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Sotheby’s Has Two Caspar David Friedrich Works in December

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Sotheby’s has two landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich — Landschaft mit Gebirgssee am Morgen (Landscape with Mountain Lake, Morning) (£2-3m) and Sonnenblick im Riesengebirge (Sunburst in the Giant Mountains)(£500-700k) — with distinguished provenance in its December 12th sale. The first comes from the collection of the late Dr Erika Pohl-Ströher and, the second, by descent through the family of the preeminent German-Swiss art dealer Dr Fritz Nathan. It’s rare to see Friedrich paintings come up at auction. These two are the first to appear at Sotheby’s in a dozen years.

Here’s Sotheby’s press release:

Today more perhaps than at any time since Caspar David Friedrich’s death almost 180 years ago, his sublime and timeless landscapes are being appreciated by artists and public alike. The artistic embodiment of landscape painting of the Romantic era, Friedrich strove to express mood and meaning through nature, his aesthetic informed by his Protestant upbringing and the idea of divine creation manifesting itself in the natural world.

Claude Piening, Head of Sotheby’s 19th Century European Paintings in London, said: “It is enormously exciting and virtually unprecedented to see not one, but two, oil paintings by Friedrich, from completely separate sources, appear on the market at once.  Friedrich was the father of German Romanticism and of modern German art, not to mention one of the defining European artists of the nineteenth-century. His legacy was so powerful, and his immediately recognisable, timeless style even today captures the imaginations of artists  and the public alike. The rarity, museum quality, and exceptional provenance of both of these paintings is sure to generate great excitement among private and institutional buyers alike.”

While Friedrich was an exacting student of the landscape, and though his paintings give the impression of the greatest appearance of actuality, his landscapes were, in fact, contructs of his own design. Landschaft mit Gebirgssee am Morgen depicts a lone wanderer in a frock coat, dwarfed by the expanse of lake and mountains beyond, pausing for a moment to take in the vista. Painted circa 1823-25, the work can be seen as the culmination of the artist’s developing thoughts on, and ambitions for, an Alpine landscape. While it has been suggested that the subject could be the Königssee in the Bavarian Alps, or the Eiger and Mönch peaks in the Bernese Alps, the exact reproduction of a Swiss Apline view was never Friedrich’s objective. He rarely delivered a topographically realistic view of a subject, preferring instead to give free reign to his imagination, an extraordinary feat considering Friedrich himself never visited the Alps.

Friedrich approached landscape painting with quiet introspection, building meaning out of the spatial structure itself. In Landschaft mit Gebirgssee am Morgen, a dramatic sense of depth is achieved by three distinct planes: the meadow with trees, figure and animals in the foreground, in which every blade of grass and field flower is observed in minute detail; the mirror-like surface of the lake below, and the majestic framing mountains, receding into a purple mist in the background. Each band is distinguished through differences in atmospheric rendering, to intimate its symbolic meaning: the grass, flowers, firs, cattle, and the wandering figure symbolising the transience of life; the lake death; the mountains salvation and the life eternal.

Though the exact dating of the work remains open to debate, the painting abounds with references to Friedrich’s life’s work, and it is tempting to see the lone figure, in frock coat and top hat, as the artist himself – and certainly a version in microcosm of the frock-coated Rückenfigur in Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer(Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog) of 1818 (Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle). The figure of a wanderer leading the viewer into the mood of the painting is certainly one of the artist’s trademarks. Friedrich believed he could achieve a truly spiritual, religious communication by transcribing his inner vision using landscape imagery and a vocabulary of symbols.

Sonnenblick im Riesengebirge belongs to the seven hitherto unrecorded oils discovered by lawyer and art historian Carl von Lorck between 1941 and 1943 during his cultural survey of East Prussian noble houses. For over a century lost in obscurity in the von Hahn family seat of Schloss Basedow until at least 1949, the painting’s next owner was Fritz Nathan, in whose possession it remained until his death.

Both in date of execution and compositionally, particularly in its symbolic vocabulary, it comes close to Friedrich’s Landschaft mit Gebirgssee am Morgen. The rocky tumbling foreground symbolises the transience of earthly life (the dead tree a memento mori), the upright firs the faithful who will inherit eternal life, denoted by the sun-illuminated uplands in the beyond.

Friedrich’s art fell into obscurity for much of the nineteenth century before being rediscovered by the avant-garde in the 1890s and by many living artists today, including Gerhard Richter.

Van Dyck’s Portrait of Princess Mary Stars at Christie’s

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In a rather unexpected turn, Christie’s announced this morning that they too have a van Dyck portrait as their featured lot for the December Old Master Evening sales in London. More than that, the work comes from the same final year as the pair of portraits announced last week for Sotheby’s. Christie’s brighter, more opulent work is priced well above either or both of Sotheby’s van Dyck portraits of the princess and the Prince of Wales.

To recap from yesterday’s post, the van Dyck market has been in something of a holding pattern for the better part of a decade. This painting aspires to sell among the top works by the artist. If the low estimate of £5m is achieved as a premium price, the work would become the third highest auction price for the artist.

Here’s Christie’s press release:

Portrait of Princess Mary (1631–1660), daughter of King Charles I of England, full-length, in a pink dress decorated with silver embroidery and ribbons by Sir Anthony van Dyck, 1641, will be offered from a Distinguished Private Collection in Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December, duringChristie’s Classic Week (estimate: £5,000,000-8,000,000). Commissioned to celebrate the crucial alliance between the British crown and the House of Orange, this intimatead vivum (from life) portrait of Princess Mary, the finest portrait of the type, is remarkable for its royal provenance, the superb quality of its draughtsmanship and its exceptional condition. It is one of the most important European Royal Portraits to come to auction for a generation. The painting will go on public view for the first time, ahead of the auction, at Christie’s Shanghai on 19 until 21 September, later touring to New York where it will be on public view from 25 to 30 October and to Hong Kong between 23 and 26 November, ahead of the pre-sale public exhibition in London from 1 to 6 December.

John Stainton, Deputy Chairman, Old Master Paintings, Christie’s EMERI:“This beautifully-preserved full-length portrait of Princess Mary, eldest daughter of King Charles I of England, and future mother of King William III of England, was one of the last commissions executed by van Dyck, in the summer of 1641, only months before the artist’s premature death at the age of forty-two. It bears many of the hallmarks of his remarkable genius – in the subtle rendering of the sitter’s physiognomy, the masterful depiction of the shimmering drapery, the brilliance of the palette, and the assured draughtsmanship and deft handling of the paint. A work of the finest quality, it represents the culmination of all that van Dyck had learnt from his master, Peter Paul Rubens, and from his Venetian predecessors, notably Titian. By developing his own distinctive style of portraiture, characterised by a calm authority and supreme elegance, van Dyck both revolutionised portraiture in Europe and left a legacy for future generations of artists from Gainsborough and Lawrence, to Sargent and Freud.”

ROYAL PROVENANCE: Identified by Sir Oliver Millar as one of two portraits commissioned from van Dyck for the court at The Hague, this painting would originally have formed part of the prestigious collection of the Princes of Orange, Stadtholders of the United Provenances of the Netherlands. It would likely have been displayed in one of their principal palaces, possibly at Binnenhof Palace in The Hague, where Princess Mary lived with her husband William, alongside works by many of the principal Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century.

VAN DYCK IN ENGLAND: In July 1632, van Dyck was appointed ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to their Majesties’ by King Charles I of England. A passionate collector and patron, the King had long hoped to attract a painter of such exceptional status and renown to his service, and found in van Dyck an artist not only capable of fulfilling his desire for magnificent portraits and paintings, but also one who shared his tastes, especially for Venetian pictures. The style, refinement and brilliance of van Dyck’s portraits was unprecedented in England; the artist instilled in his sitters a new sense of vitality and movement and his bravura technique allowed him to enliven the entire surface of his works with light, assured dashes of paint, as exemplified in the present portrait.

PRINCESS MARY AS SITTER: Van Dyck first painted the sitter in the weeks immediately following his arrival in London in 1632, when the young Princess Royal was shown with her parents, King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, and elder brother, the future King Charles II. The monumental group portrait, known as ‘The Greate Peece’, dominated the King’s Long Gallery in the Palace of Whitehall (The Royal Collection). The earliest single portraits of Princess Mary, which show her full-length in a blue dress, with her hands linked together across her stomach – a pose that echoes van Dyck’s earlier portraits of her mother – were painted in or before 1637, and are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at Hampton Court. Four years later, she sat again to van Dyck with her fifteen-year-old husband, Prince William of Orange, for the double portrait now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, as well as for the present work.

JEWELS AND ATTIRE: In both the present work and in the Rijksmuseum double portrait, Mary is shown wearing her wedding ring and the large diamond brooch given to her by her husband on 3 May 1641, the day after their marriage. Her spectacular coral gown, decorated with silver thread trim along its border, is thought to be similar to that worn for her wedding, rather than the cloth of silver-gold she wears in the Rijksmuseum picture. The apparent weight of the fabric, falling in broad, heavy folds, along with the bright highlights along the creases, suggest the fabric may have been cloth of silver. Shimmering highlights, applied in swift, cross-hatched strokes, were used as a form of shorthand by artists, mimicking the lustre of metallic threads as the textile caught the light. In accordance with the fashion of the period, her gown is open down the front, revealing a stiffened stomacher across the chest and a matching skirt beneath. The ribbons, which would at one time have been functional, lacing the skirt and stomacher to the bodice, were applied purely as adornment. One ribbon, however has been pinned or stitched flat to disguise the seam between the bodice and skirt. Details such as the Princess’s brooch, the string of pearls and ribbons on her shimmering dress are rendered with remarkable precision and delicacy, characteristics that defined the artist’s finest late works.

Sotheby’s Expects a ‘Great Deal of Excitement’ for Long Lost Canova

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Sotheby’s has announced the re-discovery of Antonio Canova’s Bust of Peace, of the late 18th and early 19th Century sculptor’s ideal heads. In this particular case, the figure of peace was given to Canova’s long-time British patron whose family owned it for generations. Eventually, the artist behind the bust and the subject were lost to family memory. The contents of the aristocratic house were sold in the 1960s. The work eventually found its way into the hands of the current owner whose risk and research has produced the new attribution.

Because carved Canova statues are very rare, Sotheby’s is being very conservative in estimating the statue’s value. The whisper number is more than £1 million. But even that number is quite conservative. Take this example, another Canova marble, ‘Bust of Murat’ was sold in November 2017 for EUR 4.3 million at auction. In pounds that’s £3.75m. And The Bust of Peace has an extraordinary provenance dating back all the way to its conception in 1814. It also has an idealized subject and historical significance. All that Sotheby’s, Director of European Sculpture and Works of Art, Christopher Mason, will say is, “we expect a great deal of excitement.”

The artist behind one of the most celebrated sculptures in Britain, The Three Graces, Antonio Canova (1757-1821) is as revered today as he was during his lifetime. Honoured in verse by Lord Byron, Canova was considered the preeminent sculptor of his time, recognised not only for his skills as a carver, but also as a diplomat and dignitary for the Papal court.

Now, on 4 July in London, Sotheby’s will offer one of the few autograph works by Canova ever
to come to auction. Long thought lost, the Bust of Peace has not been seen in public for over 200
years since it was shown for the first time at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1817.
The sculpture belongs to Canova’s celebrated series of Ideal Heads (Teste Ideale). Considered
among the artist’s most intimate works, the Ideal Heads embody Canova’s ideal of beauty, and
were developed with the express purpose of gifting them to friends and patrons. The Bust of Peace (1814) was carved for his first British patron and close friend John Campbell, Lord Cawdor, in thanks for his long term patronage and friendship, and in part for his help in repatriating art from Italy looted by the French armies during the Napoleonic Wars.

Having been passed down through five generations of the Cawdor family following John Campbell’s death in 1821, the sculpture was forgotten over time. By 1962, when the contents of the family house Stackpole Court in Pembrokeshire were sold at auction, the Bust of Peace was simply described in the catalogue as ‘a white marble bust of a lady wearing a diadem’.

Now, following extensive research by the present owner, who acquired the sculpture as an unattributed work, the bust has been identified as the long-lost Bust of Peace by Canova. The masterful work is a significant rediscovery, of seminal importance within Canova’s oeuvre, and has great historical resonance.

Rare Rembrandt Print at Christie’s London in July

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Christie’s has a Rembrandt print featured in its Old Master sales in London this July.

Christ Presented to The People (‘Ecce Homo’) is considered to be among Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn’s (1606-1669) most significant achievements in any medium (estimate on request: in the region of $3-5million). One of the world’s most versatile, innovative, and influential artists, Rembrandt is viewed by many as the greatest printmaker of any generation. Epitomizing an artist at the height of his powers, both artistically and technically, this extraordinary drypoint of 1655 dates from his third decade as a printmaker. Executed on a monumental scale, the present work is one of only eight known impressions of the celebrated first state of this print and is the last known example in private hands. The other seven known impressions of this state are in major museum collections: Kupferstichkabinett der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Ashmolean Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Musée du Louvre (Rothschild Collection) and the Graphische Sammlung Albertina.

Offered from The Collection of the late Samuel Josefowitz, it is on public view at Christie’s New York until 5 May; going on view in Hong Kong from 24 to 28 May and then in London from 15 to 28 June and 30 June to 5 July, ahead of being offered for sale during Christie’s Classic Week in London, in the Old Masters Evening Sale on 5 July.

Titian Estimated at Fraction Salvator Mundi; 500 Years Ago It Was the Other Way Around

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Sotheby’s is selling a work by Titian once owned by King Charles I just as the Royal Academy is opening a reconstruction of executed monarch’s art collection. The religious picture, one of two versions with the other hanging in the Prado, is estimated at $2-3m and will sell in New York on February 1st:

Cromwell’s government wanted to both raise money for the state and pay off Charles’s debts as quickly as possible, selling an estimated 1,500 paintings and 500 sculptures.

One person owed money – £903 for various palace repairs – was John Embry, the royal plumber. A deal was offered whereby the state would give him £403 in cash and the rest could be made up with pictures. He chose 24, including the Titian, then called Margrett Afraid of a Monster, and valued at £100.

Bendor Grosvenor points out that the £100 valuation made the Titian more valuable than Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi from the same collection that had a £30 price tag at the time.

Titian painting given to Charles I’s plumber goes up for sale (The Guardian)

Drouot Discovers a €2.4m Artemisia Gentileschi 

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The Art Newspaper reports on another Old Master sleeper:

A previously unknown Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine by the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi sold at Drouot in Paris on 19 December for an artist record of €2,360,600 (€1.850m at the hammer, against an estimate of €300,000-€400,000). The work, which dates from the same period (1614-16) as another Saint Catherine picture by the artist held by the Uffizi, was discovered by auctioneer Christophe Joron-Derem and presented in his sale of European paintings.

Newly discovered Artemisia Gentileschi painting sells for €2.4m at auction in Paris  (The Art Newspaper)

Re-discovered John Constable Painting at Sotheby’s in December

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Sotheby’s recently announced that it will be selling a re-discoved Constable painting in early December:

John Constable (1776-1837) is one of Britain’s best-loved and most significant landscape painters. A key figure in the British Romantic movement of the early 19th century, Constable, together with J.M.W. Turner, changed the course of European landscape painting forever. This winter, Sotheby’s London will present a recently rediscovered landscape by the British artist which is one of the most exciting and important additions to Constable’s oeuvre to have emerged in the last fifty years. Painted between 1814 and 1817, Dedham Vale with the River Stour in Flood belongs to a small group of Constable’s early Suffolk paintings remaining in private hands. The work will be offered in Sotheby’s Old Masters Evening sale on 6 December, with an estimate of £2-3 million.

Julian Gascoigne, Senior Specialist, British Paintings at Sotheby’s said: “Constable’s views of Dedham Vale and the Stour valley have become icons of British art and define for many everything that is quintessential about the English countryside. Dedham Vale with the River Stour in Flood  was long mistakenly thought to be by Ramsay Richard Reinagle (1775-1862), a friend and contemporary of Constable’s, but recent scientific analysis and up-to-date connoisseurship has unanimously returned the work to its rightful place among the canon of the great master’s work and established beyond doubt its true authorship. It is without question one of the most exciting and important additions to Constable’s oeuvre to have emerged in the last fifty years”.

The painting is thought to have been commissioned by Thomas Fitzhugh as a wedding present for his future wife, Philadelphia Godfrey, whose parents were neighbours and friends of Constable’s family. It is the view from the back garden of Philadelphia’s childhood home, and must have served as a perfect memento once settled into married life in London.

Old Master Collector Who Was Focus of Schadenfreude Over Recent Sale Losses Revealed as Getty Seller

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Coverage of the Old Master sales in London earlier this month fixated on the sales from a collector who had worked with Jean Luc Baroni to assemble his collection. At the time, insiders like Bendor Grosvenor were quick to point out that although the collector was unloading some works at a slight loss, his gains on works like the surprise sale of Govaert Flinck’s Old Man at a Casement more than made up for the losses. Besides, the flat sales were more an indication of an insufficient holding period than weakness in the Old Master market.

Now the Art Newspaper reveals the seller of a group of drawings and a Watteau painting to the Getty museum. Turns out, it is the same collector reporters were fixated upon. Getty sale, which Grosvenor points out, belies “the old cliché that museum quality Old Masters never come onto the market anymore is just not true.” Meanwhile, the New York Times speculates the Getty paid a substantial price further putting the recent off-loading at auction in better context.

Here’s The Art Newspaper on who pulled off this feat:Continue Reading

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