17th Century

A long-lost self-portrait of Rembrandt has been rediscovered by Gary Schwartz. The new discovery is published in his latest book Rembrandt in a Red Beret – The Vanishings and Reappearances of a Self-portrait.

The painting has not been seen in the Netherlands for nearly 125 years and has not been on public display since 1967. It is currently being presented in Escher in The Palace, the city palace in The Hague where the self-portrait was housed from 1850 to 1894.

For his research, CODART founder and Rembrandt specialist Gary Schwartz drew on numerous unpublished documents in the Dutch Royal House Archive, the archives of the American and German governments, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, German courts, as well as private correspondence between Hereditary Grand Duchess Elisabeth of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and the German-American Rembrandt specialist Jakob Rosenberg. Schwartz’s new publication reconstructs the adventures of this significant work.

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It was taken for granted that the painting was a genuine Rembrandt until 1969, when the German-Dutch art historian Horst Gerson suggested that it might be by or in imitation of Ferdinand Bol. Although Gary Schwartz maintains that no Bol expert has ever entertained this idea, the Rembrandt Research Project did actually take it seriously. Gary Schwartz: “Doubts about who produced the painting were fueled by the damage sustained by the self-portrait after it was stolen in Weimar. Incompetent overpainting misled people as to the work’s quality. Comprehensive new technological research work carried out by the renowned Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft in Zürich has revealed that only the face is work by the original painter. And anyone looking at that face will struggle to regard it as anything other than a self-portrait by the master himself”. In his new publication, Gary Schwartz argues that the work deserves to be acknowledged as by the master himself. He interrogates and refutes objections to accepting the painting for what it appears to be, a Rembrandt self-portrait.

Justin Davies & Ingrid Moortgat: The punch mark VHB : possible identification as the panel maker’s mark of Hans van Beemen alias Hans van Herentals (died 1624)

Justin Davies: Evidence of a previously unknown set of Van Dyck’s Apostles in Schloss Woyanow, Danzig in the early Twentieth century and an examination of one of the panels

Andrea Seim: Planks from the same oak tree found in different paintings

Justin Davies: Art historical considerations on same tree planks found in different paintings

Joost Vander Auwera: Jacques Jordaens, his panels and panel makers: identifications and patterns

Justin Davies: Van Dyck’s Apostles: introduction, overview and a new document Johannes Edvardsson: Dendrochronological and panel mark results from the Besançon and Konstanjevica na Krki Van Dyck related Apostles

Alexis Merle Du Bourg: The provenance of the sets of contemporary panels of Van Dyck’s Apostles in Besançon and Konstanjevica na Krki

Ingrid Goddeeris: Identifying new avenues for nineteenth-century provenance research through a focus on the Belgian art dealer Léon Gauchez using online museum files and digitised journals

James Innes-Mulraine: To Land upp into the Garden there’: Van Dyck’s lost London studio found at last

On display until 3 July in Room 83 of the Villanueva Building, The Sense of Smell, a painting by Jan Brueghel and Rubens, is the focus of The Essence of a Painting. An Olfactory Exhibition, curated by Alejandro Vergara, Chief Curator of Flemish Painting and the Northern Schools at the Museo Nacional del Prado, and Gregorio Sola, Senior Perfumer at Puig and an academician of the Perfume Academy, who has created ten fragrances associated with elements in the painting. 

Brueghel’s work, which evokes the garden of rare trees and plants belonging to Isabel Clara Eugenia and her husband in early 17th-century Brussels, depicts more than 80 species of plants and flowers, as well as various animals associated with the sense of smell, such as the scent hound and civet, and a range of objects relating to the world of perfume, including scented gloves, vessels  holding fragrant substances, a perfume burner warmed in a sumptuous brazier, and vessels for distilling essences.

X-rays showing changes and corrections that had been made to the work helped confirm Rembrandt as its creator. [Berlin curator Katja] Kleinert said experts were unanimous in their verdict. 

Comparisons were made with a very similar composition by Rembrandt, called Landscape with Stone Bridge at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which the Gemäldegalerie’s director, Dagmar Hirschfeld – herself a Rembrandt expert – said shared hallmarks typical for him. 

“You quite often get pairs of paintings, where you have the impression he is trying to do the same again, but in another style of painting or to optimise what he has already achieved,” she said. Analysis of the painting in Berlin, which the gallery acquired in 1924, showed how Rembrandt had made radical changes to the work during its creation, including shifting the position of a storm cloud, reducing the size of a hill and making changes to a group of trees. These processes in turn made the painting more compact and dense.

Join celebrated art historian and curator Karen Hearn for “Big-Bellied Women: Portraying Pregnancy in 16th and 17th-Century England,” an exploration of early modern depictions of pregnancy in British art. Hearn, a former curator at Tate Britain and honorary professor at University College London, argues many early modern works depicted pregnancy overtly, contrary to previous thought, for a variety of reasons and motivations.

Bernini and His World is a unique exploration of Gian Lorenzo Bernini the sculptor, offering new insights and including discussions of the artist’s stylistic innovations and the ways in which he approached sculpture. Placing his life and work within a social, anthropological and historical context, Livio Pestilli gives a fascinating and in-depth account, from the Rome in which Bernini lived and its reception of foreign sculptors to the myth-making narrative of his biographers, and the judgements of his critics.

This young Black woman was surely a member of the community of largely working-class Africans who by the mid-1600s had made one neighborhood in central Amsterdam their home. Rembrandt's large house was here, and he and his students, such as Govaert Flinck (1615-1660), often represented these neighbors in their history paintings and allegories. However, given the absence of attributes specifically indicating the subject's role as an allegorical or historical figure, this work appears to be a portrait of a specific, although still unidentified, woman. The feather in her hair, her pearls, and her chemise are all commonly seen in depictions of young women employed in Dutch bars and taverns, where they were tasked with amusing their male customers. As reflected as well in another recently acquired Dutch painting, Young Black Men Drinking in a Tavern (1630s), Africans were active participants in everyday life. When these two paintings are installed in the Dutch galleries, they will contribute to a nearly twenty-year campaign to bring the African presence in early modern Europe to the fore in our galleries.

However, a fourth painting of Saint Ambrose, a fourth century theologian and Bishop of Milan, is missing. A magazine article in 1919 noted the four paintings as a set so while it is thought to have hung in the house until the early 20th Century, nobody knows where it is now.

“It is a mystery,” said Ruth Peters, Senior Collections and House Officer at Chastleton. “We have an idea of what it would look like as the paintings are based on - but are not an exact copy of - a set of four Flemish engravings. The last members of the family to live at Chastleton before it came into the care of the National Trust have no memory of the fourth painting. It might have been sold or given away and so could be hanging on somebody’s wall, unrecognised.”

COLNAGHI London presents a tantalising new exhibition devoted to female still life, the highlight of which is a spatially complex painting by the mannerist artist, Fede Galizia (pictured). An important rediscovery by Colnaghi, the work contributes to the reconstruction of Galizia’s corpus in her enigmatic final years. Forbidden Fruit: Female Still Life will include other rare works by Giovanna Garzoni, painter to the Medicis and one of the first women to practice the art of still life, as well as the only known painting by Caterina Angela Pierozzi, protégée of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere. The exhibition will also feature the last painting by the hand of acclaimed Dutch botanical artist, Rachel Ruysch.

Open at Colnaghi London from April 27 through June 24, 2022, Forbidden Fruit builds upon Colnaghi's mission to spearhead new trends in art collecting, bringing the finest works in often overlooked categories to a new audience. This presentation includes work from the Renaissance to Baroque periods by: Giovanna Garzoni, Fede Galizia, Judith Leyster, Clara Peeters, Caterina Angela Pierozzi, Elisabetta Marchioni, Rachel Ruysch and others.

“Most of Giordano’s frescos are in situ on church walls and palace ceilings, so the appearance of this portable fresco on the market—a type of painting invented in Florence in the seventeenth century—provided a rare opportunity for Mia to add a fresco by the artist to the museum’s collection,” said Rachel McGarry, Elizabeth MacMillan Chair of European Art and Curator of European Painting and Works on Paper at Mia. “As the first Italian fresco to enter the museum’s collection, this acquisition strengthens our ability to tell the story of Italian painting while also significantly enhancing the museum’s holdings of Baroque art.”

Murillo skillfully embellished the narrative, conveying the story’s themes of virtue and vice, regret and forgiveness, through the figures’ dramatic gestures and facial expressions. Each composition is at once singular and dynamic despite its preservation of narrative continuity. It is therefore all the more remarkable that the series has remained intact, the only by Murillo to be so, despite changing hands many times since its creation during one of the artist’s more prolific decades. Since 1987, the paintings have been in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. 

In 2022, all six canvases will travel to the United States for the first time to be featured at the Meadows Museum, their only venue in this country. Marking the Meadows’s first collaboration with the National Gallery of Ireland, Picturing the Prodigal Son was inspired by the recent conservation work and the extensive technical analysis of the canvases carried out in Dublin, which has highlighted the beauty of Murillo’s technique and revealed new insights into his working method at a critical point in his career. The exhibition therefore marks a rare opportunity for American audiences to view an important painting series by Murillo in its entirety, just as it was created to be seen. As the largest repository of paintings by Murillo in the United States, the Meadows Museum is the ideal venue to exclusively present Murillo: Picturing the Prodigal Son.