EXHIBITIONS

Huon Mallalieu

MASTERING THE MARKET: DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTINGS FROM WOBURN ABBEY

Barber Institute, Birmingham, to 24th September

Government projects and other public schemes always come in over budget and over time.

So it will comfort our bureaucrats to see that much the same can happen in the private sector – at least as far as time is concerned.

The first major refurbishment of the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Abbey since it opened to the public in 1955 was initiated in 2018 and was intended to be finished in 2020. Two more years were then added and then, partly owing to the discovery of asbestos, another three. I don’t know how the budget is behaving.

However, this long closure has allowed the ducal curators to send some of Woburn’s masterpieces out as ambassadors for the collection to galleries around the country. It should be good for the turnstiles when the Abbey eventually reopens.

The splendid group of Canalettos has been seen in Bath, Worcester and Greenwich, where it was accompanied by portraits and landscapes.

Now a group of 17th-century Dutch paintings, headed by a little-known Rembrandt, has come to Birmingham. The exhibition sets out to illuminate the workings of the art market in the Netherlands during the Golden Age, and then to look at the collecting tastes of the 4th, 5th and 6th Dukes in the century from 1730.

As well as Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Bearded Old Man (1643), the group includes Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Man (c 1635-38). The subjects of Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of a Married Couple (c 1632-34) have been identified as the artist Daniel Mytens and his second wife, Susanna Droeshout, a miniature-painter.

Highlights include Aelbert Cuyp’s A Landscape near Calcar with the Artist Sketching (c 1652), Jan Steen’s Twelfth Night or Le Roi Boit (1670-71) and Jan van de Cappelle’s A Dutch Harbour, with Numerous Fishing Boats (c 1652-54).

The Rembrandt, also known as The Old Rabbi, was fully authenticated only in 2012. It was almost certainly conceived as a pair to the portrait of the artist’s wife, Saskia, now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. They are painted on mahogany panels from the same packing case.

Steen’s Twelfth Night portrays just the sort of boisterous scene featuring members of his family that gave rise to the expression een huishouden van Jan Steen, meaning the sort of household you really don’t want as neighbours.

The Barber’s own impressive collection is able to complement these well, with further examples by Hals, Steen and Van Dyck.

Clockwise from above: A Landscape near Calcar with the Artist Sketching, by Aelbert Cuyp; Portrait of a Man (traditionally identified as the artist), by Frans Hals; The Interior of Archduke Leopold William’s Picture Gallery at Brussels, by Teniers the Younger; Portrait of a Bearded Old Man, by Rembrandt van Rijn