Rembrandt and Guardi on display at the Ashmolean
January 22 2014
Picture: BBC News/Ashmolean
The Ashmolean museum in Oxford has acquired the above landscape byFrancesco Guardi, through the UK government's Acceptance in Lieu scheme. Says director Christopher Brown:
The picture is an enchanting early view painting which shows the Fondamenta Nuove busy with small boats and gondolas, the island of San Michele and beyond the snow-capped Dolomites. It was painted for a British Grand Tourist in 1758, and is now on display in the Britain and Italy Gallery. This Guardi work is marvellously fresh and instinctually responsive to the beauty of his native city.
The Guardi was worth more than the tax amount liable against the donating estate, so the acquisition had to be topped up by the Art Fund. So well done them.
Brown also, in his column for the Oxford Times, adds that the museum will be borrowing Rembrandt's Portrait of Catrina Hoogshaet (below):
[The] picture has been lent to the Ashmolean from a private collection and it is a particularly exciting event for me as a historian of Dutch and Flemish art. The Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet by Rembrandt van Rijn ranks amongst the finest Old Master paintings in this country. It has just been hung in the Mallet Gallery at the heart of our outstanding collection of great European paintings. Painted in 1657, it shows the 50-year-old Catrina Hooghsaet, who lived in Amsterdam. She was a member of a Mennonite — a radical Protestant community — and dressed in the restrained style they favoured. She was, however, a very wealthy woman and wears a rich silk dress with a lace collar and holds a tasselled lace handkerchief. She looks towards her pet parakeet, of which she was evidently very fond. The painting is one of the finest portraits ever made by Rembrandt. It is an enormous privilege to be able to show it at the Ashmolean where it can be seen by millions of visitors over the next few years.
