Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artworks

Take Another Trip! The Paston Treasure Beckons

I’ll bet most, if not all, of you have never heard of a large painting called The Paston Treasure, c. 1663. Neither had I, until I saw a little picture of this 8 feet by 5.4 feet work. As I guess then, it’s a real gem, a unique painting in more than one way. It’s now on view at the Yale Center for British Art–and worth the trip if you are anywhere nearby.

The painting–detail at left (and elsewhere) and pasted just below–probably by an unknown Dutch itinerant painter, anchors an excellent exhibition. But I chose to write about the painting itself in The Wall Street Journal‘s Masterpiece column, what was published last Saturday (I know, I know–but I’ve been really busy). The headline and deck were A Painting Framed in Mystery: ‘The Paston Treasure’ flaunts a family’s wealth while meditating on death.

First, here’s the “nut graf(s)”:

It looks like an overstuffed jumble, replete with vessels, timepieces, musical instruments, animals, fruits, flowers and more, gathered from the West Indies, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, Africa and the Americas, as well as Europe. But all these possessions—which would have been on display at the Pastons’ seat, Oxnead Hall, or kept in a locked cabinet of curiosities known as the “best closet”—represent a “microcosm of the known world.”

…The painting is a unique combination of still life, ostentatious banquet painting, allegory of the senses and continents, portraiture, animal painting and—most of all—the vanitas genre. Beneath the bounty is a message: That drooping flower, the ripe fruit, the candle stub convey the fragility of life and inevitability of death. Other objects allude to the fleeting nature of fortune,…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can read the rest online–how it is a microcosm of the then-known world, in many ways–but there is more to say about this painting and its owners than 800 or so words can contain. A few more bits:

  • The Pastons are famous for another reason. Between 1440 and 1509, they wrote hundreds of letters, which survive as one of the largest personal archives of the 15th century now held by the British Library.
  • The exhibit includes five objects that are in the painting–a pair of silver-gilt flagons, a Strombus shell cup, two nautilus cups and a c. 1660s perfume flask that was made of mother-of pearl sections imported from India that were joined together by silver-gilt cagework, embellished with chains, given a stopper adorned by a gilt shell–all done in London.
  • Those flagons, now in the collection of the Met, were once owned by William Randolph Hearst.
  • One thing I had no room to mention: the Paston treasure includes some stock images, like that lobster, along with real objects owned by the Pastons. This has led art historians to suggest that the unknown artist, now called the Master of the Paston Treasure, may be the artist who created a painting in the show titled Monkeys and Parrots, which was discovered in the research phase of this exhibition in a New York collection. That painting has been attributed to Carstian Luyckx or his circle. But there is, apparently, nothing to suggest that Luyckx was ever near Oxnead, in Norwich, where the Treasure was painted (there is documentation for that). More mystery!
  • Parts of the paintings are faded–that lobster was red–and this may have been exacerbated by the Pastons themselves. Sir Robert was something of an alchemist, as was his daughter Margaret–also explored in the exhibit–and some pigments were developed to family specifications. They have not fared well.
  • The Pastons’ wealth declined and their treasures were sold off within two generations of this painting’s date–that’s why the objects are now so widely dispersed.

There is so much more to explore in this paintings and this exhibition, which won’t come around again. When it closes on May 27, the painting goes back to Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and the objects return to their current owners. That’s why I say, go.

 

Photo credits: Courtesy of the YCBA

A New Leonardo?

Has the unprecedented sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi brought more paintings by the Renaissance master out of the closet? Over the courses of this fall and winter, some people were speculating that that would happen, and also that–of course–none of them would be “right.”

Now the Worcester Art Museum is entering the fray, but with a reasoned case–founded on research and connoisseurship over many years–for a painting it has owned since 1940: A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo (c. 1479-85), below. The painting is a predella panel of an altarpiece in the Duomo of Pistoia in Tuscany; a second panel, Annunciation, is in the collection of the Louvre. A third seems to be missing.

Saint Donatus, donated to the Worcester museum as a Leonardo but soon downgraded, has been attributed to Lorenzo di Credi since then–but that attribution has bothered Laurence Kanter, Chief Curator at the Yale University Art Gallery, for about 20 years. More recently, it also bothered Rita Alberrson, chief conservator at the Worcester museum, who has studied the painting for about 9-10 years, using 21st century technology. The two of them have been working away on the attribution, and in conjunction with Bruno Mottin, the senior curator of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, who has studied Annunciation, below. are prepared to argue that both works are largely by Leonardo.

I wrote all this up for an article for the January issue of The Art Newspaper, making their case more clear with examples. My piece is not online yet–just in the print and digital versions so far. (I have posted it on my website.)

Worcester on March 10 will open an exhibition, The Mystery of Worcester’s Leonardo, of those two works plus one by Lorenzo di Credi–it’s there to show his style, which is incongruous with the two other works. While Kanter is convinced that most, if not all, of Annunciation is by Leonardo, and perhaps 85% of Saint Donatus is by him, the two museums are hedging a bit with their new labels, which will read “Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi.”

Go and you’ll be able to see for yourselves.

Photo credits: Courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum and the Louvre

 

Merry Christmas: The Annual Gift

My Christmas painting for RCA readers this year is Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Nativity from the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University. It’s dated c. 1492 and was bequeathed to the museum by Charles Brinsley Marlay in 1912.

About 24.4 inches by 33.6 inches, it’s tempera on wood panel, and the provenance line says “he perhaps bought it from Messrs Colnaghi, London.” Interestingly, the painting was “formerly attributed to Mainardi, Sebastiano” but reattributed by E. Fahy in 1998.

As the museum says online, “Domenico Ghirlandaio was the master of one of the biggest, busiest and most successful workshops in Florence at the end of the 15th century”–he taught Michelangelo, among others. There is a bit more about the painter and this work here.

This painting joins other nativities I have highlighted for you in years past by–in reverse order, beginning in 2016–Gentile da Fabriano; Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi; Francesco di Giorgo Martini; Botticelli; Zaganelli; Fra Angelico, and Petrus Christus.  It all started in 2009, my first year blogging here, when the Nelson-Atkins Museum sent out an email to Kansas City media outlets offering to let them use images of their Christmas art as illustrations. I featured that here, and I think it’s still a good idea for museums to offer.

You can revisit my previous choices by going to archives on the right side of this page, choosing December of each year, and looking for the entry nearest Christmas Day.

Merry, merry to all.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum

Take A Look At Folk Art Masterpiece(s) in We The People

Last January, when the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg announced that it would “launch its diamond jubilee as the loan exhibition at the Winter Antiques Show to be held at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City,” I was interested in doing something that would focus more attention on folk art. I studied the little booklet that I was sent, with a number of items in the museum’s collection, and decided to pitch a Masterpiece to the Wall Street Journal. That, as my regular readers know, is the Saturday column that provides an anatomy of an artwork (music, poetry, film, literature as well as visual art). These pieces are wonderful to do–providing an opportunity for research as well as close viewing.

As it turned out, none of the items in the brochure ended up being my Masterpiece subject. Instead, my editor and I settled on a portrait that was new to the collection and that was to be revealed to the public in a long-term exhibition titled We the People: American Folk Portraits, which opened last summer and continues through 2019.

It is John James Trumbull Arnold’s Portrait of Mary Mattingly (1850). She is, as many people have told me since Saturday, after reading my piece, just adorably cute and well as beautifully executed.

As I wrote,

Mary, age 3 (or possibly 4), is a beguiling little girl with penetrating brown, almond-shaped eyes….limned in Arnold’s trademark sharp, simple lines. Presented frontally, encircled by a brownish oval background set against black corners, she stares directly at the viewer, holding a red rose in her left hand….

She has, in Arnold’s rendition, symmetrically arched eyebrows and fine, visible eyelashes. She wears a dress, gathered around her tiny waist, that looks black but was initially dark green. It’s trimmed at the neck in white lace, and her sleeves, gathered at the wrist, are trimmed in dark lace….[Her hair is] tied with an unusually large, cockeyed white-and-blue bow that gives her a bit of a mischievous character.

Much more from me is at the link above.

I’ve posted her picture here, but if you want a closer look at the portrait, please go here. That Live Auctioneers site gives a history of the 2014 auction at which she was purchased by the museum.

Also, Antiques and the Arts Weekly published an article  (the press release, I think) about the exhibition We the People last May. It has a slide show of other portraits in the show.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Museums

 

 

The Maltese Icon–No, Not That One

If you’re an art-lover (and writer) headed toward Malta, as I was last June, the first artwork that comes to mind is Caravaggio’s masterpiece in the Valetta cathedral, The Beheading of St John the Baptist. Brilliantly conceived and titanic in size–12 ft by 17 ft–it is the only work Caravaggio ever signed. It hangs in a separate room in the cathedral shared only with Caravaggio’s St. Jerome Writing, which would certainly catch your eye if set in an ordinary paintings gallery. Here it might be overlooked!

While I did visit those works–my only complaint is that the cathedral keeps visitors very far away from the St. John work and I did not bring, as one Japanese tourist did, a pair of binoculars–I wanted to write about something different, something not as well known, something that needed more attention. Caravaggio has lines waiting to see his works.

On the other hand, the little gallery in Malta’s National Museum of Archaeology that houses “Sleeping Lady” (c. 3000 B.C.) was empty most of the time I was there. I had her to myself. She is tiny, unlike the Caravaggio, but there too one cannot get too close.

Nonetheless, I wrote her for the wonderful Wall Street Journal masterpiece column, and my article, A Powerful Symbol of a Lost Civilization, was published on Saturday.

The Sleeping Lady is quite strange, as you’ll read (if you cannot get behind the WSJ pay wall, you can find the article on my Facebook page–I made the post “public.”).  A few excerpts:

…she is corpulent, with bulging upper arms, wide hips and ballooning thighs that overwhelm her small head…she is nearly complete and wonderfully detailed considering that whoever made her had only primitive tools of bone, stone and, possibly, wood with which to work….

She is naked to the waist, revealing ample breasts. She wears a skirt covering her knees that is decorated near the bottom with fine pleats and dots that some believe resemble embroidery. Both the front and back of her skirt are marked down the center, as if joined by a seam, and the skirt seems to have a waistband….

“Sleeping Lady” has so far proved to be unique, but she comes from a culture that produced other so-called fat ladies…interpreted by some scholars as goddesses—mother goddesses, earth mothers, fertility goddesses—whose obesity signifies the abundance of the land in which they were a totem…

She is different from the others, though, and I prefer the interpretation of her as an illustration of death, or death as eternal sleep, perhaps an allusion to belief in an afterlife.

Now you have another reason to visit Malta–and there are many more.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the WSJ (top), Wiki Commons (middle), and me, a photo of the museum wall label showing her from above (bottom)