Previous Posts: articles 2018

‘There is a growing number of collectors with an interest in dramatic pictures,’ says Henry Pettifer, Christie’s head of Old Master and British paintings. Based largely in Europe and America, these collectors look for ‘powerful imagery, a strong narrative, dark and light’, Pettifer says. Great examples of paintings by the followers of Caravaggio rarely come to market, but when they do emerge, they can fetch high prices. In 2014 at Sotheby’s London, the monumental yet tender Sacrifice of Isaac, painted in Spain around 1617 by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, one of Caravaggio’s most gifted followers, sold for £3.7m. In January this year, Orazio Gentileschi’s seductive Danaë (1621) sold for $30.5m at Sotheby’s New York. Both set new artist records. More surprising was the $5.2m paid the previous day for The Crowning with Thorns from the Taubman collection, among the first known works by Valentin de Boulogne. Unlike Gentileschi and Cavarozzi, the French painter arrived in Rome too late to meet Caravaggio in person, most likely absorbing his style through Bartolomeo Manfredi, Caravaggio’s most influential follower.

Among Dutch followers, it is the works of Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerrit van Honthorst that have performed best at auction. Ter Brugghen’s beautiful The Bagpipe Player in Profile (1624) [top], seized by the Nazis in 1938 and returned to the heirs in 2008, sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2009 for a record $10.2m. It was bought by London dealer in Dutch paintings, Johnny van Haeften, who sold it to the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Another looted painting, Honthorst’s racy and atmospheric The Duet (1624), sold at Christie’s New York in 2013 for $3.4m – an artist record. The following January that record was broken again, when the recently rediscovered A Merry Group Behind a Balustrade With a Violin and a Lute Player (1623–24) attracted fierce bidding at Sotheby’s New York, reaching $7.6m.

Alexander Bell, Sotheby’s co-chairman of Old Master paintings worldwide, warns against generalisations. ‘Caravaggio did not have just one style, and the best of his followers also diverged separately from his example,’ he says. ‘Paintings by the premier league of Caravaggio followers come up so rarely that when they do come to market, the price achieved depends very much upon the particular picture.’ Having said that, Caravaggesque paintings ‘do appeal to a modern sensibility’. ‘They are eye-catching and immediate,’ Bell adds.

Studying art can have a dramatic effect on our brain activity, too. What we know changes how we look at things and this is easy to prove in the art world. Scientists have tracked the movements of an art historian’s eyes: the results show how they scan, fixate and linger on particular points of the canvas reveals their skill and is entirely different to someone with an untrained eye.

We know that every area of expertise changes our view of the world, so why concentrate on art historians? Simply because they are the easiest to study, as they’re often focusing on one static image at a time – unlike film critics, racing drivers or neurosurgeons. This may reassure parents worried about the gravitas of the subject. Now they know that if their children immerse themselves in art history, they will develop such a specialist skill it will produce a  change in their brains.

As a knitter, I probably look at a jumper differently from a non knitter. It proves nothing.

In 1427 Renaissance manuscript illuminator and panel painter Giovanni di Paolo completed one of his most important commissions: an altarpiece for the Branchini family chapel in the church of San Domenico in Siena, Italy. The polyptych was disbanded, likely in the fifteenth century. The Getty exhibition The Shimmer of Gold: Giovanni di Paolo in Renaissance Siena unites several panels of the remarkable altarpiece for the first time since its dispersal.

In this episode, we visit the galleries with Yvonne Szafran, senior painting conservator, Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings, and Bryan Keene, assistant curator of manuscripts, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, who discuss what is depicted in the panels as well as di Paolo’s painting techniques. We also learn about the exciting technical analysis being undertaken that may eventually help to identify other missing panels.

As some of you will remember, I sent a letter to all in March expressing the wish to find ways to improve communication between fellow TEFAF exhibitors (many of whom also regularly make large purchases at TEFAF) and the Board. 

Problems concerning the hasty ”expansion“ to New York and potential weakening of Maastricht have been ignored and denied.

From entrenched positions, questions about the following issues are stubbornly brushed off:

-Prominent TEFAF dealers involved in a very public forgery scandal and the resulting damage to our vetting reputation.

-Monetary and legal questions about the Dutch European Art Foundation tax status in relation to investment in or loan to USA to form TEFAF NY LLC and TEFAF USA INC, two for profit companies (*), thus facilitating the creation of two fairs competing with TEFAF Maastricht.

-Naming galleries ”signed on“ to exhibit in future TEFAF fairs. For recruitement purposes, there has been bluffing about prominent contemporary and modern galleries committing to participate.

The first donation received by American Friends of the Prado Museum, on this occasion made by the art historian William B. Jordan, has entered the Museo del Prado as a long-term deposit. This is a previously unpublished Portrait of Philip III, which exhaustive research and technical analysis have confirmed to be an autograph painting by Velázquez. It will be exhibited at the Prado as a temporary, renewable deposit.

The work is a preparatory painting for the face of Philip III executed by Velázquez in relation to his composition The Expulsion of the Moriscos, executed in 1627 but destroyed by the fire in the Real Alcázar in Madrid in 1734 and only known from written descriptions as no copy of it has survived. 

The addition of this work to the Museum’s collections as a long-term deposit will contribute to completing its representation of Velázquez as a royal portraitist, given that it is a work of outstanding quality and previously unpublished in the scholarly literature. As such, it will help to cast light on one of the key works of the artist’s early period at court.