Introducing Dr David Bellingham and his top 5 choices from the upcoming Old Master, British & European Pictures auction (Tuesday 9 July).
Dr. David Bellingham is an art historian, author and Programme Director for the Master’s Degree in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London where he leads a core unit on Professional Practice, as well the elective Cross Collecting: The Market for Antiquities & Old Masters. David has published books and articles on a variety of subjects, including: art fairs; art business ethics; Greek & Celtic mythology; the art market for classical sculpture and frescoes; the paintings of Sandro Botticelli; and authenticity issues in the paintings of Frans Hals. David has most recently delivered a paper on Collecting and Display in Ancient Rome at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and contributed essays to exhibition catalogues on contemporary artists at JD Malat Gallery, London and the Street Art Museum Amsterdam. He is currently editor of the Antiquities volume for A Cultural History of Collecting (Bloomsbury Publishing) and writing a chapter on ‘Taste’ for the Eighteenth-Century volume. Most recently David was a judge for the Lumen Art Prize for artists working with digital technology https://www.lumenprize.com/ David also runs a podcast on ‘The Art Business’ in which he hosts alumnae/-i and others working in the art world.
https://linktr.ee/davibellingham @davibellingham
Lot 1: East Anglian School, late 15th century- The Assumption of the Virgin
I have just returned from holiday in the hilltown of Pienza in Southern Tuscany. The Cathedral was built by Pope Pius II by the architect Rossellino in the emerging Platonic Classical quattrocento style at about the same time this English church wall-hanging was painted in the late 15C. There was a musical festival when I was in Pienza to honour its new organ and whilst listening I had plenty of time to contemplate the late fifteenth-century panel paintings hanging on the walls of the cathedral aisles. Although the artistic style was more ‘advanced’ than this rare painted dorsarium, the tempera medium as well as the original function are alike, although the ground material differs with Italian paintings on wooden panel whilst the dorsarium is on rough linen. The main panel in Pienza, painted by Sienese artist Vecchietta in 1462, was placed as a backdrop to the high altar and represents the Assumption of the Virgin. The dorsarium artist is unknown but it would have had a similar location, albeit in a mediaeval Norfolk or Suffolk church in East Anglia or perhaps a private chapel: the provenience is uncertain and you can read more about the possibilities in the Rosebery catalogue note.
As in the Italian Early Renaissance painting, Mary the mother of Jesus son of God is depicted as an immortal icon in mediaeval frontality on her heavenly throne wearing a crown and hands held together in intercessional prayer on behalf of the worshipper kneeling before her. As in Italian Early Renaissance compositions she is at the centre of a symmetrical group surrounded by angels, who are significantly in more stylistically-advanced three-quarter view, the ones on our left playing musical instruments to accompany the singing from the right hand angles who are holding scrolls.
LOT 29: Francesco Solimena, Italian 1657-1747- Two putti in flight
During my stay in Naples when researching Pompeian wall-paintings for my doctoral thesis, I loved to visit the churches in my spare time and fell in love with Neapolitan Baroque art. Solimena painted frescoes as well as canvases in many of the churches. This painting is a copy of or more probably preparatory sketch for a small detail of the cupola fresco in the church of the Girolamini in Naples. There is an oil on canvas version in Ashmolean Oxford. The detail depicts two of several cherubs who float in the sky to either side of the Trinity with the more adult long-winged angels beneath them. I am always intrigued by images of cherubs/putti in Christian religious art because their iconography was inherited from the Erotes/Cupids who appear in ancient Roman art. These were associated with Venus the goddess of female sexuality and therefore, to my eyes, look slightly out of place in Christian paintings. I love the manner in which Solimena paints them as cheeky and chubby infant boys with stubby wings floating on puffy clouds but depicted in complex three dimensional baroque diagonal formations, their apparent realistic corporeality skilfully created by Solimena’s highly skilled technique of chiaroscuro.
LOT 275: Hermann Clementz, German 1852-1930- Semele and Beroe
The German painter Hermann Clementz was born in 1852 and died in 1930. Like the Solimena, this work of 1886 caught my eye at first for its dramatic employment of chiaroscuro. At first I thought it was a voyeuristic female nude but then I realised that its subject, the ancient Greek myth of Semele, mother of the wine god Dionysos/Bacchus, was here depicted at an unusual moment in the story. Her aged slave nurse Beroe is convincing her to ask the true identity of the man who is sharing her bed whilst her husband is away hunting. Unfortunately for her, the man is the super god Zeus/Jupiter in disguise as her own husband and, as god of sworn oaths, the has to agree to appear as his real self the following night in bed. His attributes of thunder and lightening destroy the queen instantly, but Zeus finds a pulsating embryo lying on the floor as the result of his impregnation of Semele. Because it is his own child he sews the embryo into his thigh and several months later out pops the baby Dionysos. In the painting the old woman who appears in the disguise of the nurse Beroe is actually Zeus’s long-suffering wife Hera who for obvious reasons is always out to destroy the mortal lovers of her husband as well as their children. Dionysos is hidden away in the East until on coming of age he returns to Greece in triumph in his leopard chariot and introduces his cult of wine and irrationality. Clementz, like so many artists of the late nineteenth century is in total mastery of his study of earlier baroque and neo-classical masters and the technique of the painted surface of both flesh and drapery is as beautiful as it comes. The age old trope of painting withered old age alongside youthful beauty is also paramount. Another interesting point is to look at the reverse of the canvas where the artist’s own brand label is still present, as a backup to his painted signature on the canvas surface.
LOT 443: Percy Robert Craft, British 1856-1934 - A Cornish Fishwife
I often take my students to St Ives in Cornwall for study visits of the famous art colony. People sometimes forget that the first centre of artistic production was across the peninsula at Newlyn, also on the sea. The Penlee Gallery in Penzance has a great collection of Newlyn School works including ones by Percy Craft, who like me was born in Kent, but later moved to Newlyn with his wife before eventually returning to the metropolis. This painting of a Cornish fishwife is an excellent small scale example of the Newlyn School’s love of local low genre scenes with members of the working class engaged in local activities, mostly sea fishing. The Cornish fishing boat, know as luggers, with its telltale red-brown sails can be seen behind the woman who is carrying a fishing basket on her back. To either side are lobster pots and, on the ground, the ‘catch of the day’ in the form of flatfish. As with French Realism and the Barbizon School these Newlyn painters were unashamed of painting realistic scenes of working-class life which proved immensely popular at the time. The realism and posed composition was also informed by developments in photographic genre scenes.
The official painter to the Royal family, knighted for his efforts, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, has always been a favourite of mine because one of my pastimes is driving out to English country houses most of which have at least one Van Dyck, or to be more accurate, at least one painting which purports to be by Van Dyck. The authenticity of Van Dyck is complicated by several factors: he painted famous people who then wanted to send replicas by the artist and/or his studio to friends and political allies; he had a large studio with several apprentices who would often be tasked with painting the replica, perhaps leaving the head(s) to the master who would then sign off the painting, just like many contemporary painters such as Hirst and Koons, as an autograph. This painting is described as ‘circle of’ which suggests an artist quite close to Van Dyck but not working within his studio. The head and shoulder image is, like the Solimena cherubs, a small part of a larger canvas of over two metres by two metres depicting James Stanley, Lord Strange, later 7th Earl of Derby (1607-1651) with his wife and daughter. The daughter is significantly called Henrietta Maria, a nod to the Royalist support of this family with her name copying the wife of Charles I, Henrietta Maria regina. The original family portrait was c.1636 judging by the apparent age of the family members. Charles was not beheaded until 1649 but the Stanley family remained staunch Royalists during the interregnum. Indeed the sitter himself was beheaded after the royalists were defeated at Worcester in 1651. The original group portrait was then acquired by the Earl of Clarendon and that family eventually sold it to Frick in 1913. This version is darker than the original where the left side of the head and hair is set against a bright sky. The original also shows his sword hilt but no armour and perhaps this copyist is including armour to signify his military prowess: described at the time as a man of ‘great honour and clear courage’.
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