Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Christie’s 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale on 28 February 2023- Lucian Freud

 Two rare and exquisite Lucian Freud paintings that trace the artist’s enduring fascination with the natural world throughout his distinguished career will highlight Christie’s 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale on 28 February 2023. Unseen in public since 1974, Scillonian Beachscape (1945-46, estimate: £3,500,000-5,500,000), is an early painting by the artist, and one of a handful of works inspired by a formative visit to the Isles of Scilly, accompanied by his close friend, the artist John Craxton. During the trip, Freud created a number of drawings and completed this canvas when he returned to London. Unusually for the artist, the composition of Scillonian Beachscape is directly based on one of his location drawings, Untitled (which was sold by Christie’s in October 2022). Scillonian Beachscape is presented alongside Garden from the Window (2002, estimate: £2,500,000-3,500,000), which comes to auction for the first time. Both paintings are offered from the same private collection, and were formerly in the renowned collection of Simon Sainsbury.

Tessa Lord, Acting Head of Department, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s London: “Lucian Freud, revered as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, continually returned to the natural world as a source of rich inspiration throughout his career. This lifelong fascination is perfectly encapsulated in these two exquisite paintings which offer viewers insight into both his early and late life. The significance of the natural world to Freud is currently being explored in an exhibition at London’s Garden Museum. Each previously in the prestigious collection of the British philanthropist and businessman Simon Sainsbury, these two remarkable works will highlight our upcoming 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale. We expect them to resonate with our international collector base, particularly in light of London’s National Gallery’s recent centenary retrospective “Lucian Freud: New Perspectives” which will open at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, Madrid in February.


Scillonian Beachscape
 presents a dreamlike coastal scene in lush, sun-drenched colour. Captured in the crisp detail that defines Freud’s work of this period, a tall sea-holly dominates the foreground, unfurling sharp, scalloped leaves. To the left, a puffin perches on a round, perfectly pitted pebble. With their precisely modelled shadows, the objects contrast with the backdrop’s stylised, near-abstract fields of colour: they stand on a golden beach, which gives way to bands of blue and turquoise sea, and a distant strip of cyan sky. Two dark islets slice through the water like fins. Freud’s early practice was defined by plant and animal subjects before he shifted his focus to portraiture. Scillonian Beachscape is also distinguished by its remarkable scale. At half a metre in height and three-quarters of a metre across, it stands alongside major early works including Boy with a Feather (1943), The Painter’s Room (1945) and Dead Heron (1945), as one of the very largest paintings Freud had made by this date.


An exquisite portrait of nature painted at the height of Freud’s powers, Garden from the Window offers a rare glimpse of life beyond the artist’s studio walls. With exceptional detail, the artist captures the dappled play of light across the buddleia at the centre of his garden. Cropped to near-abstraction, leaves and petals are rendered with the same exacting textures that Freud applied to human flesh, their forms entangled like limbs. Painted in 2002, and unveiled at Tate Britain, London two years later, the canvas belongs to a series of works depicting the artist’s garden at 138 Kensington Church Street. The wild, overgrown plot became a great source of inspiration to him during the last two decades of his life. More keenly aware than ever before of time’s inevitable passage, Freud set about capturing the miraculous flux of light and life outside his window.

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Sotheby’s Auctions on 7 October, November 14 2022: Picasso, Mondrian

 

PABLO PICASSO, FEMME ASSISE À LA GALETTE DES ROIS, 1965, OIL ON CANVAS, 100 X 73 CM.
EST. HK$60M - 80M/ US$7.7M - 10M

This Autumn in Hong Kong, for the fourth consecutive season[1], Sotheby's will once again present an exceptional work by Pablo Picasso in Asia. Making its auction debut, and unseen in public for more than thirty years, Femme assise à la galette des rois - a loving portrait of the artist’s second wife, Jacqueline Roque - will lead Sotheby’s Hong Kong Modern Art Evening Auction on 7 October with an estimate of HK$60-80 million / US$7.7-10 million.

Picasso first met Jacqueline in 1952 at the Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris in the South of France; she quickly became his lover and muse and would remain by his side right up until his death in 1973. No other figure looms larger in Picasso’s life and art than Jacqueline - of all the women associated with Picasso, it was Jacqueline who would feature most often as his subject. Her legendary features first appeared in Picasso’s output in 1954 and the following two decades, which art historian John Richardson called “l'epoque Jacqueline”, reveal the essential role she played in Picasso’s late artistic career.

In Femme assise à la galette des rois, although the sitter’s image has been partially abstracted, the dark eyebrows, the beautifully curved eyelids and the firm, straight nose are unmistakably those of Jacqueline. Picasso depicts his wife as an all-seeing classical beauty, invested with a sense of regal authority with a crown placed upon her head. Jacqueline is also seen holding the galette des rois (King Cake), a cake traditionally baked to celebrate the Epiphany, containing a small charm or figurine inside bestowing the moniker of “king for a day” on whomever finds it. This charming detail offers a personal insight into the life of the artist and his muse, and evokes an atmosphere of playful celebration that encapsulates their life together as a couple.

The vibrant palette of green, black and gold, and the comparatively formal nature of Jacqueline’s posture, reflect the influence on Picasso of Old Masters such as Velázquez. Throughout the 1960s, Picasso turned repeatedly to the reinterpretation and investigation of the artists of the past that he revered, a process through which he reaffirmed his lineage to some of the greatest painters in the history of art. These achievements were made possible by the loving company of Jacqueline who inspired many of his most significant compositions of the period.

Femme assise à la galette des rois comes to auction from a Swiss private collection and has remained in the possession of the same family for over 50 years. In 1988 (to 1989), the painting was included in Picasso’s major retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Now, some three decades later, the public will once more have a long overdue opportunity to appreciate Picasso’s visually stunning painting of the women who meant so much to him.

The work will be presented alongside a selection of paintings by internationally renowned Modern masters, including Pierre Soulages’ Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 3 décembre 1956 - a rare large-scale composition by the abstract artist, Joan Miró’s Personnage dans la nuit - a strikingly colourful work featuring Miró’s iconic motifs, Sanyu’s Branches - one of the artist’s largest flower paintings, and Zao Wou-Ki’s 15.02.65 - a seminal work from his acclaimed Hurricane Period.

PIET MONDRIAN, COMPOSITION NO. II (1930). ESTIMATE IN EXCESS OF $50 MILLION. IMAGE © 2022 MONDRIAN / HOLTZMAN TRUST

COMPOSITION NO. II (1930). ESTIMATE IN EXCESS OF $50 MILLION. IMAGE © 2022 MONDRIAN / HOLTZMAN TRUST

“There are few artists who have staked such an audacious claim in the history of Modern art as Piet Mondrian, whose grid-style of abstract painting is a truly singular achievement in painting history. Composition No. II is an undeniable masterwork by the artist, bearing the signature hallmarks of Mondrian’s groundbreaking, elemental approach to composition – black lines, forms of primary colors, and geometric precision. The work hums with an electricity that mirrors the energy of painting in Europe at this time and remains as vital as it did when it was painted nearly 100 years ago.”
OLIVER BARKER, SOTHEBY’S CHAIRMAN, EUROPE

In his recent review of Hans Janssen’s newly translated biography of the Dutch Modern master Piet Mondrian, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl places the artist alongside only Picasso as the premier progenitors of twentieth-century painting: “Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian are, to me, the twin groundbreakers of twentieth-century European pictorial art: Picasso the greatest painter who modernized picture-making, and Mondrian the greatest modernizer who painted.” As one of the earliest and most innovative creators of truly abstract painting, Mondrian is not only among the cornerstone figures of Modern art, but also among the great Dutch masters, in company with Rembrandt and Van Gogh, who revolutionized painting and the course of art history in their time.

Possessing the balance and harmony that drove Mondrian to create the most daring compositions of the twentieth century, Composition No. II from 1930 represents the pinnacle of Mondrian’s mature style, which the artist refined during his time in Paris and immersion in the artistic firmament that took hold there during the 1920s and early 1930s. Works from this period are entirely distinct from Mondrian’s earlier movement toward abstraction before and during World War I, as well as from his later period Boogie Woogie works he produced after emigrating to America in 1940.


In Composition No. II, the artist’s signature grid abstraction and geometric composition is on full display; this work is further distinguished by the large red square form occupying the upper right quadrant. Works by Mondrian that have a predominance of the color red are exceptionally rare within his oeuvre, with only 17 paintings of the nearly 120 works executed by the artist from 1921 to 1933 having a focus on the color red, and of this group, only three paintings remain in private hands. Composition No. II comes from a discrete series of square-format canvases, the majority of which are held in museum collections. It is also one of only three of paintings to feature the dominant red square at upper right; the other two works with this feature are both in museum collections (the National Gallery of Belgrade and the Kunsthaus Zurich) and are smaller in size. Composition No. II has an exceptional exhibition and provenance history, and was first exhibited the year it was painted in the inaugural Cercle et Carrée exhibition in Paris.

Reflecting on his artistic evolution, his aims as an artist, and how a primary color such as red would come to feature so prominently in his work, Mondrian recounted how his “work unconsciously began to deviate more and more from the natural aspects of reality...The first thing to change in my painting was the color. I forsook natural color for pure color.”

Coming to auction for the first time in nearly 40 years on 14 November at Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction, Composition No. II is anticipated to sell for in excess of $50 million, making this work one of the most significant and valuable works by the artist ever offered on the market. When the painting was sold at auction in 1983, it achieved the highest price ever paid at the time for a work by Mondrian and for a work of abstract art at auction, as reported in The New York Times1.

“Quintessential works by Piet Mondrian rarely come to auction as many are housed in the most prestigious museum collections around the world. Composition No. II embodies everything you could want from a Mondrian – it is a seminal painting that is both crucial to the development of Modern art and emblematic of the enduring appeal of the Modern aesthetic, characterized by a serene sense of compositional balance and spatial order, and with superb provenance. On his path towards abstraction, Mondrian reached an epiphany with the works he created at the peak of his career. The opportunity to acquire a painting of this quality is truly a once-in-a- generation occurrence.”
JULIAN DAWES, SOTHEBY’S HEAD OF IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART, AMERICAS

In the popular imagination, Mondrian’s unique style is perhaps the most commonly recognized form of abstract art, which has influenced art movements from Color Field to Minimalism, as well as artists spanning generations and global cultures, including Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Liu Ye, Richard Pettibone, and many more. Mondrian has not only had an impact within the arts, but also a wide-ranging impact on popular culture. The artist’s geometric motifs and palette of primary colors has also left an undeniable imprint on popular culture, ranging from the designer Yves Saint Laurent’s famous Mondrian-inspired cocktail dresses of the mid-1960s, the architecture of the Eames House in California, the exterior of the Hague’s City Hall, Italian designer Danilo Silvestrin's furniture, a specially designed pair of Nike SB Dunks, The White Stripes album De Stijl and album cover designs by other artists, to name just a few instances of the artist’s influence.

By the time Composition No. II was painted, Mondrian was already well known in international art circles. Peggy Guggenheim and Alfred Barr both courted him for work; Hilla Rebay and Marcel Duchamp stopped by his studio and dozens of young artists visited him in his immaculately designed environment. At the center of the art world in Paris during this time, Mondrian felt at home within the bustling metropolis and the access to new forms of culture, such as jazz, modern dance, and the excitement of fast-moving visual culture that was often associated with nightlife throughout the city. Mondrian was known to stay out all night at Café du Dome and attend the Cirque Médrano in Montmarte. The pleasures of Parisian nightlife were not only for passing the time. As with every aspect of his studied daily routine, these nocturnal outings infused and inspired his work. However, with the deteriorating political situation in Europe, by 1937 Mondrian’s work was being exhibited as Degenerate Art in Germany. Within a year he would leave France, first for England and then, in 1940, for New York, where he would, for the first time in decades, finally abandon the black line in his work as he embarked on a new series within the evolution of his work that was also indebted to the new culture he experienced around him.

Despite being at the vanguard of modernism, and effectively altering its course, Mondrian’s Dutch background and Puritan upbringing were formative influences on his ideas and work, as he sought to infuse a religiously inspired Dutch aesthetic with a radical, modernist fervor. His return from the Netherlands to his studio in Paris in 1919 marked the beginning of a period of intense activity devoted to developing the style that would dominate his work of the 1920s, during which time he confined his pictorial language to planes of pure primary color, planes of non-color and black lines. Over the next decade Mondrian refined this new vocabulary to the highest degree of balance and economy, creating several series of similar works, with each new canvas featuring minor variations in the precise shades of the primary colors, the thickness of the black lines, and the size and shape of the geometrical grids that delineate his compositions. Each work is a unique attempt to express a principle of equilibrium borne out of opposing elements, further amplified by Mondrian’s decision to present his finished canvases in recessed frames.

Mondrian’s studio environment in Paris was a vehicle for creating his work and encountering this carefully constructed world was akin to encountering one of his paintings. He had moved to the French capital in 1911, settling into what, with the interruption of World War I, would be his home until 1938. Alexander Calder visited the studio in 1930, the year Composition No. II was produced, and recalled: “I was very much moved by Mondrian's studio, large, beautiful and irregular in shape as it was, with the walls painted white and divided by black lines and rectangles of bright color, like his paintings.” It was through the careful balance of color – or lack of color – and form expressed through vertical and horizontal lines that Mondrian created his ultimate vision.

Composition No. II carries an illustrious provenance and extensive exhibition history, including a Paris-based show the year it was painted. The work was loaned by Mondrian to the Swedish artist Otto Carlsund in the early 1930s and enjoyed a stint in the collection of Dutch artist César Domela in the late 1940s. The work was later held in the Bartos collection, where it remained until 1983 when it last made an appearance at auction, alongside other important works from their collection by Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger and Mark Rothko.

Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Auction on 1 March: Picasso, Munch

 

LONDON, 22 JANUARY 2023 – The women in Picasso’s life have always been at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre. On September 5, 1935, a new muse arrived in the form of his daughter Maya, named María de la Conceptión after Picasso’s beloved late sister, and born in secrecy while Picasso was still married to his first wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova. The daughter of his greatest love Marie-Thérèse Walter, Maya was to prove an immense source of happiness for Picasso. Her timely birth coincided with a personal crisis which Picasso later referred to as “the worst period of his life”. A lengthy divorce battle with Olga and the associated loss of his beloved property, Château de Boisgeloup, in combination with the increasingly worsening political situation in Europe and a deepening sense of the inevitability of war, conspired to overwhelm the artist, who was experiencing a nearly year-long abstinence from painting.

Between January 1938 and November 1939 Picasso painted fourteen portraits of Maya – the most important series Picasso devoted to one of his children, in which his joy as a father finds poignant expression in his joy as an artist. One of the artist’s most playful and bold depictions of his daughter will now appear at auction for the first time in more than 20 years. Estimated at $15-20 million (in the region of £12-18 million), Fillette au bateau (Maya) will be offered in Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction in London on 1 March 2023. Kept by Picasso until his death in 1973, the painting was subsequently owned by Gianni Versace, before being sold by Sotheby’s in London in 1999 as part of the late fashion designer’s collection of 25 works by the artist. Its reappearance on the market coincides with the passing of Maya Ruiz-Picasso on December 20, 2022, at 87 years of age. The work will go on view at Sotheby’s Hong Kong (5-7 February), New York (11-15 February) and London (22 February-1 March).

“In his portraits of Maya, Picasso reached for his most joyful, brightly coloured palette, and employed a combination of styles to elevate his daughter to the same level as his paintings of her mother, Marie-Thérèse – the artist’s greatest love, with whom we associate his most romantic pictures. There is a continued strong demand for paintings from the 1930s, and a work of this calibre is made even more remarkable for not having appeared on the market in almost a quarter of a century.”
SAMUEL VALETTE, SENIOR SPECIALIST, IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART DEPARTMENT, SOTHEBY'S LONDON

Painted on 4 February 1938, when Maya was two-and-a-half years old – shortly after Picasso had completed the monumental and harrowing Guernica – the portrait is filled with exuberant colour and energy. Picasso depicts Maya at eye level, and captures her fidgety nature through implied movement, while her face is depicted with the Cubistic distortion that was common in Picasso's pictures from this era. An important feature of Picasso’s series of portraits of Maya is the striking resemblance that Maya’s features carry to those of her mother, Marie-Thérèse.

It was no secret that Picasso revered childhood, and in his art attempted to capture the spirit and freedom that often eludes adult creativity. Playing with his children presented him with an opportunity to reclaim his lost youth, and his portraits of them were extensions of that cherished playtime. He would sing songs to his daughter, dance with her, make paintings for doll’s houses from matchboxes, puppet theatres using paper, and small fabric figures with heads made of chickpeas.

Maya was Picasso’s eldest daughter and second child, following the birth of Paulo in 1921 (born to Olga Khokhlova), and preceding Claude in 1947 and Paloma in 1949 (born to Françoise Gilot) – all of whom were represented by Picasso in his art.

Young María – who could not pronounce her name, so her parents opted for Maya instead – was a constant presence in the artist’s studio – while her father worked on the large canvas for Guernica, she would innocently pat her hands on the surface, recognising the distinguishable profile of her mother in the faces of the anguished victims of the massacre.

“With his eyes he looked; with his hands he drew or modelled; with his skin, nostrils, heart, mind, with his gut, he sensed who we were, what was hidden in us, our being. This, I think, is why he was able to understand the human being – however young – with such truth.”
MAYA RUIZ-PICASSO, ‘MEMORIES: IMAGES OF CHILDREN’, IN WERNER SPIES (ED.), PICASSO’S WORLD OF CHILDREN, MUNICH & NEW YORK, 1996, P. 57).

Picasso would produce a final portrait of Maya in 1953, just as she was about to turn eighteen. After her father died, Maya would go on to devote her adult life to preserving Picasso’s legacy – and, in turn, her daughter Diana Widmaier Picasso recently turned the spotlight on her grandfather's relationship with her mother as a small child, with a critically acclaimed exhibition at Paris’ Musée de Picasso – which united this painting with other portraits in this series for the first time.

Also confirmed for Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Auction on 1 March, is a seminal four-metre-long painting by Edvard Munch exploring love, life and death on the Oslo fjord – from the walls of Max Reinhardt’s avant-garde Berlin theatre to a luxury cruise liner and hidden from the Nazis in a barn deep in the Norwegian forest, Dance on the Beach is being offered from the renowned Olsen Collection as part of a restitution settlement with the gamily of leading Jewish patron Curt Glaser, with an estimate of $15 – 25 million (in the region of £12 – 20 million). 


A Seminal Four-Metre-Long Painting by Edvard Munch Exploring Love, Life & Death on the Oslo Fjord

By Sotheby's

From the Walls of Max Reinhardt’s Avant-Garde Berlin Theatre to a Luxury Cruise Liner & Hidden from the Nazis in a Barn Deep in the Norwegian Forest


“Dance on the Beach” to be Offered at Sotheby’s London in March From the Renowned Olsen Collection As Part of a Restitution Settlement with the Family of Leading Jewish Patron Curt Glaser

Edvard Munch’s singular vision resulted in vivid, psychological artworks as he battled his demons and the eternal pull between life and death on canvas. In 1906, at a turning point in his life, Munch was commissioned to paint what is now known as “The Reinhardt Frieze”, installed on the walls of impresario Max Reinhardt’s avant-garde theatre in Berlin with twelve major canvases – in an immersive installation that was one of the first of its kind, and trailblazed the relationship between performance and art.

At just over four metres wide, Dance on the Beach is the monumental culmination of the series. In the foreground of the canvas are two of the artist’s great loves, affairs with both of whom ended in heartbreak. It is the only example from the Reinhardt series remaining in private hands, with all of the others held in German museum collections.

As part of a tumultuous journey in the lead up to and during the Second World War, the painting was last on the market 89 years ago, when it was acquired at auction by Thomas Olsen – who assembled an unmatched collection of around thirty works by the artist, including one of four versions of the infamous The Scream. Having been identified as once having belonged to Professor Curt Glaser, a major cultural figure in 1930s Berlin who was forced to flee, it is being sold by agreement between the two families.

The work will be offered as a highlight of Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Evening Sale in London on 1 March, with an estimate of $15-25 million. Prior to the sale, the painting will go on public view for the first time since 1979, with an exhibition in London (22 February – 1 March), as well as digital installations of this frieze in Hong Kong (5-7 February) and New York (11-15 February).

“Munch was the ultimate rebel, and every brushstroke on this frieze is utterly modern and purely expressive. This composition reimagines one of Munch’s greatest images, the Dance of Life, which was the culmination of the artist’s Frieze of Life and places love at the centre of the artist’s ‘modern life of the soul’. His first version dates from 1899-1900 and hangs alongside the iconic Scream in Oslo’s National Gallery. This work is among the greatest of all Expressionist masterpieces remaining in private hands — its shattering emotional impact remains as powerful today as in 1906.”
SIMON SHAW, SOTHEBY’S VICE CHAIRMAN, FINE ARTS
“This exceptional painting is made all the more special due to its extraordinary provenance, a history that has unfolded since it was painted 115 years ago. Intertwined in the story of this painting are two families – both leading patrons of Munch. Indeed, so important were the Glasers and the Olsens to Munch, that he painted both Henrietta Olsen and Elsa Glaser (wives of Thomas and Curt). We are proud to play a part in the painting’s next chapter, whilst celebrating the legacy of the patrons who were integral in supporting the vision of such a great artist.”

The sale will also include a monumental masterpiece from Gerhard Richter’s celebrated cycle of abstract painting. Also of spectacular proportions, and also spanning four metres across, Abstraktes Bild, 1986 will be offered with an estimate in excess of £20 million.

Freeman’s biannual European Art & Old Masters

 Freeman’s biannual European Art & Old Masters auction brings the best of the Continent, England, and Scotland to market, and this February 14 is led by 




La Fleur Préférée (Lot 58), a striking life-size outdoor portrait of a farm girl by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Offered with an estimate of $400,000-600,000, the painting was executed in 1895, at the height of Bouguereau’s career, and boasts an extensive provenance, having originally been bought directly from the artist. The work comes to Freeman’s directly from a private collection in North Carolina and has been in US collections for over a century, underscoring the artist’s longstanding popularity among Americans. This quintessential canvas is an unmissable opportunity for Bouguereau collectors.

Also on offer in the February 14 sale is Deux Mères de Famille (Lot 59), a mother and child scene by Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, an important 19th-century French painter. This fresh-to-market work was exhibited at the Salon in 1888. Gardner Bouguereau was an early and influential Parisian expatriate, one of the first American women to exhibit at the Salon, and the wife of William-Adolphe.


IMPORTANT CANVASES, WITH IMPRESSIONISM AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM ON FULL DISPLAY

European Art & Old Masters brings to market a range of distinguished paintings, including Pont-Aven (Lot 74), a lively cityscape by the noted French Post-Impressionist Gustave Loiseau. Also on offer is Canal in Spring by Frits Thaulow (Lot 64), who combined Impressionism with naturalism to execute landscapes with an aesthetic all his own—initially in his native Norway, then primarily in France.

Daniel Ridgway Knight’s romantic riverside scene The Signal (Lot 60), a highlight of European Art & Old Masters, foregrounds the artist’s traditional, academic attention to detail and his focus on perhaps his most popular subject matter: peasant women. 

James Tissot’s Sur la Plage (Lot 56), an enigmatic seaside scene, highlights the lush theatrical dress in which the artist often costumed his models.




MASTERWORKS ACROSS CENTURIES

Freeman’s February 14 auction features several centuries of artistic production, with some works—like an elegant chalk-on-paper portrait of a woman by the studio of Paolo Veronese (Lot 8)—dating back as early as the sixteenth century. Other esteemed works by Old Masters in the sale include the oil-on-copper Crying Madonna attributed to Carlo Dolci (Lot 10), and a selection of portraits of the Campbell family by William Aikman (Lots 18-21).

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Theodoor Rombouts Virtuoso of Flemish Caravaggism

On the occasion of the 225th anniversary of the MSK Ghent, the museum is presenting the first ever monographic exhibition on Theodoor Rombouts (1597-1637), the virtuoso of Flemish Caravaggism. Rombouts was an established figure in the Antwerp art world. But although his painting was appreciated during his short life, the Antwerp Baroque gods Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Antony Van Dyck (1599-1641)  pushed Rombouts' artistic legacy into relative obscurity after his early death. The exhibition reveals Rombouts' artistic personality and places his work in a new perspective.


More information and more images

Theodoor Rombouts, 'Allegory of the Five Senses', 1632, MSK Ghent
Theodoor Rombouts, 'Allegory of the Five Senses', 1632, MSK Ghent © www.artinflanders.be, photo Cedric Verhelst

Theodoor Rombouts, 'Card players with lute player', c. 1635/37, The National Museum Warsaw
Theodoor Rombouts, 'Card players with lute player', c. 1635/37, The National Museum Warsaw


Theodoor Rombouts, 'Lute player', c. 1625-30, The John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, cat. 679
Theodoor Rombouts, 'Lute player', c. 1625-30, The John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, cat. 679


Theodoor Rombouts, 'Card players', c. 1627-1632, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen
Theodoor Rombouts, 'Card players', c. 1627-1632, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen


Theodoor Rombouts, 'Allegory of the Second Bench of Aldermen of ‘Gedele’', 1627-28, MSK Ghent
​​​​​​​Theodoor Rombouts, 'Allegory of the Second Bench of Aldermen of ‘Gedele’, 1627-28, MSK Ghent © www.artinflanders.be, photo Cedric Verhelst


American Art | Bonhams Skinner 25 JANUARY 2023 |Grandma Moses

The January 25th live American Art auction presents a wonderful assortment of works in a variety of styles and periods. 


Edward Henry Potthast
(American, 1857-1927)
Ring Around the Rosie 24 x 30 in. (61.0 x 76.2 cm) framed 34 x 40 x 1 1/2 in.
25 January 2023, 12:00 EST

Skinner Marlborough, Massachusetts

US$200,000 - US$300,000

A delightful, large summer scene by Edward Potthast of children enjoying a romping game of Ring Around the Rosie leads the auction. 


Other lots of particular note are a large oil by realist figure painter John Koch titled Manuscript I and a trio of landscapes by the famed Moses family, starting with Grandma Moses Farm in Autumn and continuing with works by her son Forrest K. Moses and her great grandsons Paul J. Moses and Will Moses. There is a stunning floral by Philadelphia Ten member Mary Elizabeth Price, Nantucket Flowers, oil and silver leaf on board. The sale is full of fine examples by American artists from the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Worthington Whittredge, Bruce Crane, Alexander Wyant, William Lester Stevens, Bertha Menzler Peyton, Eric Sloane, Aldro Hibbard, and Anthony Thieme.




Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (American, 1860-1961) Farm in Autumn 13 3/8 x 27 3/16 in. (34.0 x 69.0 cm) (framed 20 x 34 in. (under glass)). Estimate: US$40,000 - US$60,000