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Born on 10 July 1928: Bernard
Buffet, French painter, etcher, lithographer, designer,
and occasional sculptor, who died in 1999. — Born in Paris, he began to study drawing at evening classes in 1943, then attended the École des Beaux-Arts 1944-1945. First one-man exhibition at the Galerie des Impressions d'Art, Paris, 1947. Awarded the Prix de la Critique jointly with Lorjou in 1948 at the age of twenty, and quickly achieved precocious international celebrity with highly-stylised linear figure compositions and still lifes expressive of the mood of austerity and anxiety in France during the Occupation. He was voted by French critics and curators in 1955 the most outstanding young painter. He ilustrated several books, including drypoints for Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautr-23amont 1952, and designed for the ballet and the opera. His works include series of huge figure compositions on such themes as The Passion, The Horror of War and The Circus. — LINKS — Portrait de l'Artiste (1954, 146x114cm) — Still Life (color lithograph 48x70cm) — Le clown bleu (1955, 73x60cm) |
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Died on 10 July 1915: Hendrik Willem
Mesdag, Dutch painter and collector specialized in Maritime
Scenes, born on 23 February 1831. — As a child and while he worked as a clerk in his father’s bank, he took lessons in drawing and painting, first from C. B. Buijs [1808–1872] and later from J. H. Egenberger [1822–1897], Director of the Academie Minerva in Groningen. It was not until 1866 that Mesdag made painting his profession. That summer he and his wife, Sientje van Houten [1834–1909], worked en plein air near Oosterbeek with the landscape painter J. W. Bilders [1811–1890]. From the autumn of 1866 to 1869 they lived in Brussels, where Mesdag was trained by Willem Roelofs, the first Dutch artist to pay regular visits to Barbizon, and where he came into contact with young Belgian Realist painters, such as Alfred Verwée, Louis Artan and Louis Dubois. In this period Mesdag learnt to render his impressions from nature accurately and directly. — Photo of Mesdag painting — George Hitchcock was a student of Mesdag. — Pinks in the Breakers — Preparations for Departure (71x55cm) — On a Stormy Sea (50x41cm) — Setting Sun (1887, 140x180cm; 617x801pix, 94kb; brownish) _same Setting Sun (568x750pix, 86kb; bluish) |
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Born on 10 July 1888: Giorgio de Chirico
is born in Greece. He will grow up to be an Italian Surrealist
painter and sculptor, who, with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi,
founds the pittura metafisica style of painting. De Chirico died on 19 November
1978. — Brother of Alberto
Savinio. — De Chirico, born in Volos, Greece, to Italian parents, studied art in Athens, Munich and Paris before moving back to Italy where, together with Carlo Carrà, he created the Pittura Metafisica (metaphysical painting). The Pittura Metafisica was centered on stark views of semi-abstract figures, a deserted collection of distorted mannequins and solitary easels made even more menacing by harsh light effects and oblique perspective. The new style was supposed to overcome the limitations of Cubism, which de Chirico had experienced in Paris, where he had met Picasso. Among de Chirico's best works from the period are The Nostalgia of the Infinite and Mystery and Melancholy of a Street . The movement, however, was shortlived, coming to an end in the early 1920s, when de Chirico and Carrà has a dispute over who had invented the concept of metaphysical painting. In the 1930s, de Chirico abandoned Modernism - which by now he despised - to rediscover the techniques and materials of the Old Masters. The enigmatic dreamscapes of the early 20s gave way to portraits and studies of fruit against the backdrop of a landscape. — Giorgio de Chirico was born to Italian parents in Vólos, Greece. In 1900 he began studies at the Athens Polytechnic Institute and attended evening classes in drawing from the nude. About 1906 he moved to Munich, where he attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. At this time he became interested in the art of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. De Chirico moved to Milan in 1909, to Florence in 1910, and to Paris in 1911. In Paris he was included in the Salon d’Automne in 1912 and 1913 and in the Salon des Indépendants in 1913 and 1914. As a frequent visitor to Guillaume Apollinaire’s weekly gatherings, he met Constantin Brancusi, André Derain , Max Jacob, and others. Because of the war, in 1915 de Chirico returned to Italy, where he met Filippo de Pisis in 1916 and Carlo Carrà in 1917; they formed the group that was later called the Scuola Metafisica. De Chirico moved to Rome in 1918, and was given his first solo exhibition at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in that city in the winter of 1918–19. In this period he was one of the leaders of the Gruppo Valori Plastici, with whom he showed at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. From 1920 to 1924 he divided his time between Rome and Florence. A solo exhibition of de Chirico’s work was held at the Galleria Arte in Milan in 1921, and he participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time in 1924. In 1925 the artist returned to Paris, where he exhibited that year at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie l’Effort Moderne. In Paris his work was shown at the Galerie Paul Guillaume in 1926 and 1927 and at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in 1927. In 1928 he was given solo shows at the Arthur Tooth Gallery in London and the Valentine Gallery in New York. In 1929 de Chirico designed scenery and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s production of the ballet Le Bal, and his book Hebdomeros was published. The artist designed for the ballet and opera in subsequent years, and continued to exhibit in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan. In 1945 the first part of his book Memorie della mia vita appeared. De Chirico died in Rome, his residence for over thirty years. — Nel 1899 ad Atene inizia gli studi al Politecnico e segue un corso di pittura. Giorgio de Chirico inizia a frequentare l'Accademia di Belle Arti e studia assiduamente nei musei l'opera di Boecklin e Klinger soprattutto. Ritornato in Italia nel 1910, l'anno successivo decide di raggiungere il fratello a Parigi. Nel corso del 1910 dipinge ritratti e autoritratti, ed è proprio durante il soggiorno fiorentino che maturano le opere del periodo metafisico, esposti per la prima volta a Parigi al Salon d'Automne nel 1912. Nel 1913 espone al Salon des Indépendants, si lega agli artisti della avanguardia cubista e surrealista. Espone nel 1919 alla Casa d'Arte di Anton Giulio Bragaglia a Roma. Stringe amicizia con Mario Broglio e collabora a "Valori Plastici". Nel 1924 espone per la prima volta alla Biennale di Venezia e a Parigi in autunno realizza le scene e i costumi del balletto La giara, tratto da Pirandello. Nel 1925 si trasferisce a Parigi, ove resterà sino al 1931. Nel 1929 de Chirico pubblica il "romanzo" autobiografico Hebdomeros. Per i Balletti Russi di Diaghilev esegue nel 1930 le scene e i costumi del balletto Le Bal. Nel 1932 ritorna in Italia e inizia una fertile stagione come scenografo, partecipa alla Biennale di Venezia e alla V Triennale di Milano, nel 1933 alla Sindacale di Firenze, nel 1935 la II Quadriennale di Roma. Nel 1936 è a New York, dove resterà sino a 1938. Nel 1944 si trasferisce definitivamente a Roma. Nel 1949 e nel 1952 e 1954 organizza rispettivamente a Londra e a Venezia delle esposizioni personali. Seguono in Italia numerose mostre e de Chirico riceve, importanti riconoscimenti soprattutto all'estero. — LINKS — Piazza d'Italia (1915, 59x49cm) — The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) — Love Song (1914) — Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1914) _ detail — The Philosopher's Conquest (1914) — Le Cerveau de l'Enfant (1914, 80x63cm) (pas d'enfant, mais, entouré de bâtiments, un homme à grande moustache et minuscule barbichette, les yeux fermés, face à un livre fermé sur un signet) — The Disturbing Muses (1925) — Archaeologists (1927) — Sole sul cavalletto (1972) — The Profit — The Great Metaphysician (1917) |
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Died on 10 July 1806: George
Stubbs, British artist specialized in horses, born on 24
August 1724. — Stubss was an outstanding animal painter and anatomical draftsman. The son of a prosperous tanner, Stubbs was briefly apprenticed to a painter but was basically self-taught. His interest in anatomy, revealed at an early age, became one of the driving passions of his life. His earliest surviving works are 18 plates etched for Dr. John Burton's Essay Towards a Complete New System of Midwifery (1751). In the 1750s Stubbs made an exhaustive analysis of the anatomy of the horse. He rented a farmhouse in a remote Lincolnshire village, where, over a period of 18 months, he undertook the painstaking dissection of innumerable specimens. After moving permanently to London in 1760, Stubbs etched the plates for Anatomy of the Horse (1766), which became a major work of reference for naturalists and artists alike. Stubbs soon established a reputation as the leading painter of portraits of the horse. His masterly depictions of hunters and racehorses brought him innumerable commissions. Perhaps more impressive than the single portraits are his pictures of informal groups of horses, such as Mares and Foals in a Landscape (1765). — Among his contemporaries George Stubbs was known only to a narrow circle of aristocratic sportsmen and horse lovers, as a mere horse-painter. George Stubbs was born in Liverpool, son of a currier and one of five children. He had a minimum of formal instruction: in 1739 he was briefly a pupil of the minor painter Hamlet Winstanley (Meeting of the Waters) . This was apparently enough to launch Stubbs off as a provincial portrait painter. As such he worked (1743-53) in Wigan, Leeds, York and at Hull. When at York he already knew enough anatomy to give private lessons to medical students at York Hospital and this led to his commissions in 1751 to illustrate a book on midwifery by Dr. John Burton. He learnt enough of etching from a local engraver to etch the plates himself. His interest in anatomy and its studies continued all his life and proved to be important not only to his art but also a new contribution to science. In 1766 his The Anatomy of the Horse was published, which added to his prestige; he worked on a comparative anatomy of a man, a tiger and common fowl until his death, it was left incomplete. At the age of 30, in 1754 he went to Italy by boat. He is said to have gone with no enthusiasm for Italian art, but with a desire to confirm his view that nature, not art, was the only source of inspiration and improvement. On the return journey he made a stop in Marocco. It is believed that a scene he saw there inspired his later picture Horse Attacked by a Lion (1763). In 1756, his son, George Townley Stubbs (d.1815), was born by Mary Spencer who had become his common~law wife. In 1759, the family moved to London. In the 1760s-1770s, Stubbs lived in London. The nature of his commissions required him to travel almost as much as a topographical watercolorist of his day. A series of masterpieces mostly belonging to this decade was that depicting horses and foals. Some of the horses named and were painted for their owners, but others may have been prompted by Stubbs’s own liking for variations on the theme Mares and Foals in a Wooded Landscape (1761), Racehorses Belonging to the Duke of Richmond Exercising at Goodwood (1760), Mares and Foals Disturbed by an Approaching Storm (1765). As portraits his horses were satisfying to his patrons: Whistlejacket (1761). His powers, however, expanded in other directions. There was an easy transition from the portraiture of mounted sportsmen to the open-air conversation picture without reference to hunting or racing. From the end of the 1760s he produced magnificent examples of the genre The Melbourne and Milbanke Families (1769), John and Sophia Musters Out Riding at Colwick Hall (1777). A separate development beginning in the 1760s was Stubbs’s portrayal of wild animals. A unique product of an imaginative kind was the horse and lion series: Horse Attacked by a Lion (1770). He was commissioned to paint the first kangaroo brought to England, for another client he painted a moose The Moose (1770); there were commissions for an Indian rhinoceros, a baboon with a macaque monkey, a yak, and other animals. An exceptional commission was that commemorating the gift of a cheetah to George III by the Governor of Madras, Sir George Pigot (later Lord Pigot) Cheetah with Two Indian Attendants and a Stag (1764-1765). In the 1770s, Stubbs embarked on new enterprises: he experimented with enamel painting. He consulted Josiah Wedgwood about the possibility of making large pottery plaques on which the enamel process could be used. Josiah Wedgwood invited Stubbs to stay at his Etruria headquarters and experiment. Stubbs lived with the famous potter in 1780, using the process on pottery plaques in portraits of Wedgwood and his family, creating experimental paintings on ceramics. In the great paintings that were still to come, he reverted to oils, mostly on smooth panels rather than canvas. An Associate of the Royal Academy in 1780, Stubbs was elected to full membership in 1781. The self~portrait of that year, executed in enamel on an oval Wedgwood plaque, Self~Portrait (1781), shows him at fifty-seven. The Academy did not look kindly to experiments of the kind, most of its members holding to the conviction that painting in oils was the proper exercise of professional skill, even watercolor being grudgingly admitted to its exhibitions. A great development of this decade was his rendering of rural life and work, especially in the two oil paintings on panel, The Reapers (1784) and The Haymakers (1785). In 1790s the Prince of Wales commissioned a painting of members of his favored regiment, which exercised Stubbs’s powers afresh. Soldiers of the 10th Light Dragoons (1793). Other works to royal commission included the portrait presumed to be of Laetitia, Lady Lade (1793). The Prince’s commissions was further extended by the herd of red deer he had acquired. Red Deer Stag and Hind (1792). In all, the 18 paintings by Stubbs show his powers undiminished and indeed in some ways strengthened as he neared the age of 70. Stubbs died in poor financial circumstances. — LINKS — Horse Startled by a Lion — Mares and Foals (1760) detail — The Grosvenor Hunt |
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Born on 10 July 1830: Jacob
Camille Pissarro, French Pointillist
and Impressionist
painter specialized in landscapes,
who died on 13 November 1903. — Father of Lucien
Pissarro. Studied under Jean-Baptiste-Camille
Corot. — Born to a Creole mother and a French father, Pissarro was sent to boarding school in Paris for five years. After eight years back in Saint Thomas and then Caracas, he returned to Paris in 1855 to study art, working first with Anton Melbye and then at the Académie Suisse where he met Monet, Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin (1841–1927), and Cézanne. Painting out-of-doors, he developed a personal style much influenced by Courbet and Corot (1796–1875) but with a distinct feeling for structure and contrasting tonal values in the landscape. He had his first painting accepted at the Salon of 1859, then joined with Cézanne, Manet (1832–1883), and others in the 1863 Salon des Refusés. The Salon des Refusés was an art exhibition held in Paris in 1863, set up by the government at the urging of the artists involved, as an exhibition of paintings that had been refused by the official annual Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The show's major sensations were two paintings by Edouard Manet , each considered scandalous-- Déjeuner sur l'herbe, for portraying nude and clothed figures together in a scene of everyday life, and Olympia, for portraying a nude prostitute, whose form was not typical of those considered ideal. Other exhibitors were Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and James A. M. Whistler (1834-1903). Pissarro fled to England during the FrancoPrussian War. Back in Paris, he was a guiding force behind the first impressionist exhibition in 1874 and participated in all seven subsequent group shows. His work gave way in the mid-eighties to a divisionist manner inspired by Seurat (1859–1891), but he returned to a looser, less "scientific" style in the early nineties, and his late serial paintings of cityscapes and harbors are among his greatest achievements. — Pissarro was born in St. Thomas, in the West Indies into the family of a merchant. His father was of French-Jewish origin, his mother was a Creole. First Camille started his career as a businessman, like his father, but his obsession with painting changed the direction of his life. In 1852 he got acquainted with the Danish painter F. Melbye and spent about two years with him in Caracas. In 1855, he came to Paris, where he was impressed by the landscapes of Corot. He painted in Paris and in its suburbs; in 1859, he was admitted to the Salon. In 1859-1861, he attended the Académie Suisse and formed friendships with Monet, Guillaumin and Cézanne. Approximately at the same time his liaison with Julie Vellay started; they would marry ten years later, in 1871; they had eight children; their two sons, Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944), and Georges Pissarro (1871-1961) would both become the artists. Rejected by the Salon in 1861 and 1863, Pissarro showed at the “Salon des Refusés” in 1863. Though in 1864-68 he exhibited at the Salon, his pictures were not popular with public, nobody bought them, and financial difficulties started. In 1866-68, Pissarro lived and worked in Pontoise, painted landscapes in which he changed from Barbizon Realism of Corot to Impressionism; in 1869/70 he moved to Louveciennes, where many of his paintings were destroyed by German troops during the occupation of Louveciennes in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. The artist at the time stayed with his family in London. Pissarro’s friend, the painter Daubigny, recommended him to the art dealer Durand-Ruel, who did much for promotion of the Impressionists’ works; he would organize Pissarro’s exhibitions in Paris (1883) and New York (1886). In 1872-78, Pissarro stayed in Pontoise, working with Cézanne, on whom he exercised considerable influence. At this time his independent Impressionist style fully developed. Pissarro was the leader of the original Impressionists, and the only one to exhibit at all eight of the Group exhibitions in Paris from 1874 to 1886. In 1885, he met Signac and Seurat and for the next five years adopted their Divisionist/ Pointillist style. Pissarro’s interest in Socialism brought him some trouble: in 1894 he had to flee to Belgium from the French persecution of Anarchists, he had become an Anarchist in 1885. In 1896 and 1898, he painted views of the town and harbor of Rouen, remaining faithful to the early Impressionist style. In 1897-1903, he mainly painted views of Paris, also Dieppe and Le Havre. He died in Paris. — Pissarro was born to French Jewish parents on the West Indies island of St. Thomas. Sent to boarding school in France, he returned after six years to work in his parents' store. Pissarro abandoned this comfortable bourgeois existence at the age of twenty-two, when he left for Caracas with Danish painter Fritz Melbye, who became his first serious artistic influence. After returning briefly to St. Thomas, Pissarro left in 1855 for Paris, where he studied at various academic institutions (including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse) and under a succession of masters (including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Charles-François Daubigny). Corot is often considered Pissarro's most important early influence; Pissarro listed himself as Corot's pupil in the catalogues to the 1864 and 1865 Paris Salons. While Pissarro was accepted to show at the official Salon throughout the 1860s, in 1863 he participated with Edouard Manet, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and others in the historic Salon des Refusés. At the close of the decade, he moved to Louveciennes (near the Seine, twenty miles from Paris). Working in close proximity with Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, he began to revise his method of landscape painting, privileging the role of color in his expression of natural phenomena and employing smaller patches of paint. This artistic circle was dispersed by the Franco-Prussian War, which Pissarro fled by moving to London in 1870-71. There he met Paul Durand-Ruel, the Parisian dealer who would become an ardent supporter of Pissarro and his fellow Impressionists. Pissarro participated in his last official Salon in 1870. The years after Pissarro's return to France were seminal ones. He settled in Pontoise, where he received young artists seeking advice, including Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. He took part in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Pissarro — along with Edgar Degas, one of the Salon's most passionate critics — was the only artist to show at all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions, the last of which took place in 1886. Pissarro experienced somewhat of an artistic crisis in 1885. As he had done consistently throughout his career, he opened himself up to fresh influences by meeting with the younger generation, this time with Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, who were experimenting with a divisionist technique rooted in the scientific study of optics. Pissarro lived long enough to witness the start of the Impressionists' fame and influence. He was revered by the Post-Impressionists, including Cézanne and Gauguin, who both referred to him toward the end of their own careers as their master. In the last years of his life, Pissarro experienced eye trouble, which forced him to abandon outdoor painting. He continued to work in his studio until his death in Paris. — Born in Saint Thomas in the West Indies of a fairly affluent mercantile family, Pissarro was sent to Paris to complete his education. In 1855 he enrolled at the Academie Suisse, where he got to know Monet, and by frequenting the Café Guerbois he soon met the other Impressionist artists. Influenced by Corot, he exhibited at the Salon between 1864 and 1869, and at the Salon des Refuses in 1863. During the Franco-Prussian War he joined Monet in London where they met Durand-Ruel. Actively involved in the creation of the Societe Anonyme des Artistes, he took part in all the Impressionist exhibitions. Around 1865 Pissarro adopted a form of Pointillism, but he eventually reverted to his earlier style. His versatility extended to fan and porcelain painting, engraving and illustration. Politically a radical, he had a strong leaning towards the anarchistic beliefs that were causing alarm throughout Europe society at the time. Pissarro's impressionism has much of the sobriety of Sisley's but less reflective. He was the oldest member of the group, being two years older even than Edouard Manet. Everyone who knew Pissarro seems to have left some account of him, and by all these accounts his life and his character were a catalog of virtues — loyalty to his friends, wisdom as the father of a large family, courage in adversity, and patience, tolerance, honesty, and industry in all circumstances. Although Pissarro was intent upon capturing transient effects just as Monet was, he never abandoned the relative discipline of early impressionism, and for a while late in his career he joined the "neo-impressionists," who tried to solidify impressionism by systematizing its free prismatic shattering of light into a scientific application of color into minutely calculated dots. Pissarro soon abandoned this extreme, but that he was attracted to it at all shows his cautiousness in the use of impressionist effects. While Monet was pushing further into exploration of effects of light in air at the expense of form, Pissarro was retreating. The Market at Gisors is an effort to retain the atmospheric vibration of impressionism while at the same time imposing the discipline of well defined contours on forms monumentally arranged in space. More than any other member of the group, Pissarro encouraged younger men. At least three painters who were notoriously suspicious and thorny to deal with — Degas, Cézanne, and Gauguin — always retained a deep affection for him. Like Monet's and Sisley's, his financial situation was often desperate and at best difficult, but finally, at the age of sixty-two, he had the satisfaction of seeing his reputation established, not spectacularly but sound enough, in a large retrospective exhibition organized by Durand-Ruel. It was a gratifyingly happy ending to an admirable career. — LINKS — Self-Portrait — Another Self-Portrait — Le Port de Dieppe — Bouquet de Fleurs — Place de l'Opéra — Self-Portrait (1873) — Paysage à Pontoise avec un Chasseur (1879, 55x65cm) — Bouquet de Fleurs (54x65cm) — The Road Near the Farm (1871, 38x46cm) — Snow Scene at Eragny (View of Bazincourt) (1884, 47x56cm) — Le Port de Dieppe (1902) — La Foire à Dieppe — Toits Rouges — Paysannes nues dans l'herbe (1895 monotype, 13x18cm) — Le Semeur — Portrait of the Artist's Son, Félix (1880 charcoal, 20x15cm) — Église et ferme d'Éragny (1890 color etching, 16x24cm) — La Charrue (1901 color lithograph) — Paul Cézanne (1874 etching, 27x21cm) — La masure (1879 etching, 17x17cm) — Femme dans un potager (1880 etching, 25x17cm) — Quai Malaquais, Après-Midi Ensoleillée — Boulevard Montmartre de nuit — The Boieldieu Bridge to Rouen, Sunset |
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On 10 July 2002: $76.7 MILLION PAID FOR A MASSACRE. No it is not the amount of punitive damages assessed by a war crimes tribunal. Nor is it what the war criminals paid their agents. A recently rediscovered Rubens that had been hanging in the dark hallway of a monastery in Austria is sold at an evening auction at The Massacre of the Innocents (1611, 142x182cm) [image below] is a large, biblically inspired painting depicting the massacre of newborn boys ordered by King Herod. Sam Fogg, a London manuscripts dealer, was the winning bidder. Three dealers and one telephone bidder were willing to spend more than $55 million. Mr. Fogg would not say on whose behalf he was bidding, but speculation is that the buyer is David Thomson, a Canadian collector and the son of Lord Thomson of Fleet, former owner of The Times of London. Mr. Thomson is thought to have outbid several museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The seller, an unidentified 89-year-old Austrian woman, so disliked the painting after she inherited it in 1923 that she lent it to Stift Reichersberg, a monastery in upper Austria. It was thought to be by Jan van den Hoecke, an assistant to Rubens, until George Gordon, an expert in Flemish and Dutch paintings at Sotheby's in London, received an e-mailed picture of it from Sotheby's office in Amsterdam, which had been approached by the seller. Simply by looking at the image on a computer, he had a hunch it might be something else, so he went to the monastery to see the work. The back hallway where the painting hung was so dark he had to do his examination with flashlights. What convinced Mr. Gordon that the painting was by the Flemish master was how much it had in common with Rubens's Samson and Delilah. The two works date from almost the same point in Rubens's career and have the same characteristics. When Gordon was convinced that the painting was indeed a Rubens he had leading Rubens scholars from London, Oxford and Antwerp examine it. All agreed with him. The $76.7 million far surpasses the $35 million paid for Pontormo's portrait of a young man, which the Getty bought at Christie's in 1989 for $35.2 million, then a record for an old master painting. It is also the third-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890, 67x56cm) brought $82.5 million at Christie's, and Renoir's Au Moulin de la Galette (1876, 131x175cm) sold for $78.1 million at Sotheby's, both in May 1990 in New York. The family who owned The Massacre of the Innocents tried to sell it in the 1930's, officials at Sotheby's said, but couldn't find a buyer. — Learning that his mother was ill, Rubens returned from Italy to Antwerp in the autumn of 1608. By the time he reached Antwerp on 11 December, she was already dead. Rubens had no intention of staying in the north to start with, and his letters show how much he was missing Italy, but he was deluged with commissions, and stayed in Antwerp, eventually relinquishing any intention of returning south and marrying his first wife, Isabella Brandt. At some point in the three years or so after his return he painted this The Massacre of the Innocents. Such a picture must have had an extraordinary impact upon the Flemish public, in comparison to what was familiar to them. In pictures such as this Rubens brings the full-blown Baroque to the north; to a public largely unprepared for it. This is a brutal, unrestrained depiction of an horrific subject, but Rubens, a deeply religious man, would not have seen any reason for toning down the horror of one of the most appalling incidents in the Bible, one which has blackened the name of Herod for all time. The manner of its execution matches the subject: the long strokes of the fully-laden brush are bold and confident; there is no hesitancy in any part of this picture, which is painted with an immediacy and power that is itself overwhelming. Underlying the savage energy of this picture is a remarkably complex composition. The central figure group, though technically unstable, is visually held together by the centrifugal force of the flattened circle formed by the heads of the leading figures, by the alternating tension and compression of the figures whose limbs stretch and press, and by the interlocking network of triangles that unite the figures in different ways. Though the central figure group occupies a remarkably compact space, within their interlocking forms is an intricate series of receding layers – seen most clearly in the sword, limbs, heads and torsos to the left of the armoured soldier. This picture is full of what Rubens saw in Italy. To depict three of Herod’s soldiers, engaged in an orgy of butchery, in the nude, or barely draped in the manner of an Antique marble, is to place an immeasurable distance between this picture and Pieter Bruegel’s contemporary soldiery unemotionally impaling babies in a quotidian act of cruelty (The Slaughter of the Innocents, 1566, 111x160cm), which by the early 17th century was the standard manner of treating this subject in Flanders. Nonetheless, Rubens has adapted and concealed his Classical sources, so that what we see, though unimaginable without a deep understanding of Antique sculpture of all sorts, remains the unadulterated product of his own imagination. In this he has outshone so many later, and some earlier, artists of all schools, who risk descending into pedantry and stylization when drawing on Classical sources. Rubens is the antithesis of our popular conception of the great artist as a precocious genius. In this he stands in stark contrast to his own pupil, Van Dyck, and to Rembrandt. Rubens was well into his thirties by the time he painted this picture. Very little of his work before he departed for Italy at the age of 23 is known, and though his surviving paintings from his Italian period reveal an artist of enormous talent, and the equal of the best of his Italian contemporaries, it is not until immediately after his return to Antwerp that he suddenly starts to produce pictures that reveal the true depth of his genius. These are hyperbolic phrases, but in pictures such as Samson and Delilah in London, Susanna and the Elders in Madrid, The Raising of the Cross (1611, 462x341cm) in Antwerp cathedral, and in the present extraordinarily well-preserved Massacre of the Innocents, we sense that Rubens finally becomes aware of what he is capable of and understands the full extent of his own powers. That this picture should have remained unrecognized since 1767, when it was first mis-catalogued in Vincenzio Fanti’s inventory of the Liechtenstein collection, until late 2001 when identified by Sotheby’s, is extraordinary, though the London Samson and Delilah, painted at about the same time, and also in the Liechtenstein collection for nearly two centuries, suffered the same fate. It may have something to do with a partial misunderstanding, until the second half of the 20th century, of the nature of Rubens’ style immediately after his return to Italy, since by 1613 his style had moved on, and he was painting pictures that are closer to our familiar conception of his work. Such misunderstanding is not new, since correspondence between the Forchondt family discussing their attempts to persuade the Prince Johann Adam Andreas I of Liechtenstein to buy this picture in 1698 reveal a difference of opinion over what constitutes Rubens’ first style. They clearly overcame his objections, since to our knowledge no pictures were bought by the Liechtensteins between his death in 1712 and 1733, the year when a wax seal was applied to all Liechtenstein pictures, including this one. It remained in their collection until 1920 when it was sold to the father of today's seller. There is another The Massacre of the Innocents by Rubens, painted in 1621. |
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