Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December, 2018
The pair of Hals portraits hanging in Mr Albada Jelgersma's home. Frans Hals (1580/5-1666), Portrait of a Gentleman, Aged 37 and Portrait of a Lady, Aged 36,
1637. Oil on canvas, (both) 36⅝ x 27 in (93 x 68.5 cm). Estimate
£8,000,000-12,000,000. Offered in The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection
Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December 2018, as part of Classic Week, at
Christie’s in London
While the paintings were on loan to
The Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the renowned Hals
scholar Seymour Slive observed that they are ‘outstanding,
superlative works… in a near miraculous state of preservation.’
Their exceptional condition means that Hals’ fluid brushwork and
subtly toned palette can be clearly appreciated.
An ‘imagined’ illustration of Eric Albada Jelgersma (1939-2018) surrounded by his collection
Eric Albada Jelgersma (1939-2018) was just one of several illustrious
owners of the Hals pictures, which are said to be the finest
pair of portraits by the artist remaining in private hands.
During the 19th century they belonged to the family of Count
de Thiènnes, who lived in
Castle Rumbeke, one of the oldest renaissance castles
in Belgium.
In the 20th century they passed through the hands of Canadian
railroad magnate and pioneering Impressionist collector William
Cornelius Van Horne and the American diplomat J. William
Middendorf II, before Jelgersma acquired them in 1996 from Robert Noortman, the Dutch art dealer and decade-long director of TEFAF art
fair.
At that time Albada Jelgersma, a businessman from the south of Holland who
had amassed a fortune in the supermarket wholesale industry,
was well on his way to establishing his reputation as a connoisseur
of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masterpieces, acquiring
works that covered each genre of Golden Age painting.
Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) An Extensive Wooded Landscape,
1610. Oil on copper. 20¾ x 28½ in (52.7 x 72.4 cm). Estimate:
£3,00,000-5,000,000. Offered in The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection Old
Masters Evening Sale on 6 December 2018 at Christie’s in London
Mr Albada Jelgersma’s collection also includes one
of the largest landscapes
Jan Brueghel the Elder ever painted on copper (above),
and important genre paintings by
Gerard Ter Borch,
Michiel van Musscher and Dirck Hals, as well as Merry Company, a scene
of three young revellers by
Judith Leyster (below). This particularly rare work by
the greatest female painter of the Dutch Golden Age was painted
in 1629 when the artist was just 20 years old, and demonstrates
her precocious talent.
Judith Leyster (1609-1660), Merry Company.
Oil on canvas. 29⅜ x 24⅞ in (74.5 x 63.2 cm). Estimate:
£1,500,000-2,000,000. Offered in The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection
Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December 2018 at Christie’s in London
Other notable highlights include Anthony van Dyck’s monumental painting of Venus and Adonis (below),
which is a rare disguised double-portrait of George Villiers, 1st Duke
of Buckingham, and his wife Katherine Manners, as the characters from Classical mythology. Painted in 1620,
most probably to celebrate the couple's marriage, then rediscovered
in 1990, the canvas is one of only three works datable to
Van Dyck’s first trip to England — and the only one still
in a private collection.
Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), Venus and Adonis. Oil
on canvas. 87¾ x 64⅛ in (222.9 x 163 cm). Estimate:
£2,500,000-3,000,000. Offered in The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection
Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December 2018 at Christie’s in London
In addition, the evening sale features a selection of still life paintings,
including a small-scale masterpiece by
Ambrosuis Bosschaert the Elder and a monumental Frans Snyders canvas (below).
Frans Snyders (1579-1657), Larder. Oil
on canvas. 66⅝ x 93⅛ in (169.2 x 236.5 cm). Estimate:
£1,000,000-1,500,000. Offered in The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection
Old Masters Evening Sale on 6
Portrait
of Princess Mary (1631–1660), daughter of King Charles I of England,
full-length, in a pink dress decorated with silver embroidery and
ribbons by Sir Anthony van Dyck, 1641, will be offered from a Distinguished Private Collection in Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December, during Christie’s Classic Week
(estimate: £5,000,000-8,000,000). Commissioned to celebrate the crucial
alliance between the British crown and the House of Orange, this
intimate ad vivum (from life) portrait of Princess Mary, the
finest portrait of the type, is remarkable for its royal provenance, the
superb quality of its draughtsmanship and its exceptional condition. It
is one of the most important European Royal Portraits to come to
auction for a generation.
The painting will go on public view for the
first time, ahead of the auction, at Christie’s Shanghai on 19 until 21
September, later touring to New York where it will be on public view
from 25 to 30 October and to Hong Kong between 23 and 26 November, ahead
of the pre-sale public exhibition in London from 1 to 6 December.
John Stainton, Deputy Chairman, Old Master Paintings, Christie’s EMERI:
“This
beautifully-preserved full-length portrait of Princess Mary, eldest
daughter of King Charles I of England, and future mother of King William
III of England, was one of the last commissions executed by van Dyck,
in the summer of 1641, only months before the artist’s premature death
at the age of forty-two. It bears many of the hallmarks of his
remarkable genius – in the subtle rendering of the sitter’s physiognomy,
the masterful depiction of the shimmering drapery, the brilliance of
the palette, and the assured draughtsmanship and deft handling of the
paint. A work of the finest quality, it represents the culmination of
all that van Dyck had learnt from his master, Peter Paul Rubens, and
from his Venetian predecessors, notably Titian. By developing his own
distinctive style of portraiture, characterised by a calm authority and
supreme elegance, van Dyck both revolutionised portraiture in Europe and
left a legacy for future generations of artists from Gainsborough and
Lawrence, to Sargent and Freud.”
ROYAL PROVENANCE:
Identified
by Sir Oliver Millar as one of two portraits commissioned from van Dyck
for the court at The Hague, this painting would originally have formed
part of the prestigious collection of the Princes of Orange,
Stadtholders of the United Provenances of the Netherlands. It would
likely have been displayed in one of their principal palaces, possibly
at Binnenhof Palace in The Hague, where Princess Mary lived with her
husband William, alongside works by many of the principal Dutch and
Flemish painters of the seventeenth century.
VAN DYCK IN ENGLAND:
In July 1632, van Dyck was appointed ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to
their Majesties’ by King Charles I of England. A passionate collector
and patron, the King had long hoped to attract a painter of such
exceptional status and renown to his service, and found in van Dyck an
artist not only capable of fulfilling his desire for magnificent
portraits and paintings, but also one who shared his tastes, especially
for Venetian pictures. The style, refinement and brilliance of van
Dyck’s portraits was unprecedented in England; the artist instilled in
his sitters a new sense of vitality and movement and his bravura
technique allowed him to enliven the entire surface of his works with
light, assured dashes of paint, as exemplified in the present portrait.
PRINCESS MARY AS SITTER:
Van Dyck first painted the sitter in the weeks immediately following
his arrival in London in 1632, when the young Princess Royal was shown
with her parents, King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, and elder
brother, the future King Charles II. The monumental group portrait,
known as ‘The Greate Peece’, dominated the King’s Long Gallery in the
Palace of Whitehall (The Royal Collection). The earliest single
portraits of Princess Mary, which show her full-length in a blue dress,
with her hands linked together across her stomach – a pose that echoes
van Dyck’s earlier portraits of her mother – were painted in or before
1637, and are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at Hampton
Court. Four years later, she sat again to van Dyck with her
fifteen-year-old husband, Prince William of Orange, for the double
portrait now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, as well as for the present
work.
JEWELS AND ATTIRE:
In
both the present work and in the Rijksmuseum double portrait, Mary is
shown wearing her wedding ring and the large diamond brooch given to her
by her husband on 3 May 1641, the day after their marriage. Her
spectacular coral gown, decorated with silver thread trim along its
border, is thought to be similar to that worn for her wedding, rather
than the cloth of silver-gold she wears in the Rijksmuseum picture. The
apparent weight of the fabric, falling in broad, heavy folds, along with
the bright highlights along the creases, suggest the fabric may have
been cloth of silver. Shimmering highlights, applied in swift,
cross-hatched strokes, were used as a form of shorthand by artists,
mimicking the lustre of metallic threads as the textile caught the
light. In accordance with the fashion of the period, her gown is open
down the front, revealing a stiffened stomacher across the chest and a
matching skirt beneath. The ribbons, which would at one time have been
functional, lacing the skirt and stomacher to the bodice, were applied
purely as adornment. One ribbon, however has been pinned or stitched
flat to disguise the seam between the bodice and skirt. Details such as
the Princess’s brooch, the string of pearls and ribbons on her
shimmering dress are rendered with remarkable precision and delicacy,
characteristics that defined the artist’s finest late works.
Princess
Mary was born on 4 November 1631 at St. James’s Palace, the eldest
daughter of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. She was baptized
on the same day by William Laud, Bishop of London. On 2 May 1641, at the
age of nine, she was married to William II, son of Frederick Henry,
Prince of Orange and Amalia von Solms, at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall
Palace. Mary remained in England for a year after the marriage,
eventually following her husband to Holland in 1642, accompanied by her
mother and a train of four hundred courtiers.
In March 1647, William II
succeeded his father as Stadholder of the Dutch Republic and Mary became
Princess of Orange. Her new position at court, however, caused conflict
with her mother-in-law. The ill health which Frederick Henry had
suffered between 1640 and his death in 1647 had meant that Amalia had
effectively ruled as Regent and Stadtholder during this time. Mary’s
appearance at court seems to have represented something of a challenge
to her mother-in-law, with one of Mary’s ladies allegedly saying that
‘it was time the princess should run the country’, since Amalia had done
so for so long.
In
November 1650, following his failed attempt to capture Amsterdam from
his political opponents, William II died of smallpox. Eight days later,
Mary gave birth to a son, the future William III of England. His baptism
saw the rivalry between Mary and Amalia erupt once again: despite
Mary’s desire to christen her child Charles, in honour of her father,
Amalia insisted that he be called William. Mary’s position in Holland
became increasingly precarious during her widowhood. She was obliged to
share the guardianship of her infant son and the Regency of Holland with
Amalia, and her uncle-in-law Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg.
Amalia was reported to be ‘hateful of all things English’ and Mary’s
continuous support of the Royalist cause in England provoked
considerable hostility at court. This was no doubt exacerbated by her
brothers, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, who had come to The
Hague in 1648 and 1649, where they borrowed large sums of money from her
husband. Indeed, after the Anglo-Dutch war, which had begun in 1652,
was concluded by a peace treaty in May 1654, all ‘enemies’ of
Parliamentarian England were banned from the Netherlands, thus
forbidding Mary to welcome her brothers on Dutch soil again.
After the
Restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, Mary’s position
changed dramatically for the better in the Netherlands. She returned to
her homeland in September of Charles’ coronation year, where, after a
short illness with smallpox, she died at Whitehall on 24 December.
Frans Snyders (1579-1657), Larder. Oil
on canvas. 66⅝ x 93⅛ in (169.2 x 236.5 cm). Estimate:
£1,000,000-1,500,000. Offered in The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection
Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 
