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拍品专文
This eye-catching painting of a gallant looking bearded man exemplifies Rubens’s genius at capturing a likeness through his practice of making spontaneous, rapid studies ad vivum from models in his studio. These records of physiognomies were used for his larger multi figural compositions, allowing him to populate them with varied, lifelike protagonists, a working procedure that he relied on for the duration his career.
In this he may have been inspired by Frans Floris, the leading Antwerp artist of his generation who is known to have kept a stock of head studies in his studio, and also by Federico Barocci who was still active in Urbino when Rubens was in Italy. Barocci’s biographer Bellori recorded: ‘when he [Barocci] was outside in the piazza or in the street [...] he would study the countenances and physique of the various people he saw there. If he happened to see someone who was in some way striking, he would try to get that person to his house in order to draw him or her’ (N. Turner, Federico Barocci, 2000, p. 189; and B. Bohn, ‘Drawing as Artistic Invention’, Barocci: Brilliance and Grace, exhibition catalogue, St. Louis Museum of Art and the National Gallery, London, 2012-2013, pp. 49-53). There are a number of remarkable, extant oil sketches by Barocci of heads, made preparatory to the execution of his large compositions, which Rubens could have admired.
Rubens’s studies, together with his compositional modelli were kept in his studio as invaluable working tools which were made available to his assistants to whom he might delegate the execution of his great figure compositions. His most gifted pupil, Anthony van Dyck, rapidly assimilated Rubens’s method and amply demonstrated his stock of fascinating physiognomies in the series of apostles he painted as a young man. Van Dyck’s head studies were left in Rubens’s studio after he embarked on his travels, and they remained there until Rubens’s death in 1640. Thus when the contents of his studio and his collection were assembled for an estate sale, one of the last items was ‘Une quantité de visages au vif, sur toile, & fonds de bois, tant de Mons. Rubens, que de Mons. van Dyck’. A good many of the studies were painted on quite restrictive fragments of panel, which were made more marketable by enlargement and/or being worked up in oils, as was the case with the head study offered in these Rooms, 2 July 2013, lot 30 (£1,741,875). The present study has a comparable composite support and it may have been embellished by the early addition of the black costume and gold chain.
A comprehensive account of Rubens’s work in this vein awaits the publication of Nico van Hout’s Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard volume. Until then that given by Julius Held in his 1980 catalogue of the oil sketches remains the most authoritative, although he limited his survey to a selection of just eighteen works. Burchard accepted the present painting in a certificate of 1960, and it appears amongst a group of twenty-five head studies in Michael Jaffé’s 1989 catalogue of the paintings. Allowing for some repetition in inventories and other period sources, there are visual records of perhaps as many as some seventy such works, but many more must have been executed.
Not all the heads in Held’s catalogue were used to enhance the large compositions executed by Rubens and his assistants. Thus of the artist’s most famous example of this genre – the four studies of a black man in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels – only two are found in subsequent paintings. It is also the case that full use of the present study was apparently not made in any extant work. A glimpse of the face has been detected among the crowd in the famous Adoration of the Magi in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (fig. 1), as was pointed out in the catalogue of the Antwerp 1977 quatercentenary exhibition in which it was included. Another face in the crowd of the preparatory drawing for the Adoration of the Shepherds (Paris, Fondation Custodia) shows a likeness too. But such glimpses seem hardly to do justice to its scope.
Yet the image can be securely linked to Rubens’s production from the fact that the head appears in one of the sheets of the so called Livre à dessiner engraved after Rubens’s drawings by Paulus Pontius (fig. 3), which was published not long after the artist’s death perhaps to advertise the release of his drawings collection to the market in 1658. The head in the print does not follow that in the painting exactly and is in the same direction, which would thus seem to have required the existence of a contre-épreuve as a prototype.
In his discussion of the Head of a bearded man owned by the Prince of Liechtenstein, Held raised the question as to whether it was not executed as a portrait; earlier he had pointed out that ‘It is not always easy to make a neat distinction between a head painted as a study and one painted as a portrait of a particular person’. Thus it can be asked whether the present study was not also a portrait and if so whether the sitter can be identified (indeed a torn, handwritten collector’s label in French on the reverse over optimistically identified the sitter as Rubens himself). One possibility, more worthy of consideration, stems from a comparison with a sitter in the extensive group of engraved portraits of notable personalities, known as the Iconography, after Anthony van Dyck. In particular there is a resemblance with the appearance of the rich, Antwerp amateur of painting, Anthonis Cornelissen (1565-1639). Van Dyck’s prototype for the engraving has been dated circa 1630; Michael Jaffé has dated the present painting circa 1622-24 in his Catalogo Completo, but it likely dates from a decade earlier, if so the putative, elegant sitter would have been about forty.
Sir Alfred Beit inherited the present work from his father who bought it from Agnew’s in July 1930, some six months before his death. Agnew’s may have been acting in partnership with the dealer Dr von Frey, then active in Paris and later in New York. The previous owner was named as Count Sergueiew (or Serguiew) of Moscow, whose identity remains obscure, though he was presumably a Russian émigré, and perhaps the painting had accompanied him from Russia. He may have been the father of Nathalie (1915-50), who was born in St Petersburg and came to Paris in 1917. She was to become an important double agent in World War II, known by MI5 as ‘Treasure’. The picture was stolen twice from Russborough, first in 1974, after which it was soon recovered, and again in 1986. It was finally returned unharmed, following a tip-off, in August 2002.
In this he may have been inspired by Frans Floris, the leading Antwerp artist of his generation who is known to have kept a stock of head studies in his studio, and also by Federico Barocci who was still active in Urbino when Rubens was in Italy. Barocci’s biographer Bellori recorded: ‘when he [Barocci] was outside in the piazza or in the street [...] he would study the countenances and physique of the various people he saw there. If he happened to see someone who was in some way striking, he would try to get that person to his house in order to draw him or her’ (N. Turner, Federico Barocci, 2000, p. 189; and B. Bohn, ‘Drawing as Artistic Invention’, Barocci: Brilliance and Grace, exhibition catalogue, St. Louis Museum of Art and the National Gallery, London, 2012-2013, pp. 49-53). There are a number of remarkable, extant oil sketches by Barocci of heads, made preparatory to the execution of his large compositions, which Rubens could have admired.
Rubens’s studies, together with his compositional modelli were kept in his studio as invaluable working tools which were made available to his assistants to whom he might delegate the execution of his great figure compositions. His most gifted pupil, Anthony van Dyck, rapidly assimilated Rubens’s method and amply demonstrated his stock of fascinating physiognomies in the series of apostles he painted as a young man. Van Dyck’s head studies were left in Rubens’s studio after he embarked on his travels, and they remained there until Rubens’s death in 1640. Thus when the contents of his studio and his collection were assembled for an estate sale, one of the last items was ‘Une quantité de visages au vif, sur toile, & fonds de bois, tant de Mons. Rubens, que de Mons. van Dyck’. A good many of the studies were painted on quite restrictive fragments of panel, which were made more marketable by enlargement and/or being worked up in oils, as was the case with the head study offered in these Rooms, 2 July 2013, lot 30 (£1,741,875). The present study has a comparable composite support and it may have been embellished by the early addition of the black costume and gold chain.
A comprehensive account of Rubens’s work in this vein awaits the publication of Nico van Hout’s Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard volume. Until then that given by Julius Held in his 1980 catalogue of the oil sketches remains the most authoritative, although he limited his survey to a selection of just eighteen works. Burchard accepted the present painting in a certificate of 1960, and it appears amongst a group of twenty-five head studies in Michael Jaffé’s 1989 catalogue of the paintings. Allowing for some repetition in inventories and other period sources, there are visual records of perhaps as many as some seventy such works, but many more must have been executed.
Not all the heads in Held’s catalogue were used to enhance the large compositions executed by Rubens and his assistants. Thus of the artist’s most famous example of this genre – the four studies of a black man in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels – only two are found in subsequent paintings. It is also the case that full use of the present study was apparently not made in any extant work. A glimpse of the face has been detected among the crowd in the famous Adoration of the Magi in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (fig. 1), as was pointed out in the catalogue of the Antwerp 1977 quatercentenary exhibition in which it was included. Another face in the crowd of the preparatory drawing for the Adoration of the Shepherds (Paris, Fondation Custodia) shows a likeness too. But such glimpses seem hardly to do justice to its scope.
Yet the image can be securely linked to Rubens’s production from the fact that the head appears in one of the sheets of the so called Livre à dessiner engraved after Rubens’s drawings by Paulus Pontius (fig. 3), which was published not long after the artist’s death perhaps to advertise the release of his drawings collection to the market in 1658. The head in the print does not follow that in the painting exactly and is in the same direction, which would thus seem to have required the existence of a contre-épreuve as a prototype.
In his discussion of the Head of a bearded man owned by the Prince of Liechtenstein, Held raised the question as to whether it was not executed as a portrait; earlier he had pointed out that ‘It is not always easy to make a neat distinction between a head painted as a study and one painted as a portrait of a particular person’. Thus it can be asked whether the present study was not also a portrait and if so whether the sitter can be identified (indeed a torn, handwritten collector’s label in French on the reverse over optimistically identified the sitter as Rubens himself). One possibility, more worthy of consideration, stems from a comparison with a sitter in the extensive group of engraved portraits of notable personalities, known as the Iconography, after Anthony van Dyck. In particular there is a resemblance with the appearance of the rich, Antwerp amateur of painting, Anthonis Cornelissen (1565-1639). Van Dyck’s prototype for the engraving has been dated circa 1630; Michael Jaffé has dated the present painting circa 1622-24 in his Catalogo Completo, but it likely dates from a decade earlier, if so the putative, elegant sitter would have been about forty.
Sir Alfred Beit inherited the present work from his father who bought it from Agnew’s in July 1930, some six months before his death. Agnew’s may have been acting in partnership with the dealer Dr von Frey, then active in Paris and later in New York. The previous owner was named as Count Sergueiew (or Serguiew) of Moscow, whose identity remains obscure, though he was presumably a Russian émigré, and perhaps the painting had accompanied him from Russia. He may have been the father of Nathalie (1915-50), who was born in St Petersburg and came to Paris in 1917. She was to become an important double agent in World War II, known by MI5 as ‘Treasure’. The picture was stolen twice from Russborough, first in 1974, after which it was soon recovered, and again in 1986. It was finally returned unharmed, following a tip-off, in August 2002.