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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.

Portraits of King Charles I’s Children Lead Sotheby’s December Old Master Sale

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Sotheby’s announced last week two portraits by Anthony van Dyck to lead their December Old Master Evening sale in London. Two of King Charles I’s children are depicted in these consignments from a collection that has held the works for almost 100 years. The more valuable portrait is of King Charles II while he was Prince of Wales (£2-3m); his younger sister’s portrait has a £600-800k estimate. The works are interesting for their long provenance, the depiction of the future king and the fact that they were among van Dyck’s last works and may have never emerged from his studio. Sotheby’s feels these attributes might help buck the currents running against van Dyck in the marketplace.

Nine years ago, the van Dyck market hit an all-time high with the sale of the artist’s last self portrait from the same period as these works. The painting had been in the same hands for three centuries. It was offered with a £2-3m estimate but was bid up to £8.3m premium or more than $13.5m. That year and the next there were other strong sales including a study of a bearded man that made $7m.

The last work offered at this level, in April of this year, was a portrait of François Langlois that Christie’s hoped would make $2-4m but sold for $1.8m premium.

The year before, Saint Sebastian After His Ordeal was estimated at £1.2-1.8m and sold for a premium price of £1.9m also at Christie’s. Perhaps more relevant to this discussion was the portrait of these two children’s mother painted by van Dyck. In 2015, Sotheby’s offered a portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria which failed to find a buyer. Here’s Sotheby’s release on the two portraits:

Two portraits of Charles I’s eldest children – the eleven year-old Prince of Wales, (later King Charles II), and his nine year-old sister Mary, the Princess Royal, (later, the mother of the future king, William III) will be among the highlights of Sotheby’s London Old Master Evening sale on 5 December. Among the very last works that Van Dyck painted for his royal patron, these charming, beautifully preserved portraits have been in the same private collection for nearly a century, and come fresh to market with a combined estimate of £2.6 million – 3.8 million.

Conceived and executed in the summer of 1641, months before the artist’s death in December the same year, it is possible that they are the portraits of the Prince and the Princess recorded as being among the possessions left in the artist’s studio in Blackfriars on his death. Epitomising the extraordinary skill which Van Dyck brought to child portraiture, a genre in which he had excelled ever since his early years in Genoa, both works provide a penetrating likeness of the royal children at a time when their world, and the Stuart monarchy, was on the brink of collapse.

Alex Bell, Sotheby’s Co-Chairman of Old Master Paintings, said: “Van Dyck was responsible for creating the enduring images of Charles I and his court, and in these exceptionally well-preserved portraits of his two eldest children we see the artist use his painterly skill to acknowledge both the youth and the status of his royal subjects. The tumultuous history of the Stuart court has always captured people’s imagination and with the additional interest sparked by the fascinating exhibitions in London this year, it is particularly timely for these royal portraits, which are extremely rare to the market, to come up for sale.’

Appointed ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to Their Majesties’ in 1632, Van Dyck created numerous portraits of Charles I, his wife Henrietta Maria, and their children, many of which still remain in the British Royal Collection. Depicting his sitters with a relaxed elegance and understated authority, Van Dyck’s sophisticated style dominated English portraiture until the end of the 18th century.

Portraying the eldest child of Charles I, the Portrait of Charles II, when Prince of Wales(estimate: £2-3 million) is a unique likeness of the young prince and one of the finest royal portraits of Van Dyck’s late career. Depicting the future heir to the throne standing in armour with the ribbon of the Garter, with his left hand resting on the hilt of his sword and his right on the head of a stick, this portrait marks a distinct shift in the representation of the young Prince. Moving away from the celebrated child portraits painted alongside his siblings, the portrait exudes a more martial and adult gravitas, both in accoutrements and bearing.

It is not known when the king gave the commission to paint such an important portrait of the Prince of Wales but the painting can probably be associated with a payment for the Prince’s barge, which on 9 August 1641 had ‘caryd his highness from Lambeth to Whithall and from thence to Sr Anthonye Vandickes and back again.’

Although he was still very young, the Prince of Wales accompanied his father, Charles I, at the outbreak of the English Civil War, and was present at the battle of Edgehill in 1642. When by 1646 it was clear that his father was losing the war, Charles was made to flee England and take refuge on the continent. Following the king’s execution, Charles lead a number of unsuccessful campaigns to recover his throne. Following the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658 and the reformed parliament’s decision to restore the monarchy, Charles returned to England in 1660 as King Charles II.

Painted shortly after her marriage to Prince Willem of Orange, the Portrait of Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange (estimate: £600,000 – 800,000), is the last of the artist’s likenesses of the young princess. It is one of three versions of the design, all most likely to have been painted in the summer of 1641. Mary is depicted wearing a fine orange silk dress edged with lace tied with blue ribbon, and both her wedding ring and the large diamond brooch given to her by her husband the day after their wedding on 2 April 1641. By this date Van Dyck was probably too unwell to finish the picture himself for it seems probable the painting of the Princess’ costume was entrusted to his studio.

Following her marriage aged just nine years old, the Princess remained in London until February 1642, when she travelled with her mother to Holland to join her husband. She returned to England at the Restoration but died shortly thereafter. Her son, Willem III of Orange, later succeeded her brother Charles II and was crowned King William III of England in 1689.

Newly Discovered Van Dyck Comes By Way of Museum Project

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Olivia Boteler Porter

The fascinating part of the story of the discovery of a new work by Old Master Anthony van Dyck comes after the painting itself:

The oil on canvas by Van Dyck was found at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle in County Durham in northeast England. Van Dyck was born in Antwerp in 1599 and was famous for his paintings of Charles I, the king who was executed after the English Civil War in 1649.

“To find a portrait by Van Dyck is rare enough, but to find one of his ‘friendship portraits’ like this, of the wife of his best friend in England (Endymion Porter), is extraordinarily lucky,” said Bendor Grosvenor, an art historian and dealer.

The painting was in a bad state, and was listed as “a copy after Sir Anthony Van Dyck.” As such, it would probably only have made £5,000 (5,700 euros) at auction. It could now be worth £1 million.

The work came to light during photography of all 210,000 of the United Kingdom’s publicly held paintings. Yes, someone is creating a catalogue of the entire country’s painting patrimony.

Van Dyck Old Master Painting Found in England (DW.de)

Sotheby's on Van Dyck

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Sotheby's Van Dyck VideoSotheby’s draws attention to the three works by Anthony van Dyck in next week’s Old Master sale with this video supplying biographical and art historical background for the artist.

Sotheby's Van Dyck Record Explained

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Sotheby’s explains their success today:

A new auction record for Sir Anthony van Dyck – one of the most important artists to have worked in England – was set tonight at Sotheby’s in London when the artist’s Self Portrait sold to a bidder in the saleroom (Alfred Bader in partnership with Philip Mould) for £8,329,250/ US$13,521,704/ €9,207,960.  The portrait was hotly pursued by nine bidders, who drove the price to almost three times the pre-sale high estimate (the painting had an estimate of £2-3 million) and established a new auction record for the artist by a considerable margin.

**The previous auction record for a work by van Dyck was £3,065,250 and this was set by his A Rearing Stallion in 2008.**Continue Reading

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