Adriaensz Backer. An X-ray of an endearing family portrait by Nicolaes Maes (no.32) revealed an inscription masked by the relining of the canvas that gives

the name François van den Brandelaer, a nobleman and captain of a company of civil guards in Dordrecht. This allowed the remaining sitters to be identified as members of his family. The sitter in Michiel van Musscher’s Portrait of François Le Fort (no.39; Fig.75), arguably one of the finest in his œuvre, was only recently identified on the basis of the coat of arms painted on the curtain in the background, allowing it to be recognised as the portrait of François Le Fort mentioned in the inventory made after Musscher’s death.

Born in Geneva, François Le Fort (1656–99) embarked on a military career that brought him to Marseille, Amsterdam and Moscow, where he eventually became an adviser to Peter the Great. We learn in the entry on this painting how the family coat of arms, the oriental tablecloth and the sitter’s Muscovite dress act as visual mementos of the sitter’s peripatetic life as a diplomat. Such information tells us about the relations Musscher had with his patrons and the international network in which he operated.

This empirical approach also allows a deeper understanding of the function of paintings.

We learn from the scientific analysis of Barent Graat’s Bacchus and Ariadne (no.73), for example, that for a while the painting served as a model for students in the private academy run

by Graat, before it was properly finished. The discovery of two preparatory drawings by Willem van Herp for two paintings on copper representing The multiplication of bread (no.54), also by Herp, and Christ among the doctors, by David III Rijckaert (no.55), showed that although Herp designed the compositions, he delegated much of the final work to his colleague Rijckaert. Their collaboration is not documented, but supported by stylistic comparison of their treatment of landscapes.

Visitors new to the city of Geneva will also be struck by Frans de Momper’s View of Geneva (no.153; Fig.77), made after an engraving by

77. View of Geneva, by Frans de Momper. c.1650–60. Panel, 77.3 by 118 cm. (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva).

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the Swiss engraver Matthäus Merian based on material provided by the architect and engineer Claude de Chastillon.

To appreciate the full scope of this show, the catalogue, which also serves as a catalogue raisonné (unfortunately available only in French), is a necessary work of reference. It complements the earlier exhibition (2005–06) and catalogue La naissance des genres,2 which documented the Dutch and Flemish paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and like that one will be of value well beyond the time-span of the exhibition.

The only quibble one might have is that in light of the international importance of the collection, it would have been useful had the exhibition been pitched to a slightly wider audience, in which respect an English edition of the catalogue would have been desirable.

The exhibition labels, also only in French, talk at length about provenance before touching on more engaging matters. Such layering of information does not do justice to the discoveries that ultimately make this exhibition so captivating.

1 Catalogue: L’Art et ses marchés: La Peinture Flamande et Hollandaise (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles) au Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève. Edited by Frédéric Elsig. 398 pp. incl. 550 col. + b. & w. ills. (Somogy, Paris, 2009), €47.

ISBN 978–2–7572–02500.

2 F. Elsig, ed.: exh. cat. La naissance des genres: la peinture des anciens Pays-Bas (avant 1620) au Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, Geneva (Musée d’art et d’histoire) 2005–06.

Juan Bautista Maíno Madrid

by PETER CHERRY

the organiser of the exhibition Juan Bautista Maíno 1581–1649 at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (closed 17th January), the first dedicated to this artist, should be congratulated for having brought together most of Maíno’s known easel paintings. The Prado possesses more of his pictures than any other museum, the core being those for the high altar of the church of the Dominican monastery of S. Pedro Mártir el Real, Toledo, where the artist professed as a friar in 1613. It showed that Maíno’s reputation as one of the leading painters at the court of Philip IV of Spain was richly deserved.

Maíno worked in a wide range of pictorial formats. The show opened with a group of small-scale pictures. His paintings on copper were a revelation: of particular beauty was an unpublished pair of St John Baptist (cat. no.1; Fig.78) and St Mary Magdalene (no.2) showing the saints in rich, deep landscapes. Their juxtaposition with Elsheimer’s Tobias and the angel (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) showed Maíno’s vision of landscape, as well as his interest in copper supports, to be rooted in his experience of painting in Rome.

LETICIA RUIZ GÓMEZ,

78. St John the Baptist in a landscape, by Juan Bautista Maíno. Before 1613. Copper, 23 by 18.5 cm. (Private collection; exh. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid).

The Crucifixion (no.5) did not appear to the present writer to be by the same hand as Maíno’s Resurrection from Dresden (no.4).

Although it is suggested that the inscription ‘NP.’ at the foot of the Cross signifies ‘Pater Nostri’, signatures were frequently placed in that position, particularly when the painting had votive associations.1 The key event in Maíno’s artistic life was his residence in Rome, where he is documented between 1605 and 1610. His association with Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni, reported in Spanish sources, was explored in the show through examples of their works and in the catalogue essay by Gabriele Finaldi.2 Maíno’s work constitutes a fascinating example of the first-hand response of a Spanish artist to Caravaggism,3 illustrated in the exhibition through the inclusion of comparative paintings. Caravaggio’s Ecstasy of St Francis (c.1595; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), although a nocturne, was comparable with Maíno’s work in the clear, smooth flesh of the angel and detailed observation of nature. Ironically, however, it was the similarity of Caravaggio’s later David and Goliath (Museo del Prado, Madrid) to the St John the Baptist from Basel (no.11) which made the attribution of the latter to Maíno unconvincing; the pronounced chiaroscuro, opaque shadows and cold flesh tints are untypical of him, and the relatively literal transcription of the left shoulder and elbow in an otherwise quite generalised treatment of the body is quite different from Maíno’s more rounded treatment of anatomical features. The ‘Spanish’ iconography of the playful sheep, noted in the catalogue (p.105), may also have a source in Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist (Musei Capitolini, Rome) and the works of his ‘school’.

Maíno was shown to have more in common with the Italian followers of Caravaggio than with the master himself. The choice of Carlo Saraceni’s Martyrdom of St Eugene (Toledo

Cathedral) was particularly apposite since this was part of a commission from the archbishop Bernardo Sandoval y Rojas made before 1614.4 Most of all Maíno fell under the spell of Orazio Gentileschi, yet, while this is stressed in the catalogue, the artist was represented by only two paintings. His Sybil (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) would seem to have little in common with Maíno’s painting of the Dominican mystic St Catherine of Siena (no.22) with which it was paired and, while the juxtaposition of Maíno’s Recapture of Bahía (no.34) with Gentileschi’s Finding of Moses (Museo del Prado), both large-scale paintings of a similar date, did reveal similarities, the works are from late in their careers and were shown in the last room. As it is, the exhibition demonstrated that Maíno’s paintings are far more than the sum of his Roman experiences, and the quality and originality of his painting was highlighted by the comparison with other artists’ work. The mix included paintings by Spanish contemporaries said to exemplify an ‘early naturalism’, such as Bartolomé González, Eugenio Cajés, Luis Tristán, Antonio de Lanchares and Pedro Núñez del Valle. Although the latter four artists are reported to have travelled to Italy, they evidently took much less from the experience than Maíno, and their presence only emphasised his superior skills. This reviewer found the larger works rather obtrusive on the wall;5 placing them in a separate space might have disencumbered the show.

The exhibition layout did not follow the sequence of the catalogue. Maíno’s paintings for the S. Pedro Mártir altarpiece, discussed as an ensemble in the catalogue, were separated

79. Resurrection of Christ, by Juan Bautista Maíno.

1612–14. Canvas, 295 by 174 cm. (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid).

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80. Pentecost, by Juan Bautista Maíno. 1615–20.

Canvas, 324 by 246 cm. (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid).

between three rooms in the show. Two medium-sized paintings of the Adoration of the shepherds (nos.27 and 29) hung on different walls, albeit in the same room. Two versions of the Miracle of Soriano were divided between different rooms and the Prado version (c.1629) was, strangely, the very last picture in the show.6 One of the high points at the Prado was the selection of portraits by Maíno, which corroborated his reputation in this field among his contemporaries. This was an excellent opportunity to test attributions, and Maíno’s only known signed portrait, of an unidentified gentleman (no.36), is an important benchmark. Two of the best pictures in the show, the Ashmolean’s Portrait of a monk (no.41) and a miniature of an unknown sitter (no.38), were entirely plausible as autograph.

A portrait of Bishop José de Melo (no.35), however, was found seriously wanting, and one of Fray Alonso de Santo Tomás (no.44) also appeared remote from Maíno’s style, being closer to that of Alonso Cano (1601–67), of whom the sitter, if this is he, was a patron. St Agabus(?) (no.26; Bowes Museum) was even more anomalous; perhaps its former attribution to Juan Martín Cabezalero (1633–73) should be revisited. The portrait of Philip IV attributed to Gaspar de Crayer (fig.34.8) is closely related to a miniature of the king convincingly given to Maíno (no.37) and to his portrait in the Recapture of Bahía.

The excellent scholarly catalogue7 is based on a synthesis of previous scholarship and a great deal of new research, including a detailed reconstruction of the artist’s life and work and a documentary appendix. Of particular interest is the discussion of Maíno as a Dominican painter by María Cruz de Carlos Varona and Fernando Marías. The entries offer some intriguing commentary on Maíno’s technique, based on scientific analysis undertaken for this show. Maíno was not really a tenebrist painter, for the luminosity of his painting would appear

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to be partly achieved by the use of light grounds. The relative clarity of contours and lucid modelling of forms allies him with classical painters such as Annibale Carracci and Reni; he may have been among the first to appreciate the legibility of Carracci’s Assumption over Caravaggio’s paintings of Sts Peter and Paul, all in S. Maria del Popolo, Rome.

Maíno was drawing-master to the Infante Philip (later Philip IV), but his drawings have yet to be identified. X-rays have shown a high degree of improvisation in some of his easel pictures (nos.13 and 27). The practice of painting from live models would have obviated the need for preparatory drawings, although drawings and cartoons would have been necessary for his frescos (nos.23 and 24), which were painted in an unorthodox technique of oil on plaster. Maíno’s figures show signs of being individually painted in studio lighting, with a resultant disunity in the overall illumination.

Other consequences of the use of models can be seen in the Resurrection (no.15; Fig.79), in the relative separateness of figures and their inconsistency of scale, as well as a still-life painter’s attention to details of costume, arms and armour. Maíno may have made drawings for details, such as hands, since he appears to understand their structure. In contrast, the hands of Christ in Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) are expressive, but badly drawn. The Madonna in Maíno’s powerful Pentecost (no.28; Fig.80) is conventionally idealised in the manner of Reni and classical sculpture, whereas the show-stopping Magdalene has been improvised from the life. Like Gentileschi, he evidently improved his models as he painted, seeking a verisimilitude based on observation, not the unleavened naturalism of Caravaggio.

1 A Crucifixion painted on an actual wooden cross by Pedro Núñez del Valle, an associate of Maíno, is signed and dated at the foot of the cross (‘Pº Nuñez. Fat / 1627’), where the redeeming blood of the Saviour runs down towards his name; see D. Angulo Íñiguez and A.E. Pérez Sánchez: Historia de la pintura española. Escuela madrileña del primer tercio del siglo XVII, Madrid 1969, p.332, no.8.

2 While it was speculated in the catalogue (p.58) that Maíno intended a homage in the manner of El Greco to these artists in two portraits in his Adoration of the shepherds (no.27), these are more likely to represent donors; both wear shepherds’ sheepskin jerkins (compare them to the jerkin in no.8).

3 Caravaggio and Spain has been treated in two recent exhibitions in the country, J. Milicua and M.M. Cuyàs, eds.: Caravaggio y la pintura realista europea, Barcelona (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya) 2005–06; reviewed in this Magazine, 148 (2006), pp.144–46; and A.E. Pérez Sánchez and B. Navarrete Prieto, eds.: exh. cat. De Herrera a Velázquez. El primer naturalismo en Seville, Seville (Fundación Focus-Abengoa) and Bilbao (Museo de Bellas Artes) 2005–06.

4 Surprisingly, no mention was made of the St John Baptist, also long in the collection of Toledo Cathedral, as by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, who was in Spain in 1617–19, and is now widely accepted as its author.

5 Thirty-five paintings attributed to Maíno in the show were supplemented by twenty-nine by other artists, eighteen of which were from the Prado itself.

The exhibited works that were not illustrated in the catalogue were: Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s Holy Family

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with St Catherine, Pedro Núñez del Valle’s Adoration of the kings, Guido Reni’s St Catherine, Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Francisco Pacheco and Guido Reni’s St Apollonia in prayer. The three works in the exhibition omitted from the catalogue checklist (pp.213–14) were Guido Reni’s St Apollonia in prayer and the Martyrdom of St Apollonia, and Eugenio Cajés’s Virgin and Child.

6 Sergio Benedetti suggested in conversation that an attribution to Maíno of another version of this subject in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, not mentioned in the catalogue, would repay further investigation.

7 Catalogue: Juan Bautista Maíno 1581–1649. Edited by Leticia Ruiz Gómez, with contributions by María Cruz de Carlos Varona, Maria Margarita Cuyàs, Javier Docampo Capilla, Gabriele Finaldi, Fernando Marías, José Milicua, Alfonso Rodríguez G. de Ceballos and Leticia Ruiz Gómez. 315 pp. incl. 131 col. + 22 b. & w. ills. (Museo Nacional del Prado/El Viso, Madrid, 2009), €45. ISBN 978–84–8480–190–0.

Gabriel Orozco New York

by MORGAN FALCONER HAVING HAD THE PRESCIENCE to grant Gabriel Orozco one of his very first solo exhibitions back in 1993, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, can be proud of having also originated a mid-career touring survey of his work (to 1st March).1 Although brief – given the prolific variety of Orozco’s output – it affords an ample overview of an artist who, although only in his late forties, has attracted more serious critical attention than any of his peers. And, joining this – and indicating the extent of the artist’s standing among leading critics – there is a new collection of essays devoted to him, edited by Yve-Alain Bois, in October magazine’s excellent Files series.2 Benjamin Buchloh is surely the artist’s most prominent supporter; he champions few contemporary artists, and yet he contributes no less than three essays and an interview to the volume, and adds another essay to MoMA’s exhibition catalogue.3 He makes extraordinary claims for Orozco, likening his emergence to the consequential arrival of Brancusi in Paris in 1903. The parallel is based on Buchloh’s contention that the last decade or so has seen the waning of sculpture, largely due to the exhaustion of the central discourses of the 1960s (Minimalism, Post-minimalism and Arte Povera). Into this desert Orozco has arrived, Buchloh suggests, and liberated sculptural processes and materials from the medium’s traditional objects. He synthesises various possibilities for the medium: working with common and uncommon materials, as well as found objects and photographs; using both artisanal modes of production and recent technology; and holding in consideration both the conditions of globalisation (a sensitivity encouraged by his nomadic existence), and the regional specificity of his Mexican upbringing.

The artist eschews any posture of sculptural mastery and, similarly, avoids suggestions that

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his work might supply privileged experience.

In other words Orozco’s work is radically democratic. Indeed, as the exhibition’s curator, Ann Temkin, argues in her own catalogue essay, his approach advances on the poststudio practices of the 1960s, replacing such models as the factory, the laboratory and the office with the commonplace notion of the apartment or the home. The result of all these alleged achievements, Buchloh concludes, is a practice that revives the viewer’s sculptural experience of the everyday world, and helps mend our destroyed – or endlessly mediated – relationship to material objects.

Catalogue essays (which are the basis of much of the material in the new Files book) are ever the source of indiscriminate praise, but rarely are their assertions as robustly supported as they are in these essays. Unfortunately, we cannot really look to MoMA’s exhibition to verify those assertions, since a monographic survey cannot make the necessary historical comparisons. MoMA, of course, enjoys grand claims, and the installation in the Marron Atrium is in that vein: the very eye-catching Mobile matrix (2006), employs the skeleton of a grey whale divided by geometric lines. But Orozco himself has a quieter personality, and it is characteristic of him that the exhibition opens with Empty shoe box (1993), a sly humbling of the Museum’s claim to serve as a definitive historical archive and not as some private, subjective scrap-album.

The exhibition only really takes off with works from the series My hands are my heart (1991; Fig.82): two photographs of the naked torso of a man moulding a piece of clay, alongside the heart-shaped fired clay itself, still impressed with the man’s hand-prints. It delivers – as indeed Buchloh argues – a startling reassertion of the value of tactile, sculptural processes, and one which does not elicit an object demonstrative of sculptural mastery. Neither is Orozco wedded to tradi81. Kytes tree, by Gabriel Orozco. 2005. Synthetic polymer on canvas, 200 by 200 cm. (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

82. My hands are my heart, by Gabriel Orozco. 1991.

Two chromogenic colour prints, each 23.2 by 31.8 cm. (Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery; exh. Museum of Modern Art, New York).

tional artisanal materials: Spume fin (2003) is a sleek mobile fabricated from polyurethane foam, yet, in a similar vein to My hands are my heart, its smoother, more sculpted areas often give way to ragged parts which speak of the act of making. The show also confirms critics’ contentions that Orozco is engaged by the Duchampian readymade as a commodity form: La DS (1993) is a Citroën DS, modified so that the centre of the car has been sliced out and the two sides rejoined to create a symmetrical effect: the object becomes a phantasmic image of desire for modernity. Similar in conception, if not intention, is Four bicycles (There is always one direction) (1994), in which the parts have been fused together into an

eccentric three-dimensional form. The show also reveals that other important influence on Orozco, John Cage’s notion of art as a commonplace event. It includes many photographs of performance-based sculptures that Orozco has made in the street, including Extension of reflection (1992), in which the artist rode a bicycle in circles between two puddles to spread a trail of watery tyre marks.

Buchloh’s eagerness to comprehend Orozco’s work in terms of the history of sculptural media tends to apprehend it as an endeavour on many fronts. Orozco himself seems to feel more impelled by a single governing idea of form, a single metaphor being more compelling than a scattered history. That governing idea makes its debut in a series of drawings, First was the spitting (1993), in which the artist spat toothpaste onto sheets of graph paper and, from the edges of the white pools, elaborated patterns like rudimentary scientific sketches of cell groups. But that organic metaphor has since morphed into one based on the more rule-bound notion of the game (although Orozco’s use of it still has recourse to the concept of growth). And he is now well known for his networks of disc motifs, complexes which appear to build out from a centre according to a game-like scheme of steps and rotations. The motifs overlay news photographs of sporting events in the Atomist series (1996), suggesting underlying order, and more recently they have also begun to appear alone in paintings such as Kytes tree (2005; Fig.81). Glossing the ideas underlying these works, however, is difficult, just as it is difficult to draw connections between them and Orozco’s sculptural output, and MoMA’s show sheds no new light.

Some of Orozco’s supporters have expressed disappointment about his move into painting, seeing it as regressive; had they been curating the show they might have excised it. Critical consensus might also have excised his preoccupation with organicism, since this is the province of his more eccentric ideas about ‘tantric abstraction’. But this is a show that observes the totality of Orozco’s work – as a mid-career retrospective should – and while that makes it difficult to adequately weigh the validity of the claims made for Orozco, it still delivers a marvellously rich show. It will take time, historical survey shows and, probably, the trace of influence on younger artists, for those claims to be tested.

1 After New York, the exhibition travels to the Kunstmuseum, Basel (18th April to 10th August); the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (15th September to 3rd January 2011); and Tate Modern, London (19th January to 25th April 2011).

2 Gabriel Orozco. Edited by Yve-Alain Bois. 240 pp. incl. 59 b. & w. ills. (October Files, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2009), $38/£28.95 (HB). ISBN 978–0–262–01318–5; $18.95/£14.95 (PB). ISBN 978–0–262–51301–2.

3 Catalogue: Gabriel Orozco. Edited by Ann Temkin, with contributions by Ann Temkin, Briony Fer, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Paulina Pobocha and Anne Byrd. 256 pp. incl. 500 col. ills. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009), $55. ISBN 978–0–87070–762–9.

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Calendar London Alan Cristea. Gillian Ayres at 80: New Paintings and Works on Paper is on view at  and  Cork Street from 3rd February to 13th March.

Alison Jacques. Works by Ryan Mosley are on view to 13th February.

Barbican. The first major survey in Britain of work by the designer Ron Arad is on view here from 18th February to 16th May. A new commission by the French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot can be seen in The Curve from 27th February to 23rd May. British Library. Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs; to 7th March; to be reviewed.

British Museum. An exhibition examining printmaking in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century; to 5th April; to be reviewed.

Camden Arts Centre. A solo exhibition of work by Eva Hesse is on view here to 7th March.

Chisenhale Gallery. Work by Florian Hecker, comprising four computer-generated sound pieces; 12th February to 28th March.

Courtauld Gallery. Michelangelo’s Dream explores the making and meaning of the celebrated drawing of this name in the permanent collection through related works by Michelangelo and his contemporaries; 18th February to 16th May; to be reviewed.

Dulwich Picture Gallery. Paintings, watercolours and drawings by Paul Nash spanning his entire career comprise an exhibition running from 10th February to 9th May. Estorick Collection. An exhibition exploring the representation and analysis of movement in the visual arts and science; to 18th April.

Fleming Collection. Paintings by the Scottish Colourists from the Collection are here to 1st April.

Gagosian Gallery. At Davies St., work by Arshile Gorky is on view from 10th February to 1st April.

At Britannia St. an exhibition following from last year’s exhibition of Pop Art and its legacy, titled Crash, runs from 11th February to 1st April.

Haunch of Venison. Video, sculpture, installations and photographs by the Indian artist Jitish Kallat, reflecting on the urban environment of Mumbai, are on view here from 15th February to 27th March.

Works by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota are displayed from 19th February to 27th March.

Hauser & Wirth. Paintings by the Chinese artist Zhang Enli are on view to 27th February.

Helly Nahmad. An exhibition of works by Monet from all periods and mostly from private collections runs here to 26th February.

Karsten Schubert. New paintings by Dan Perfect from the ‘Dæmonology’ series are on display to 5th March.

Marlborough Fine Art. Works by Thérèse Oulton are on view from 10th February to 13th March.

National Gallery. An exhibition here focuses on the Gallery’s famous painting of the Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche; 24th February to 23rd May. In Room 1 is the concurrent display A Masterpiece Recovered: Delaroche’s Charles I Insulted.

Parasol Unit. A group show of work by Cecily Brown, Hans Josephsohn, Shaun McDowell, Katy Moran and Maaike Schoorel; to 7th February.

A major solo exhibition of works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila includes three video installations not seen before in Britain; 25th February to 25th April.

Pilar Corrias. Works by Charles Avery run from 12th February to 31st March.

Purdy Hicks. New paintings by the Irish artist Claire Kerr (Fig.83) are on view here from 26th February to 20th March.

Queen’s Gallery. The exhibition tracing the history of the ‘conversation piece’, seen previously in Edinburgh and reviewed in the October issue, is on view here to 14th February.

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Raven Row. An exhibition of film projections by the German artist Harun Farocki; to 7th February.

Royal Academy. A landmark exhibition of work by Van Gogh, the first in London for over forty years, centres on the artist’s letters, some 35 of which will be on display; to 18th April.

An exhibition documenting the work of the architect Richard MacCormac; to 17th March.

Sadie Coles. New drawings by Matthew Barney are on view at  South Audley St.; to 6th March.

Serpentine Gallery. Design Real looks at industrial, scientific and domestic design; to 7th February.

Simon Lee. Paintings by Bernard Frize can be seen here from 10th February to 24th March.

South London Gallery. An installation by Michael Landy in which people can apply to discard failed works of art in a giant bin runs here to 14th March.

Stephen Friedman. Works by Cornelius Quabeck are on view to 5th March.

Tate Britain. A major exhibition of work by Henry Moore brings together the most comprehensive selection of his work for a generation; 24th February to 15th August; to be reviewed.

A major survey of paintings by Chris Ofili is on view here to 16th May; to be reviewed.

83. Monument, by Claire Kerr. 2009. Oil on linen mounted on wood, 16 by 12 cm. (Exh. Purdy Hicks, London).

Tate Modern. Seen earlier in Leiden, the exhibition Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World presents works by the Dutch artist in the context of his time; 4th February to 16th May; to be reviewed.

The exhibition of works by Arshile Gorky, previously in Philadelphia, is here from 10th February to 3rd May (see also Gagosian Gallery); to be reviewed.

Timothy Taylor. Works on paper by Philip Guston can be seen to 20th February.

Waddington. A group show of 20th- century artists includes works by Turnbull, Flanagan and Caulfield; to 27th February.

Wallace Collection. During refurbishment of the west gallery of the museum, a sizeable selection of nineteenth-century paintings is temporarily on view in the exhibition space in the basement.

Whitechapel. An exhibition of photography from 1840 to the present from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is on view to 11th April.

White Cube. At Mason’s Yard, paintings by Franz Ackermann are on view from 10th February to 1st April; works by Candice Breitz are on view in Hoxton Square; 12th February to 20th March.

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Great Britain and Ireland Belfast, Ulster Museum. Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed: The Imagery of Sean Scully is on view here to 14th February.

Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. 17thcentury Dutch paintings from the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, are shown alongside Dutch paintings from the Barber; to 28th February.

Birmingham, Ikon Gallery. The first UK exhibition of works by the American artist Clare Rojas (b.1976), whose work is inspired by folk art; and an exhibition of work by the Portuguese duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva; both to 21st March.

Birmingham, Museum and Art Gallery. Works by Bridget Riley from the collection of the Arts Council are on view in the exhibition Flashback, running from 6th February to 23rd May. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. A collectionbased exhibition explores the work of Sargent, Sickert and Spencer; to 5th April.

Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard. The first in a series of exhibitions reflecting on ‘Modern Times’ is curated by the artist Lutz Becker and reflects on the theme of chaos; to 14th March.

Cardiff, National Museum. Rembrandt’s Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet is on loan here from Penrhyn Castle; to 21st March.

Dublin, Hugh Lane Gallery. On the centenary of the birth of Francis Bacon, the exhibition Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, which was reviewed in the January issue, provides an overview of and new insights into Bacon’s work; to 7th March (then in Compton Verney).

Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art. Works by the Jorge Pardo and Anne Tallentire are on display here from 17th February to 3rd May. Works by the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs from the on-going series Le Temps du Sommeil, are on display in an exhibition running from 26th February to 23rd May. The work will travel to Tate Modern, London, for a retrospective of Alÿs’s work opening in summer 2010.

Edinburgh, Dean Gallery. Seen earlier in London, the BP Portrait Award 2009 is on view here while the Portrait Gallery is closed for refurbishment; to 21st February.

Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery. Paintings, reliefs and constructions by Toby Paterson; to 28th March.

Edinburgh, Inverleith House. An exhibition of sculptures by Karla Black is here to 14th February.

Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. The exhibition devoted to Paul Sandby, already seen in Nottingham and reviewed in the November issue, is here to 7th February (then in London).

An exhibition exploring Peter Lely’s enormous collection of paintings, drawings and prints runs here to 14th February.

Edinburgh, Queen’s Gallery. An exhibition of photographs by Herbert George Ponting and Frank Hurley of Scott and Shackleton in the Antarctic mark the centenary of Scott’s ill-fated journey to the South Pole; to 11th April.

Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery. Paintings by Basil Beattie are on view to 6th March.

Leeds, Temple Newsam House. Wonderwall: 300 Years of Wallpaper; to 9th May. Liverpool, Tate. Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic traces in depth the impact of different black cultures from around the Atlantic on art from the early twentieth century to the present; to 25th April.

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. An exhibition of paintings by Aubrey Williams reflects on the meeting of Atlantic and black Atlantic cultures in Europe, the Caribbean, North and South America; to 11th April.

Manchester Art Gallery. An exhibition of works by Ron Mueck; 4th February to 11th April.

Middlesbrough, Institute of Modern Art. An exhibition of drawings by Ellsworth Kelly is on view here to 21st February.

Milton Keynes Gallery. The first survey exhibition of work by Marcus Coates in a public gallery in Britain, runs here to 4th April.

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Nottingham Contemporary. Star City. The future under communism features work by a generation of artists who grew up in Eastern Bloc countries before the fall of Communism; 13th February to 17th April (then in Warsaw).

Norwich, Sainsbury Centre. Seen earlier in Compton Verney and reviewed in the January issue, The Artist’s Studio is here from 9th February to 16th May. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. The Museum has reopened after a major redevelopment.

Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery. After Michelangelo brings together 35 drawings from the permanent collection to trace Michelangelo’s genius through his followers, imitators and admirers; 16th February to 16th May. Oxford, Museum of Modern Art. A survey of video works by Mirosław Balka and an installation by Pawel Althamer are both on view to 7th March.

Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius is the curious title of a monographic loan exhibition devoted to the Plympton-born artist; to 20th February; to be reviewed.

St Ives, Tate. The first major survey of paintings by Dexter Dalwood; to 3rd May. Sheffield, Graves Gallery. An exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe; to 27th March.

Southampton, City Art Gallery. An exhibition of prints by Howard Hodgkin, seen recently in London, is on view here to 14th February.

Windsor, Windsor Castle, Drawings Gallery. An exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne includes works by Holbein; to 18th April.

York Art Gallery. 100 Years of Gifts: the Centenary of the Contemporary Art Society; 6th February to 9th May.

Berlin, Brücke-Museum. An exhibition focusing on the work of Fritz Bleyl runs here to 25th April.

Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim. An exhibition examining the concept of utopia from the Nazarenes to the Bauhaus; to 11th April.

Bern, Kunstmuseum. Paintings by Giovanni Giacometti; to 21st February; to be reviewed.

Bielefeld, Kunsthalle. The survey exhibition of German Impressionism runs here to 28th February.

Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum. Seen earlier in New York, the exhibition devoted to the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright, reviewed in the September issue, is on view here to 14th February.

Bregenz, Kunsthaus. A retrospective of works by Candice Breitz; 6th February to 11th April.

Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia. The exhibitions Inca and Beyond Baroque: Signs of Identity in Latin American art document the Pre- and Post-Columbian civilisations in Peru; to 27th June.

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition drawn from the collections of the Museo del Greco and the Museo de Santa Cruz in Toledo explores the work of El Greco; 4th February to 9th May. Brussels, Wells Contemporary Art Centre. A survey exhibition of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres is here to 25th April (then in Basel and Frankfurt).

Europe Amelia, Complesso ex-Collegio Boccarini di Amelia. Piermatteo d’Amelia is celebrated in exhibitions here and at Terni; to 2nd May. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. The survey of winter landscapes by Hendrick Avercamp, reviewed on p.122 above, runs here to 15th February (then in Washington).

Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. Seen earlier in Cleveland, Paul Gauguin. The Breakthrough to Modernity examines the artist’s Volopini suite set of lithographs; 19th February to 6th June.

Antwerp, Rubenshuis. Room for Art in 17th-century Antwerp explores art collecting in 17th-century Antwerp through three paintings by Willem van Haecht depicting the art collection of Cornelis van der Geest; to 28th February (then in The Hague).

Baden-Baden, Museum Frieder Burda. Georg Baselitz. 50 Years of Painting runs here to 14th March.

Barcelona, Museu d’Art Contemporani. A survey exhibition of works by Rodney Graham is on view here to 18th May (then in Basel and Hamburg).

Seen earlier in London, the John Baldessari exhibition is on view here from 11th February to 25th April.

Basel, Fondation Beyeler. Work by Günther Förg is on view here to 28th February.

An exhibition marking the centenary of the death of Henri Rousseau comprises some 40 works; 7th February to 9th May. Basel, Kunstmuseum. Works by the Swiss artist Albert Müller; 6th February to 9th May. Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico. While the exact birthdate of Jacopo Bassano is uncertain, his home town is celebrating his 500th birthday with a major exhibition of his and his family’s work; to 3rd May; to be reviewed.

Bergamo, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. The exhibition The Great Game: Form in Italian art from 1947 to 1989 is on view here from 24th February to 9th May (see also at Lissone and Milan).

Berlin, Akademie der Künste. An exhibition of work by George Grosz draws on the Academy’s extensive holdings; to 5th April.

84. Judith with the head of Holofernes, by Salomon de Bray. 1636. Panel, 89 by 71 cm. (Museo del Prado, Madrid).

Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery. Late Baroque Impressions: Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Joseph Winterhalter; to 28th February.

Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts. From Botticelli to Titian: Masterpieces of Two Centuries of Italian Art includes some 80 loans from international collections; to 14th February.

The Alchemy of Beauty: Parmigianino – Drawings and Prints runs to 15th March.

Castelfranco Veneto, Museo Casa Giorgione. On the 500th anniversary of his death, Giorgione is being celebrated in his home town with an exhibition of ‘about half his works’, together with a generous selection of works by Bellini, Cima, Sebastiano, Titian et al.; to 11th April; to be reviewed.

Catania, Fondazione Puglisi Cosentino, Palazzo Valle. Burri e Fontana: Materia e Spazio confronts the work of these two artists; to 14th March.

Catanzaro, Museo Marca. Antoni Tàpies Materia focuses on the artist’s large-scale work over the last three decades; to 14th March.

Cologne, Museum für Angewandte Kunst. Commemorating the 300th anniversary of the inauguration

by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, of the Meissen manufactory, an exhibition here explores the history of porcelain; to 25th April.

Cologne, Museum Ludwig. An exhibition of works by the Austrian artist Franz West; to 14th March.

Drawings and prints by Mary Heilmann are on view to 11th April.

The exhibition Ways to Abstraction and Back Again: Kasimir Malevich and his Circle draws on the Museum’s extensive holding of works by the Ukrainian-born artist; 5th February to 22nd August.

Conegliano, Palazzo Sarcinelli. A major monographic exhibition commemorates the 500th anniversary of Cima da Conegliano’s death in 1510; 26th February to 22nd June; to be reviewed.

Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst. Works

by Christian Lemmerz are on view to 6th March.

Dresden, Semperbau. An exhibition of works by Georg Baselitz reflects on the artist’s relationship with Dresden; to 28th February.

Duisburg, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum. A major exhibition of works by Alberto Giacometti comprises some 120 of the sculptor’s works; to 18th April.

Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum. An ambitious, threepart exhibition examining the work of El Lissitzky; to 5th September.

Florence, Palazzo Strozzi. Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings are shown with works by Magritte, Balthus, Ernst, Carrà and Morandi; 26th February to 18th July.

Florence, Uffizi. The recent refurbishment and arrangement of the Tribuna is the focus of a show running to 30th June.

At the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, themes of calumny, envy and truth in Federico Zuccari’s work are explored; to 28th February.

Forlì, Musei di San Domenico. Flowers: Nature and Symbol from the Seicento to Van Gogh; to 20th June.

Frankfurt, Liebieghaus. An international loan exhibition explores the work of Houdon and his contemporaries; to 28th February (then in Montpellier).

Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle. The exhibition of works by Seurat, recently on view in Zürich, is on display here from 5th February to 9th May. Frankfurt, Städel Museum. A monographic show devoted to Botticelli, reviewed on p.126 above, runs here to 28th February.

Fratta Polesine, Villa Badoer. An exhibition of porcelain and maiolica from the collections of the Musei Civici of Treviso is on show to 13th June.

Geneva, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. Art and its markets: Flemish and Dutch painting of the 17th and 18th century, reviewed on p.131 above, runs to 29th August.

Geneva, Musée Rath. A selection of works by Alberto Giacometti focuses on his work made during the mid1940s; to 21st February.

Genoa, Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso.

Francesco Hayez’s The kiss is shown with other works alluding to the Risorgimento; to 31st May. Genoa, Palazzo Ducale. An exhibition devoted to work in all media by the Bauhaus artist Otto Hofmann (1907–96) runs to 14th February.

Genoa, Wolfsoniana. An exhibition of Futurist ceramics and graphic work runs here to 11th April.

Gorizia, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Gorizia.

Here and at the Castello di Gorizia, an exhibition examines the importance for Marinetti of the frontier region of Venezia Giulia; to 28th February.

Graz, Kunsthaus. Works by Tatiana Trouvé are on view here to 16th May. Groningen, Groninger Museum. Highlights from the collection of the Brücke Museum in Berlin are on display in the Ploeg Pavilion; to 11th April.

Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. A small display focusing on Judith Leyster’s Self-portrait from Washington includes additional loans of works by the artist; to 9th May. The Hague, Gemeentemuseum. The first large retrospective of works by artists associated with the Blaue Reiter artists’ group; 6th February to 24th May. A retrospective of works by Georges Vantongerloo, is on display to 16th May. An exhibition exploring the world of Haute Couture including the latest creations of Dior, Lacroix and Gaultier is on view to 6th June.

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The Hague, Mauritshuis. The exhibition devoted to Philips Wouwerman, seen previously in Kassel and reviewed on p.125 above, runs here to 28th February.

Hamburg, Bucerius Kunst Forum. Deceptively real: the art of trompe l’œil; 13th February to 24th May. Hamburg, Kunsthalle. Seen earlier in London, the controversial exhibition Pop Life, tracing the influence of Pop art and the cult of celebrity, is on view here from 12th February to 9th May. Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The video installation Homo Sapiens Sapiens by Pipilotti Rist is on view here to 25th April.

Colour in Art is drawn from the collection of Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher, and contains works by Kandinsky, Nolde, Matisse, Miró, Hockney, Kusama and others; 5th February to 13th June.

Istanbul, Sakip Sabanci Museum. To celebrate Istanbul’s year as Cultural Capital of Europe, an exhibition entitled Venice and Istanbul in the Ottoman era shows works of art from the two cities spanning Gentile Bellini to Ippolito Caffi; to 28th February.

Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage. Some 100 paintings spanning Corot to Beckmann are on loan here from the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; 5th February to 24th May. Lille, Roubaix, La Piscine. The first exhibition in France to examine the influence of the Bloomsbury Group ranges works by Bell, Grant and Fry alongside French associates such as Derain, Bussy, Henri Doucet and Jean Marchand; to 28th February.

Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The first instalment of a two-part loan exhibition devoted to European still life brings together 71 17th- and 18th-century paintings; 12th February to 2nd May. Lisbon, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Centro de Arte Moderna. A survey of works by Jane and Louise Wilson is on view here to 18th April.

Lisbon, Museu Colecção Berardo. Seen earlier in Nice, a survey exhibition of work by Robert Longo is displayed here from 15th February to 25th April.

Lissone, Museo d’arte contemporanea. Italian works of art dating from 1947 to 1958, part of the exhibition The Great Game also at Bergamo and Milan, are on show here from 24th February to 9th May. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Dutch Painters in the Prado brings together a sizeable group of the most important Dutch paintings (Fig.84) from the permanent collection on the occasion of the publication of the first catalogue of this part of the Museum’s holdings, largely unknown to the wider public; to 15th April.

The Rijksmuseum’s Company of Captain Reinier Reael, better known as the ‘Meagre Company’, by Frans Hals and Pieter Codde is on loan here to 28th February.

Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Seen last year in London, and reviewed in the April issue, the exhibition Rodchenko and Popova.

Defining constructivism, is here to 22nd February.

A major retrospective of works by Thomas Schütte is on view from 9th February to 17th May. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Monet y la Abstracción; 23rd February to 30th May. Málaga, Museo Picasso. Seen earlier in Barcelona, the exhibition of works by Frantisek Kupka, drawn from the collection of the Centre Pompidou, runs here from 15th February to 15th April.

Mantua, Casa del Mantegna. Futurism and Dada: from Marinetti to Tzara; to 28th February.

Milan, Galleria Gruppo Credito Valtellinese (Palazzo delle Stelline). An exhibition devoted to the work of Maurice Henry runs here to 14th March.

Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli. The exhibition Seta, Oro, Cremisi illustrates the technological innovations in silk production promoted in Milan by the Visconti and Sforza families; to 21st February; to be reviewed.

Milan, Palazzo Reale. The exhibition Japan: Power and Splendour, 1568–1868, runs to 8th March.

Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. Crivelli and the Brera concentrates on the artist’s great pale of the 1480s; to 28th March.

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85. The tax collectors, by Quentin Metsys. Panel, 86.4 by 71.2 cm. (Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna).

Milan, Rotonda di via Basana. Italian works of art dating from 1959 to 1972, part of the exhibition The Great Game also at Bergamo and Lissone, are on show here from 24th February to 9th May. Milan, Triennale di Milano. Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on art; to 30th May. Montpellier, Musée Fabre. An exhibition devoted to Jean Raoux; to 14th April; to be reviewed.

Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Rubens challenges the Old Masters: Inspiration and Reinvention examines the copies Rubens made of the work of other painters; to 7th February.

The Art of the Frame: Exploring the Holdings of the Alte Pinakothek; to 18th April.

Munich, Haus der Kunst. Seen earlier in London, and reviewed in the January issue, the exhibition of paintings by Ed Ruscha is on view here from 12th February to 2nd May. Munich, Neue Pinakothek. Johann Georg von Dillis (1759–1841): Painter and Gallery Director; to 22nd March.

Naples, Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina (MADRE). Barok: arte, Scienza, Fede e Tecnologia nell’età contemporanea draws parallels between artists of the seicento and the present day and includes Hirst’s Heaven; to 5th April.

An exhibition devoted to Cindy Sherman runs to 31st May. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte. Here and at the Certosa di S. Martino, the Castel S. Elmo, the Museo Duca di Martina, the Museo Pignatelli and the Palazzo Reale, Return to the Baroque: from Caravaggio to Vanvitelli, curated by Nicola Spinosa, surveys arts in all media in an international loan exhibition; to 11th April; to be reviewed.

Nîmes, Carré d’Art. Seen earlier in London, the exhibition of paintings by Michael Raedecker runs here to 18th April. Concurrently, an exhibition of textile works by Isa Melsheimer.

Padua, Civici Musei agli Eremitani. A loan exhibition of paintings from the Fondazione Longhi, Florence, runs to 28th March.

Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. The work of Pierre Soulages is celebrated in an exhibition running to 8th March.

Paris, Galerie des Gobelins. Trésors des Habsbourgs d’Espagne, chefs-d’œuvre de la tapisserie de la Renaissance; to 7th March.

Paris, Grand Palais. Turner and the Masters, reviewed at its London showing in the December issue, runs here from 24th February to 24th May. Following displays by Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra, the third edition of ‘Monumenta’ features a gigantic work by Christian Boltanski titled Personnes; to 21st February.

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Paris, Institut Néerlandais. Previously in New York, Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection runs here from 11th February to 11th April.

Paris, Jeu de Paume. Exhibitions of work by Lisette Model, Esther Shalev-Gerz and Mathilde Rosier are on view from 9th February to 6th June.

Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

An exhibition of work by Elaine Sturtevant is on display from 5th February to 25th April.

Exhibitions of work by the Dutch artist Charley Toorop and by Jan Dibbets are on display here from 19th February to 9th May. Paris, Musée du Louvre. An exhibition devoted to drawings by Battista Franco runs to 22nd February.

La collection Georges Pébereau: Maîtres du dessin européen du XVIe au XXe siècle; to 22nd February.

Paris, Musée Eugène Delacroix. Une passion pour Delacroix: la collection Karen B. Cohen; to 5th April.

Paris, Musée Rodin. The first exhibition exploring the relationship between Matisse and Rodin, previously in Nice, runs to 28th February; it is reviwed on p.119.

Paris, Palais de Tokyo. Work by the German painter Charlotte Posenenske; 18th February to 15th May. Paris, Pinacothèque. An exhibition of work by Edvard Munch; 19th February to 18th July.

Passariano, Villa Manin. The age of Courbet and Manet: the spread of realism and Impressionism through central and eastern Europe; to 7th March.

Piacenza, Galleria d’arte moderna Ricci Oddi. An exhibition devoted to small-scale paintings by the Macchiaioli and post-Macchiaioli; to 2nd May. Pont-Aven, Musée. An exhibition of paintings by Serge Poliakoff is on view here to 30th May. Ravenna, Museo d’Arte della Città. The 15thcentury Pre-Raphaelites – Fra Angelico, Perugino et al.

– are shown together with their 19th-century admirers in The Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian Dream; 28th February to 6th June (then in Oxford).

Rimini, Castel Sismondo. Paintings spanning Rembrandt to Picasso from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are on loan here to 14th March.

Rome, Complesso del Vittoriano. The form of the Renaissance: Donatello, Andrea Bregno, Michelangelo and sculpture in Rome in the 15th century; to 9th May. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e contemporanea. A retrospective devoted to Sandro Chia runs to 28th February.

Rome, MACRO. An exhibition of works by Urs Lüthi is on view here to 21st March.

Rome, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori.

An exhibition devoted to Michelangelo’s drawings for his architectural projects in Rome, reviewed in the January issue, runs to 7th February.

Rome, Museo del Corso. Previously in Milan, the exhibition devoted to Edward Hopper runs here from 16th February to 13th June.

Rome, Museo Mario Praz. An exhibition of the Roman drawings of Lancelot-Théodore Turpin de Crissé (1782–1859) from the collection of the Louvre is on show here to 13th February.

Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni. A large exhibition of works by Alexander Calder; to 14th February.

Rome, Scuderie Papali al Quirinale. The 400th anniversary of Caravaggio’s death is commemorated in a plethora of exhibitions; the first runs here from 18th February to 17th June; to be reviewed.

Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

A display compares the Museum’s St Jerome with angel

by Anthony van Dyck with a second version in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; to 14th February.

Rovereto, Museo d’Arte moderna e contemporanea. Previously in Marseille and later moving to Toronto, the exhibition From the stage to painting explores the links between the two arts in the 18th and 19th centuries from David to Vuillard; 6th February to 23rd May; to be reviewed.

Rovigo, Museo dei Grandi Fiumi. One hundred paintings from historic houses of the Veneto, dating from the 13th century (Guariento) to the 18th (Tiepolo et al.), are on show here to 13th June.

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Rovigo, Palazzo Roverella. Easel paintings by the Venetian Mattia Bortoloni (1696–1750) are shown with those by contemporaries such as Tiepolo, Piazzetta and Balestra and others; to 13th June.

Salzburg, Museum der Moderne. A survey exhibition of work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; to 14th February.

Seville, Museo de Bellas Artes. Previously in Bilbao, the exhibition devoted to the early work of Murillo is here from 18th February to 30th May; to be reviewed.

Stockholm, Bonniers Konsthall. Tomás Saraceno’s room-size spider’s web, made from black elastic in collaboration with arachnologists and astrophysicists, was shown at the Venice Biennale to great acclaim. It is reinstalled here in an exhibition running from 17th February to 15th June (then in Gateshead).

Stockholm, Moderna Museet. A retrospective survey of works by Lee Lozano runs here from 13th February to 25th April.

Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. The in-focus show 2 x Caravaggio juxtaposes two versions of St Francis, one from the S. Maria della Concezione, Rome, the other from the Carpineto Romano, and argues that the latter is by Caravaggio himself; to 14th March.

Also on show are a number loans from museums in Europe and the United States to put the Nationalmuseum’s own collection of Flemish paintings into context; 25th February to 23rd May. Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie. The first monographic exhibition in Germany devoted to the work of Edward Burne-Jones; to 7th February.

An exhibition devoted to the prints and drawings of Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (1609–82/83) runs here to 7th March.

Terni, Centro Per le Arti Opificio Siri (CAOS).

Piermatteo d’Amelia is celebrated in exhibitions here and at Amelia; to 2nd May. Toulouse, Les Abattoirs. Early works by Miquel Barceló; to 28th February.

Trento, MART, Palazzo delle Albere. Eugenio Prati (1842–1907), between Scapigliatura and Symbolism runs to 25th April.

Trento, Museo Diocesano Tridentino. Padre Andea Pozzo’s early work is celebrated in an exhibition running to 5th April.

Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Jean Baptiste Vanmour: a painter from Valenciennes in Constantinople, reviewed on p.121 above, runs to 7th February.

Venice, Museo Correr. 19th-century drawings of Venice, many hitherto unpublished, and including works by Giacomo Guardi and Ippolito Caffi, are on show here to 11th April.

Venice, Palazzo Grassi. Mapping the Studio: Artists from the Pinault collection runs to 6th June.

Verona, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Palazzo Forti.

Drawings and models of Leonardo’s machines are on show until 28th February.

Verona, Palazzo della Gran Guardia. The idea that Corot can be seen as the ‘father’ of modern art is explored here in an exhibition of 115 works spanning Poussin to Picasso; to 7th March.

Vienna, Belvedere. An exhibition here focuses on Prince Eugene of Savoy ‘as philosopher and art lover’; 11th February to 6th June.

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. After having clocked up countless air miles over the last decade, Vermeer’s Art of Painting is enjoying time at home at the Museum in a display with loans that puts it into context; to 25th April.

Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum. An exhibition here presents recent acquisitions, including Metsys’s Tax Collectors, (Fig.85); 12th February to 24th August.

Vienna, MUMOK. The exhibition Gender Check.

Femininity and Masculinity in Eastern European Art is on view here to 14th February.

A major survey exhibition of works by Zoe Leonard (b.1961) is on view here to 21st February.

Zaragoza, Museo de Zaragoza. Valencia, The Splendour of the Renaissance in Aragon, previously in Bilbao and Valenica, runs here to 31st May; to be reviewed.

Zürich, Kunsthaus. A loan exhibition from the Bührle collection of paintings spanning Frans Hals to Picasso runs here from 12th February to 16th May.

New York Brooklyn Museum. A unique, site-specific installation by Kiki Smith is on view from 12th February to 12th September.

Gagosian. At Madison Avenue, works by Damien Hirst and by Elisa Sighicelli are on view to 6th March.

At W. th St., works on paper by Philip Taafe are on view to 20th February.

Jewish Museum. An exhibition examining how Man Ray’s work was shaped by his turn-of-the-century American-Jewish immigrant experience runs here to 14th March.

Marian Goodman. Film works by Steve McQueen are on view to 6th March.

Matthew Marks. At  W. th St., photographs by Robert Adams; at  W. nd St., sculptures by Ken Price; both to 17th April.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. An exhibition devoted to Bronzino’s drawings; to 18th April; to be reviewed.

Moretti Fine Art. From the Gothic to the Early Renaissance; to 12th February.

Morgan Library. The Library’s Hours of Catherine of Cleves, disbound for the occasion so that more than 100 pages can be viewed separately, is on show in an exhibition seen earlier in Nijmegen; to 2nd May. There is a concurrent display of Flemish manuscripts from the Morgan.

16th-century drawings from the permanent collection are on display to 9th May. Museum of Modern Art. A display of six late paintings by Monet, made at Giverny, including four from the collection, are on show for the first time since the Museum’s reopening in 2004; to 12th April; it was reviewed in the November issue.

Works by Gabriel Orozco are here to 1st March (then in Basel and Paris); it is reviewed on p.134.

Neue Galerie. From Klimt to Klee: Masterworks from the Serge Sabarsky Collection honours the life and work of the museum’s co-founder; to 15th February.

Onassis Cultural Center. The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete traces the influences of Byzantine and Renaissance art on artist’s workshops in 15th- and 16th-century Crete; to 27th February.

Pace Wildenstein. At  W. nd St., new work by Stirling Ruby (5th February to 20th March); at  E. th St., thirty new paintings by Robert Ryman (19th February to 27th March).

Solomon Guggenheim Museum. A newly commissioned work by Anish Kapoor, Memory, is on display to 28th March.

Organised as part of the Museum’s 50th anniversary celebrations, two major projects by Tino Sehgal involving interactive performances within the rotunda, run to 10th March.

Whitney Museum of American Art. The 75th Whitney Biennial, a ‘panoramic survey of the latest American art’ including works by 55 artists, runs here from 25th February to 30th May.

North America Atlanta, High Museum of Art. Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius comprises some 50 works, including more than 20 sketches and studies by Leonardo, some of which will be on view in the United States for the first time; to 21st February.

Baltimore, Museum of Art. Seen earlier in New Jersey, the first exhibition to examine Cézanne’s influence on American artists such as Marsden Hartley, Arshile Gorky and Man Ray is on view here from 14th February to 23rd May. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. The monographic show devoted to Luis Meléndez, previously in Washington and Los Angeles, runs here from 2nd February to 9th May. Cincinnati, Taft Museum of Art. Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880–1914 includes some 70 works by artists such as William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, John Twachtman and others; 5th February to 2nd May.

Chicago, Art Institute. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video 1958–2008 is on view here from 20th February to 16th May. Chicago, Smart Museum. Seen earlier in Los Angeles and Washington, the exhibition The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy 1850–1900 examines the prints, drawings and small sculptures kept in private collections by amateurs in late-nineteenth century Paris; 11th February to 13th June.

Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts. A survey exhibition of photographs and video by Cyprien Gaillard is on view here to 11th April.

Dallas Museum of Art. Seen earlier in Michigan, an exhibition exploring the response of Impressionist painting to photography focusing on works made on the coast of Normandy from 1850 to 1874 (Fig.86) runs here from 21st February to 23rd May. Evanstone, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. The exhibition A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections is on view here to 14th March.

Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum. From the Private Collections of Texas: European Art, Ancient to Modern; to 21st March.

Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum. Andy Warhol: The Last Decade runs from 14th February to 16th May. Houston, Menil Collection. An exhibition exploring the fragmented human body in art spanning late medieval to the 20th century; to 28th February.

An exhibition of works by Maurizio Cattelan is on view from 12th February to 15th August.

Houston, Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition Sargent and the Sea runs here from 14th February to 23rd May (then in London).

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Seen earlier in Paris, Renoir in the 20th Century runs here from 14th February to 9th May. The exhibition American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 is on view here from 28th February to 23rd May. Los Angeles, Hammer Museum. The first museum exhibition of drawings by Rachel Whiteread offers a comprehensive survey of her work in this medium, complemented by a number of sculptures; to 25th April (then in Dallas and London).

Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference, a timehonoured exercise in connoisseurship, explores the differences between Rembrandt’s drawings and those of more than 14 pupils and followers; to 28th February.

There is a concurrent display of Dutch drawings from the Getty collections.

Montreal, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal.

Separate exhibitions of work by the contemporary artists Luanne Martineau, Etienne Zack and Marcel Dzama are on view here from 5th February to 30th April.

New Haven, Yale Center for British Art. The exhibition Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp is on view here from 4th February to 25th April.

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada. Maurice Denis: Journeys examines the artist’s work as a book illustrator; to 30th April.

Philadelphia, Museum of Art. Picasso and the AvantGarde in Paris surveys the artist’s work during the period 1905 to 1945; 24th February to 25th April; to be reviewed.

A sound work by Bruce Nauman presented at the Venice Biennale last year is on view here to 4th April.

Saint Louis, Art Museum. Yinka Shonibare: Mother and Father worked hard so I can play runs here to 14th March.

San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition of paintings by Luc Tuymans is on view here from 6th February to 2nd May. Seattle Art Museum. Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti is on view here to 11th April.

Vancouver Art Gallery. Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man is an exhibition of drawings from the Royal Collection; 6th February to 2nd May.

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Venice, L.A. Louvre. 3 x 3 is an exhibition of paintings by Imi Knoebel, Robert Mangold and Jason Martin; and sculptures by Richard Deacon, Joel Shapiro and Peter Shelton; to 13th February.

Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art. Previously in Syracuse, Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales is on view here to 25th April (then in Albuquerque).

Washington, National Gallery of Art. The exhibition The Sacred Made Real, reviewed at its London showing in the January issue, is on view here from 28th February to 31st May. The exhibition From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection comprises French and American late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury paintings, bequeathed in 1962; to 31st July.

45 proofs for lithographs, etchings and screenprints

by Jasper Johns are on display here in an exhibition running to 4th April.

Washington, Phillips Collection. Seen earlier in New York, and reviewed in the January issue, the exhibition of works by Georgia O’Keeffe, focusing on the artist’s abstract works, is on view here from 6th February to 9th May (then in Santa Fe).

West Palm Beach, Norton Museum of Art. The travelling exhibition of reclaimed paintings from the Goudstikker collection is here from 13th February to 9th May. Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. The Boldini exhibition, reviewed at its Ferrara showing in the December issue, runs here from 14th February to 25th April.

Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia. The 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art runs here from 26th February to 2nd May. Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery. The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is on view here to 5th April.

Canberra, National Gallery of Australia. Masterpieces from Paris is a loan exhibition of works from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, by artists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat, Bonnard, Monet, Denis and Vuillard; to 5th April.

Gurgaon, Devi Art Foundation. An exhibition of contemporary art from Pakistan is on view here to 2nd May. Kanazawa, st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. A large exhibition of works by Olafur Eliasson is on view to 22nd March.

Melbourne, Heide Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition Cubism and Australian Art is on display here to 8th April.

São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna. An exhibition of works by Gordon Matta-Clark is on view here from 25th February to 4th April.

Singapore, Art Museum. The exhibition In the Eye of Modernity: Philippine Neo-Realist Masterworks from the Ateneo Art Gallery traces the development of ‘NeoRealism’ in the Philippines during the 1950s and 1960s, in the work of artists such as Arturo Luz and Cesar Legaspi; to 14th March.

Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson is on view here to 11th April.

Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art. The first exhibition in Japan of paintings by the Welsh painter Frank Brangwyn (1867–1956) centres on his relationship with the collector Matsukata Kojiro; 23rd February to 30th May.

February sales

London, / International Art Fair; 18th to 21st February.

London, BADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair; 17th to 23rd March.

London, Watercolours and Drawings Fair; 3rd to 7th February.

Madrid, Almoneda, Art and Antiques Fair; 10th to 18th April.

Madrid, ARCO; 17th to 21st February.

Maastricht, TEFAF; 12th to 21st March.

New York, The Armory Show; 4th to 7th March.

New York, Works on Paper; 19th to 21st February.

New York, Sculpture, Objects and Functional Art (SOFA); 16th to 19th April.

Palm Beach, American International Fine Art Fair (AIFAF); 3rd to 8th February.

Paris, Salon du Dessin; 23rd to 29th March.

Announcements American Art History Symposium, Yale University, 10th April. Proposals are solicited from graduate students whose work exemplifies creative modes of inquiry and breaks with established critical approaches to the study of American art. Abstracts of approximately 500 words for papers not to exceed 20 minutes in length should be received, along with a CV, by 22nd February. Please e-mail material to <americanist.symposium@gmail.com>; for details contact Elizabeth Athens <elizabeth.athens@yale.edu> or Xiao Situ <xiao.situ@yale.edu>.

The lent term Graduate Seminars in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, focus on aspects of collecting and include Piers Barker-Bates on Emperor Charles V (10th February), Alastair Laing on Bankes’s Spanish pictures, Kingston Lacy (3rd March) and a discussion on Horace Walpole (10th March). Contact Jonathan Yarker <jonnyarker@googlemail.com>.

March issue

London, Christie’s. The art of the surreal (2nd); Impressionist and modern art (2nd and 3rd); PostWar and contemporary art (11th and 12th).

London, Sotheby’s. Impressionist and modern art (3rd and 4th); Contemporary art (10th and 11th).

F e b r uary 2010

86. Hôtel des Roches Noires, Trouville, by Claude Monet. Canvas, 81 by 58.5 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; exh. Dallas Museum of Art).

Forthcoming fairs

Rest of the world

140

Notes on contributors

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The March issue is devoted to art in Siena and artists including Taddeo Bartolo, Gentile da Fabriano, Sassetta, Vecchietta and Mattia Preti. See the Editorial on p.75 above.

the burlington magazine

Till-Holger Borchert is Chief Curator at the Groeningemuseum, Bruges.

Alison Brown is Professor Emerita of Italian Renaissance History at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Quentin Buvelot is Senior Curator at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Lorne Campbell is the George Beaumont Senior Research Curator at the National Gallery, London.

Peter Cherry is Head of the History of Art and Architecture Department at Trinity College, Dublin.

Herman Th. Colenbrander is an independent art historian.

Catherine Craft is an independent art historian.

Xander van Eck is Associate Professor of Art History at Izmir University of Economics.

Mark Evans is Senior Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Morgan Falconer is a critic and journalist.

Jan Piet Filedt Kok is a former Curator and Director of Collections at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Patrick Florizoone is the Archivist of the James Ensor Archives, Ghent.

Ton Geerts is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague.

Tony Godfrey is Programme Director for the MA in Contemporary Art course at Sotheby’s Institute, Singapore.

Yuriko Jackall is completing her doctorate on JeanBaptiste Greuze at the Université Lumière Lyon 2.

David Jaffé is a Senior Curator at the National Gallery, London.

Catherine Lampert is a Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts, London.

Jill Lloyd is an independent art historian specialising in German and Austrian 20th-century art.

Christina Lodder is a Fellow of the University of Edinburgh.

Jan Gorm Madsen is Curator at the Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen.

Mark Meadow is Professor at Leiden University and Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Scott Nethersole is the Harry M. Weinrebe Curatorial Assistant at the National Gallery, London.

Luuk Pijl is an independent art historian.

Hugo Platt is Senior Paintings Conservator at Kiffy Stainer-Hutchins & Co., Houghton.

Kiffy Stainer-Hutchins is Chief Paintings Conservator at Kiffy Stainer-Hutchins & Co., Houghton.

Jessica Stevens-Campos is Gallery Manager at Moatti Fine Arts, London.

Oliver Tostmann is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Italian Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Marina Vaizey is former editor of Art Quarterly and The Review for the National Art Collections Fund.

Simon Watney is an independent scholar and the Conservation Cases Recorder for the Church Monuments Society.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. is Curator of Northern Baroque Painting at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Majorie E. Wieseman is Curator of Dutch Paintings at the National Gallery, London.

Corrections In John Elderfield’s article ‘Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s “Matisse. His Art and His Public”, 1951’, in the January 2010 issue, the citation in footnote 14 should have read: A.H. Barr, Jr.: ‘Modern Art Makes History, Too’, College Art Journal 1/1 (November 1941), pp.3–6, and not January 1941, as published.

In Alvar Gonzáles-Palacios’s review of Carlos IV Mecenas y Coleccionista (October 2009, pp.714–15) the name of José-Luis Sanchez, co-curator of the exhibition, was unfortunately omitted from the authors of the catalogue.