Early arrivals in America: paintings attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck,

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Early arrivals in America: paintings attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck

by DENNIS P. WELLER

FOR MUCH OF the last century and a half, American collectors have amassed extraordinary troves of old-master paintings, with arguably their greatest acquisitions being made during the decade or two on either side of 1900.1 Many of the names of these collectors continue to resonate with museum visitors today, among them Morgan, Altman, Frick, Gardner, Widener and Mellon. While it must be noted that many of these collectors were motivated by deep pockets and large egos, one cannot fault their attempts to acquire superlative works of the highest quality. These individuals can also be praised for their generosity to subsequent generations, as they ultimately enriched museums across the nation. Provenance research tells us that they began their efforts to buy ‘culture’ in the years after the American Civil War, as their successes (and failures) are documented in the pages of biographies, monographs, and collection and exhibition catalogues.2 By contrast, and easily lost within the fog of more than two centuries, scholars have uncovered little information regarding the modest activities of America’s earliest collectors. Only in rare instances has documentation regarding the arrival and disposition of old-master pictures been uncovered from the decades before the Civil War. Rarer still are identified and extant ‘early arrivals’ that can be directly linked to collectors active during these years.

By a happy coincidence, two paintings currently on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art can cast light on the topic.

Hanging opposite each other in the Museum’s seventeenthcentury Flemish kunstkamer, both pictures are documented as having arrived in America before 1810. As is often the case with such early collecting, both paintings carried rather ambitious attributions at the time – Peter Paul Rubens for Romulus and Remus (Fig.37), and Anthony van Dyck for the Madonna and Child with five saints (Fig.38).

Currently attributed to the workshops of Rubens and Van Dyck respectively, both of these paintings have remained in relative obscurity since arriving in America. This can be partially explained by their having been unavailable to European scholars researching the œuvres of Rubens and Van Dyck in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 Moreover, the pictures have rarely been on public display in the two centuries before they reached Raleigh. Romulus and Remus, for example, made a single appearance in a 1936 Detroit exhibition. The Van Dyck turned up a decade later in a Los Angles show, and after entering the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1956, it has left Raleigh only once for an exhibition in 1961.4

For the student of American museum and exhibition history, these dates and locations offer important clues as to the individual responsible for their emergence from relative obscurity, W.R. Valentiner (1880–1958). German born and trained, he wrote his dissertation on Rembrandt und seine Umgebung (Rembrandt and his circle). In 1905 Valentiner took a position with Cornelis Hofstede de Groot in The Hague, and a year later he became the private assistant to Wilhelm Bode, the general director of the Prussian State Art Collections in Berlin. With the blessing of Bode, he brought his expertise to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1908 as curator of decorative arts. After serving in the German army during the First World War, Valentiner returned to the United States where he served as the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts between 1924 and 1944, followed by six years, from 1947, at the precursor of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At the end of his long career he was lured out of retirement to become the first director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, a position he held from 1955 until his death in 1958.

It could be argued that Valentiner’s accomplishments have not been equalled by others working in American museums in the decades since his death.5 Coupled with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the country’s collections and collectors, he served as a magnet for individuals seeking information and attributions for paintings in their possession. In addition, art dealers made available to him details about works on the market, especially imports from Europe. It was Valentiner, for example, who informed Gustav Glück of the whereabouts of the Madonna and Child with five saints. Glück then included the picture as an autograph Van Dyck in his catalogue of the artist’s œuvre published in 1931.6 Another decade and a half would pass before Valentiner took the opportunity to include this ‘Van Dyck’ in an exhibition devoted to Rubens and Van Dyck held in Los Angeles. Similarly, Romulus and Remus seems to have crossed Valentiner’s radar at about the same time. Correspondence with the picture’s owner in the mid-1930s ultimately led to its inclusion in Sixty Paintings and Some Drawings by Peter Paul Rubens curated by Valentiner in Detroit.

While it was Valentiner who brought the two paintings out of the shadows following their long hibernation in American private collections for well over a century, here we are concerned with their earlier provenance in the United States. The history of Romulus and Remus in America began in 1794, when Henri Joseph Stier (1743–1821), a descendant of Peter Paul Rubens, was forced to flee the Southern Netherlands during the French Revolution.

1 Although this article is concerned with two Flemish pictures, much of the research on early collecting has focused on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings.

2 Several recent publications have addressed the early appearance of Dutch, and to a lesser degree, Flemish paintings in America. For the most thorough treatment of the subject, see E. Quodbach, ed.: Holland’s Golden Age in America. Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals (The Frick Collection studies in the history of art collecting in America; 1), University Park 2014.

3 For the literature devoted to the Romulus and Remus, see E. McGrath: Corpus

Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Pt. 13: Rubens: Subjects from History, I, London 1997, pp.161–62. The Madonna and Child with five saints was catalogued in D.P. Weller: Systematic catalogue of the collection, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh: SeventeenthCentury Dutch and Flemish Paintings, Raleigh 2009, pp.243–47.

4 Exh. cat. Twenty-fifth Anniversary 1936–1961, New York (Hans Schaeffer Galleries) 1961.

5 The role played by Valentiner in professionalising American museums, advancing scholarship and bringing collectors, curators and dealers together, has been discussed

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37. Romulus and Remus, from the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens. 1610s. Canvas, 107.6 by 129.5 cm. (Private collection, on loan to the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh).

He came to an area just outside Washington DC, now suburban Maryland, bringing his collection of paintings with him. He returned to his native land in 1803. Although his paintings would find their way back to Europe in 1816, they had come to America for safe keeping by Stier’s daughter Rosalie (1778–1821), who lived with her husband George Calvert (1768–1838) at Riversdale mansion in modern-day Riverdale, Maryland.7 Shortly before the collection, including Romulus and Remus, returned to the Low Countries in 1816, Rosalie and her husband decided to have them unwrapped and briefly put on view for their friends and neighbours at their mansion in Riversdale. This was the last time the work was shown in public until it appeared in the 1936 Detroit exhibition. Romulus and Remus did not remain in Europe for long. Calvert, following the death of his wife, Rosalie, bought the picture at auction in Antwerp on 29th July 1822, and had it returned to Riversdale in Maryland. Since then, Romulus and Remus has remained in the possession of Calvert’s descendants in America, and its current owners have placed the canvas on

long-term loan to the North Carolina Museum of Art. Their generosity was in part prompted by correspondence they had in their possession from Valentiner dating to the 1930s.

In turning to the Madonna and Child with five saints, a painting that entered the permanent collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1956, a degree of caution is required regarding its early American provenance. Mrs Chandor Dickinson (née Alice May Haring; b. 1900) stated in 1939 that she had inherited the painting from her great-great uncle Thomas Ivers Haring (b. 1780), adding that he had brought the painting ‘from Europe about 1809’.8 While an inventory of Haring’s possessions has not surfaced to confirm his ownership of the painting, the Haring family tree indicates that Mrs Dickinson’s great-great-grandfather Abraham Haring (b. 1779) and Thomas Ivers Haring were indeed brothers.9 By the early 1930s Mrs Dickinson had sold the Madonna and Child with five saints.10 The picture passed through collections in New York and Los Angeles until the mid-1950s. In 1956, the

by a number of authors, from M. Heiden Sterne’s The Passionate Eye: The Life of William R. Valentiner, Detroit 1980, to the essays by the present writer and others in the publication cited in note 2 above.

6 G. Glück: Van Dyck, des Meisters Gemälde in 571 Abbildungen, 2nd ed., Stuttgart and New York 1931, p.61, and illustrated on p.525 (as Van Dyck).

7 Much of the information we have about Stier, his family and the collection while in America comes from letters written by Rosalie Stier beginning in 1795. See M. Law Callcott, ed.: Mistress of Riversdale. The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert

1795–1821, Baltimore and London 1991.

8 The testimony of Mrs Dickinson is attached to the photograph of the painting on file in the photo archives of the Frick Art Reference Library, New York.

9 Information regarding the early history of the Haring family in America appears in P. Haring Judd: More Lasting than Brass. A Thread of Family from Revolutionary New York to Industrial Connecticut, Boston 2004.

10 For the subsequent provenance of the painting, see Weller, op. cit. (note 3), p.243. the burlington mag a z i n e

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38. Madonna and Child with five saints, from the workshop or circle of Anthony van Dyck. c.1627–30. Panel, 112.7 by 95.3 cm. (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh).

Hans Schaffer Galleries, New York, sold the painting to George Ivey of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was acting on behalf of the J.V. Ivey Company. It was purchased as an intended gift to the then recently opened North Carolina Museum of Art. The work has remained in the collection since then, leaving the building only once for an exhibition in 1961.11 In her Rubens: Subjects from History (1997), Elizabeth McGrath was certainly correct in questioning Rubens’s participation in the execution of Romulus and Remus. Although she had not seen the painting, she recognised that its composition related to a number of autograph paintings by Rubens and designated the picture ‘? Rubens’.12 Perhaps more intriguing in terms of authorship is the Van Dyck. The most recent monograph on the painter determined that the Madonna and Child with five saints was indeed painted by Van Dyck near the end of his first Antwerp period, c.1620.13 That said, one of its authors wrote that ‘a certain inexplicable discrepancy can be observed between the typical “early” figures

types with pastose and finely executed elements on the one hand, and the more plastic and almost pure Rubensian Madonna with the chubby, round-cheeked Child on the other’.14 Recent technical examination of the panel helps to explain the discrepancy outlined above, as ‘dendrochronology gives the years 1627 or after as the most likely painting date, and that is about a decade later than the previous estimate’.15 Consequently, Van Dyck is highly unlikely to have painted the Madonna and Child with five saints, and it should be assigned to his workshop or circle.

Regardless of their downgraded attributions, the importance of Romulus and Remus and Madonna and Child with five saints to our limited understanding of the ‘early arrivals’ of European old-master paintings in America cannot be underestimated.

Combining the results of modern science with personal recollections, archival information, chance meetings, a good deal of luck, and above all the crucial role played by W.R. Valentiner, the two paintings speak to each other over the centuries within the galleries of the North Carolina Museum of Art.

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15

See footnote 4 above.

McGrath, op. cit. (note 3), I, pp.162–63.

13 S.J. Barnes, et al.: Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2004, no. I.8, p.26.

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Nora De Poorter in ibid., p.243.

Dendrochronological examination of the Madonna and Child with five saints was undertaken by T. Wazny and C.B. Griggs in 2006. The quote comes from their report which is on file at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.