Lotto No. 35


Anthony van Dyck


Anthony van Dyck - Dipinti antichi

(Antwerp 1599–1641 London)
Portrait of a noblewoman with a parrot,
oil on panel, 121 x 88 cm, framed

Video: Anthony van Dyck
Blog: Anthony van Dyck’s Noblewoman with a Secret

On the reverse the brand mark of the Guild of Saint Luke, Antwerp, two hands and a castle, and the panel maker’s mark of Peeter de Noble (active from 1605).

Provenance:
possibly Philippe-Charles d’Arenberg, 3rd Prince of Arenberg and 6th Duke of Aarschot (1587-1640);
by descent to Princess Lydia of Arenberg (1905–1977);
and by inheritance to the present owner

We are grateful to Susan Barnes for identifying the present portrait as an early work by Anthony van Dyck.

This portrait, which is extremely well conserved on its original uncradled panel, is previously unpublished and represents an important and significant addition to Anthony van Dyck’s corpus of work.

The Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Parrot dates to the artist’s first Antwerp period. This was a crucial phase in van Dyck’s development as he established himself as an independent artist in his own workshop, specialising in portraiture. Simultaneously he was working in the studio of Europe’s most prominent painter of large-scale history painting, Peter Paul Rubens.

Having completed his training with Hendrick van Balen in 1615, the young Anthony van Dyck is thought to have embarked on his career as an independent artist, even before enrolling as a member of the Guild of St Luke. He opened his first studio, complete with his own assistant, in ‘Den Dom van Ceulen’, close to the Cathedral in Antwerp. He was only 15 or 16 years old at the time. Soon after, he took up a post as an assistant in the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens.

It is thought that van Dyck intended to become, like Rubens, a painter of religious and secular historical subjects. A number of biblical works, as well as painted study heads, or tronies, from his early catalogue date to this period and testify to this ambition. It may have been his master, Peter Paul Rubens himself, who directed van Dyck towards the genre of portraiture, recognising a great emerging talent in his young assistant. It is believed that Rubens also enabled the young artist to take advantage of his own large network of influential and wealthy clients, allowing van Dyck to specialise in a field in which he was to become highly influential and greatly celebrated. This important support allowed the still very young van Dyck to establish himself in his own practice. He would become the most sought-after portrait painter in Europe, the painter of royalty, aristocracy and of the rich and celebrated Burghers in both continental Europe and England.

Anthony van Dyck enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke on 11 February 1618, officially giving him the freedom to work as an independent artist. His career as painter of portraits took off spectacularly. His first dated portraits were created in that same year (see S.J. Barnes, e.a., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven and London 2004, nos. I.118-I.119 and I.130-131). Although certainly accomplished, these paintings are still in the traditional style, executed in a very precise and detailed manner, using small brushstrokes. Van Dyck quickly developed a new technique however, involving a much freer method of painting, with a swift handling of the brush. This innovative style of painting is visible in the Portrait of a Man in an Oval Frame in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels dated 1619 (Barnes, op. cit., I.150). This faster painting technique was possibly a response to the number of commissions he was receiving.

Van Dyck’s extraordinary development as a portrait painter did not go unnoticed abroad. He was invited to London as early as 1620, where he worked at the court of King James I, as well as for the influential Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Barnes, op. cit., I.161). He was in England from October 1620 until February 1621 and by the end of the same year he left for Italy where he travelled and worked for about six years, also mostly as a portrait painter. By the time of his return to Antwerp in July of 1627, he was established as the fashionable portraitist, both at home and abroad. He was a favourite at the courts of Brussels and The Hague. In 1631 van Dyck again went to England, this time on the invitation of King Charles I. There he worked prolifically until his death in London in 1641. He died the most famous and influential portrait painter of his time.

The present magnificent work, Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Parrot, dates to van Dyck’s early Antwerp career, more specifically, to circa 1619-20, before his first visit to England. This is suggested by the style of the painting, the costume of the sitter, and the fact that the portrait is painted on a panel acquired from the Antwerp panel maker Peeter de Noble (private communication from Justin Davies of the Jordaens Van Dyck Panel Paintings Project ). This dating for the present painting has been suggested by Susan Barnes, co-author of the authoritative catalogue raisonnée of the oeuvre of Anthony van Dyck (private communication).

The present Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Parrot is stylistically close to the portraits of Isabella Brant and Susanna Fourment with her daughter, both in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (Barnes, op. cit., I.100 and I.103), and both generally dated to 1621 (see A. Vergara and F. Lammertse (eds.), The Young van Dyck,exhibition catalogue, Madrid and New York 2012, nos. 89-90).

Especially similar is the way in which the hands are painted, with seemingly effortless, broad brushwork, which is also apparent in the Portrait of Susanna Fourment with her Daughter, and the same applies to the hair, the headdress and the lace cuffs. Barnes also points out that the collar shows ‘the full range of matière from thin glazes and scumbles below to the thick white paste that frames the face and - with the headdress - makes a kind of aura around it’ (private communication), and this can also be seen in the slightly later Portrait of Margriet de Vos in the Frick Collection, New York (Barnes, op. cit., no. I.107). Typical for van Dyck around 1620 are also the highlights on the bodice and the gold chain, which can also be seen on the figure of the lady in Portrait of a Married Couple in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (Barnes, op. cit., I.115). At the same time, the landscape in the background in the Adelaide painting shows close affinities with the landscape in the distance on the right of the present portrait.

The combination of the ‘millstone ruff’, the lace cuffs, the headdress decorated with pearls, and the gold embroidered bodice can also be observed in a some other van Dyck portraits of women, such as the one in the El Paso Museum of Art (Barnes, op. cit., I.152), and is thought to have been fashionable in the early 1620s. Cornelis de Vos, the other Antwerp specialist in portraiture during this period, also included these elements in portraits dating to the same period, for example in his Portrait of a Lady of 1622 in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (see K. van der Stighelen, De portretten van Cornelis de Vos: een kritische catalogus, Brussels 1990, no. 13).

At present, the question of the identification of the sitter, who is depicted with distinctly different coloured eyes, remains unresolved, as does the early provenance of this important panel. As the woman appears to have been married - she wears rings on both of her hands - it is likely that there was originally a pendant painting depicting her husband. The dimensions and support of this work suggest one candidate among the known published works by Anthony van Dyck, namely the Portrait of a Man in the Royal Collection, London (Barnes, op. cit., I.137), however the proportions of the two figures in relation to the painted compositions seem slightly different, the man being somewhat larger than the lady. It is of course entirely possible that the pair to the present panel, depicting the husband, has been destroyed, or is still lost.

Once part of the historic Arenberg collection, the present Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Parrot has remained obscure. No complete catalogue of the collection of any of the seventeenth-century members of the Arenberg family has survived. It is therefore not possible at present to trace the painting’s early provenance more precisely (see A. Verbrugge, La collection d’art, in: Jean-Marie Duvosquel and Denis Morsa (eds.), La Maison d’Arenberg en Wallonie, à Bruxelles et au G.-D. de Luxembourg depuis le XIVe siècle. Contribution à l’histoire d’une famille princière, Enghien 2011, pp. 377-404).

Nevertheless it is entirely plausible that a member of the Arenberg family is the subject of the present portrait. Anthony van Dyck is known to have worked for the family, most notably for Albert de Ligne, Prince of Arenberg and Barbançon (Barnes, op. cit., III,66), as had his Master, Peter Paul Rubens. As a young boy, Rubens was page to Duchess Margaretha de Ligne-Arenberg, and he was in close contact with Philip-Charles Arenberg, Duke of Aarschot, in 1616, around the time when the young van Dyck was working as his assistant. Philip-Charles Arenberg bought a Wolf and Fox Hunt from Rubens, probably the painting now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (see Arnout Balis, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part XVII-II: Hunting Scenes, Oxford and London 1986, no. 2).

We are grateful to Jaco Rutgers for his help in cataloguing the present lot.

Technical analysis:
This work is painted on four vertical oak panels, about 5-6 mm thick, with the original brand mark of the Guild of Saint Luke, Antwerp and the panel maker’s mark (‘4+BPR’) on the reverse, even more readable through IR images. The painting, made over a white or whitish ground, is very well preserved, with a few integrations along the panel joins and in the landscape. The craquelure is thin or very thin, indicating a perfect balance among pigment and oil medium.

The technical quality is remarkable, with a peculiar ability apparent in working with fast brushstrokes without losing efficacy and form. Technique and materials are coherent with 17th century Flemish practice and specifically with works painted around 1620 by van Dyck, who made a very limited use of wood supports.

Only a few lines of under drawing can be seen in IR reflectography, some of which are very thin, some larger and made with a brush: in the lady’s left hand, in the base of the column, around the parrot and the chair. A few thin marks (of construction?) appear around the woman’s head. No significant changes can be seen in the IR images, only very small ones.

Pigments include smalt blue in the sky (not discoloured as typically happens for this pigment in oil medium), azurite (also mixed with yellow to obtain green hues) in the landscape and in the parrot, lead white mixed with vermillion and with iron oxides in the flesh tones, carmine-type red lake and vermillion in the red curtain, for the decoration of the dress the painter used lead-tin based yellow, together with ochres to paint the brown-reddish hues. Instead of a common ochre, in the darker areas of the column on the left an organic brown or an earth rich in organic pigments (van Dyck or Kassel earth) is preferred. The chromatic difference between the eyes is confirmed by IRR.

We are grateful to Gianluca Poldi for the technical examination of the present painting.

23.10.2018 - 18:00

Prezzo realizzato: **
EUR 1.425.000,-
Stima:
EUR 300.000,- a EUR 500.000,-

Anthony van Dyck


(Antwerp 1599–1641 London)
Portrait of a noblewoman with a parrot,
oil on panel, 121 x 88 cm, framed

Video: Anthony van Dyck
Blog: Anthony van Dyck’s Noblewoman with a Secret

On the reverse the brand mark of the Guild of Saint Luke, Antwerp, two hands and a castle, and the panel maker’s mark of Peeter de Noble (active from 1605).

Provenance:
possibly Philippe-Charles d’Arenberg, 3rd Prince of Arenberg and 6th Duke of Aarschot (1587-1640);
by descent to Princess Lydia of Arenberg (1905–1977);
and by inheritance to the present owner

We are grateful to Susan Barnes for identifying the present portrait as an early work by Anthony van Dyck.

This portrait, which is extremely well conserved on its original uncradled panel, is previously unpublished and represents an important and significant addition to Anthony van Dyck’s corpus of work.

The Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Parrot dates to the artist’s first Antwerp period. This was a crucial phase in van Dyck’s development as he established himself as an independent artist in his own workshop, specialising in portraiture. Simultaneously he was working in the studio of Europe’s most prominent painter of large-scale history painting, Peter Paul Rubens.

Having completed his training with Hendrick van Balen in 1615, the young Anthony van Dyck is thought to have embarked on his career as an independent artist, even before enrolling as a member of the Guild of St Luke. He opened his first studio, complete with his own assistant, in ‘Den Dom van Ceulen’, close to the Cathedral in Antwerp. He was only 15 or 16 years old at the time. Soon after, he took up a post as an assistant in the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens.

It is thought that van Dyck intended to become, like Rubens, a painter of religious and secular historical subjects. A number of biblical works, as well as painted study heads, or tronies, from his early catalogue date to this period and testify to this ambition. It may have been his master, Peter Paul Rubens himself, who directed van Dyck towards the genre of portraiture, recognising a great emerging talent in his young assistant. It is believed that Rubens also enabled the young artist to take advantage of his own large network of influential and wealthy clients, allowing van Dyck to specialise in a field in which he was to become highly influential and greatly celebrated. This important support allowed the still very young van Dyck to establish himself in his own practice. He would become the most sought-after portrait painter in Europe, the painter of royalty, aristocracy and of the rich and celebrated Burghers in both continental Europe and England.

Anthony van Dyck enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke on 11 February 1618, officially giving him the freedom to work as an independent artist. His career as painter of portraits took off spectacularly. His first dated portraits were created in that same year (see S.J. Barnes, e.a., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven and London 2004, nos. I.118-I.119 and I.130-131). Although certainly accomplished, these paintings are still in the traditional style, executed in a very precise and detailed manner, using small brushstrokes. Van Dyck quickly developed a new technique however, involving a much freer method of painting, with a swift handling of the brush. This innovative style of painting is visible in the Portrait of a Man in an Oval Frame in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels dated 1619 (Barnes, op. cit., I.150). This faster painting technique was possibly a response to the number of commissions he was receiving.

Van Dyck’s extraordinary development as a portrait painter did not go unnoticed abroad. He was invited to London as early as 1620, where he worked at the court of King James I, as well as for the influential Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Barnes, op. cit., I.161). He was in England from October 1620 until February 1621 and by the end of the same year he left for Italy where he travelled and worked for about six years, also mostly as a portrait painter. By the time of his return to Antwerp in July of 1627, he was established as the fashionable portraitist, both at home and abroad. He was a favourite at the courts of Brussels and The Hague. In 1631 van Dyck again went to England, this time on the invitation of King Charles I. There he worked prolifically until his death in London in 1641. He died the most famous and influential portrait painter of his time.

The present magnificent work, Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Parrot, dates to van Dyck’s early Antwerp career, more specifically, to circa 1619-20, before his first visit to England. This is suggested by the style of the painting, the costume of the sitter, and the fact that the portrait is painted on a panel acquired from the Antwerp panel maker Peeter de Noble (private communication from Justin Davies of the Jordaens Van Dyck Panel Paintings Project ). This dating for the present painting has been suggested by Susan Barnes, co-author of the authoritative catalogue raisonnée of the oeuvre of Anthony van Dyck (private communication).

The present Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Parrot is stylistically close to the portraits of Isabella Brant and Susanna Fourment with her daughter, both in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (Barnes, op. cit., I.100 and I.103), and both generally dated to 1621 (see A. Vergara and F. Lammertse (eds.), The Young van Dyck,exhibition catalogue, Madrid and New York 2012, nos. 89-90).

Especially similar is the way in which the hands are painted, with seemingly effortless, broad brushwork, which is also apparent in the Portrait of Susanna Fourment with her Daughter, and the same applies to the hair, the headdress and the lace cuffs. Barnes also points out that the collar shows ‘the full range of matière from thin glazes and scumbles below to the thick white paste that frames the face and - with the headdress - makes a kind of aura around it’ (private communication), and this can also be seen in the slightly later Portrait of Margriet de Vos in the Frick Collection, New York (Barnes, op. cit., no. I.107). Typical for van Dyck around 1620 are also the highlights on the bodice and the gold chain, which can also be seen on the figure of the lady in Portrait of a Married Couple in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (Barnes, op. cit., I.115). At the same time, the landscape in the background in the Adelaide painting shows close affinities with the landscape in the distance on the right of the present portrait.

The combination of the ‘millstone ruff’, the lace cuffs, the headdress decorated with pearls, and the gold embroidered bodice can also be observed in a some other van Dyck portraits of women, such as the one in the El Paso Museum of Art (Barnes, op. cit., I.152), and is thought to have been fashionable in the early 1620s. Cornelis de Vos, the other Antwerp specialist in portraiture during this period, also included these elements in portraits dating to the same period, for example in his Portrait of a Lady of 1622 in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (see K. van der Stighelen, De portretten van Cornelis de Vos: een kritische catalogus, Brussels 1990, no. 13).

At present, the question of the identification of the sitter, who is depicted with distinctly different coloured eyes, remains unresolved, as does the early provenance of this important panel. As the woman appears to have been married - she wears rings on both of her hands - it is likely that there was originally a pendant painting depicting her husband. The dimensions and support of this work suggest one candidate among the known published works by Anthony van Dyck, namely the Portrait of a Man in the Royal Collection, London (Barnes, op. cit., I.137), however the proportions of the two figures in relation to the painted compositions seem slightly different, the man being somewhat larger than the lady. It is of course entirely possible that the pair to the present panel, depicting the husband, has been destroyed, or is still lost.

Once part of the historic Arenberg collection, the present Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Parrot has remained obscure. No complete catalogue of the collection of any of the seventeenth-century members of the Arenberg family has survived. It is therefore not possible at present to trace the painting’s early provenance more precisely (see A. Verbrugge, La collection d’art, in: Jean-Marie Duvosquel and Denis Morsa (eds.), La Maison d’Arenberg en Wallonie, à Bruxelles et au G.-D. de Luxembourg depuis le XIVe siècle. Contribution à l’histoire d’une famille princière, Enghien 2011, pp. 377-404).

Nevertheless it is entirely plausible that a member of the Arenberg family is the subject of the present portrait. Anthony van Dyck is known to have worked for the family, most notably for Albert de Ligne, Prince of Arenberg and Barbançon (Barnes, op. cit., III,66), as had his Master, Peter Paul Rubens. As a young boy, Rubens was page to Duchess Margaretha de Ligne-Arenberg, and he was in close contact with Philip-Charles Arenberg, Duke of Aarschot, in 1616, around the time when the young van Dyck was working as his assistant. Philip-Charles Arenberg bought a Wolf and Fox Hunt from Rubens, probably the painting now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (see Arnout Balis, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part XVII-II: Hunting Scenes, Oxford and London 1986, no. 2).

We are grateful to Jaco Rutgers for his help in cataloguing the present lot.

Technical analysis:
This work is painted on four vertical oak panels, about 5-6 mm thick, with the original brand mark of the Guild of Saint Luke, Antwerp and the panel maker’s mark (‘4+BPR’) on the reverse, even more readable through IR images. The painting, made over a white or whitish ground, is very well preserved, with a few integrations along the panel joins and in the landscape. The craquelure is thin or very thin, indicating a perfect balance among pigment and oil medium.

The technical quality is remarkable, with a peculiar ability apparent in working with fast brushstrokes without losing efficacy and form. Technique and materials are coherent with 17th century Flemish practice and specifically with works painted around 1620 by van Dyck, who made a very limited use of wood supports.

Only a few lines of under drawing can be seen in IR reflectography, some of which are very thin, some larger and made with a brush: in the lady’s left hand, in the base of the column, around the parrot and the chair. A few thin marks (of construction?) appear around the woman’s head. No significant changes can be seen in the IR images, only very small ones.

Pigments include smalt blue in the sky (not discoloured as typically happens for this pigment in oil medium), azurite (also mixed with yellow to obtain green hues) in the landscape and in the parrot, lead white mixed with vermillion and with iron oxides in the flesh tones, carmine-type red lake and vermillion in the red curtain, for the decoration of the dress the painter used lead-tin based yellow, together with ochres to paint the brown-reddish hues. Instead of a common ochre, in the darker areas of the column on the left an organic brown or an earth rich in organic pigments (van Dyck or Kassel earth) is preferred. The chromatic difference between the eyes is confirmed by IRR.

We are grateful to Gianluca Poldi for the technical examination of the present painting.


Hotline dell'acquirente lun-ven: 10.00 - 17.00
old.masters@dorotheum.at

+43 1 515 60 403
Asta: Dipinti antichi
Tipo d'asta: Asta in sala
Data: 23.10.2018 - 18:00
Luogo dell'asta: Wien | Palais Dorotheum
Esposizione: 13.10. - 23.10.2018


** Prezzo d'acquisto comprensivo di tassa di vendita e IVA

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