While Sotheby’s Old Masters week centres on the $25m-plus Danaë by Orazio Gentileschi (above), to be offered in its evening sale on 28 January, a number of other less heralded pictures also deserve attention.
First up, on 27 January, is the dramatic Crowning with Thorns by the seldom encountered French Caravaggist Valentin de Boulogne (around 1591-1632) from the estate of former Sotheby’s head Alfred Taubman. The artist is best appreciated for his genre scenes of gallants and wenches making merry. His religious pictures are far less popular, which explains why—despite its high quality and excellent condition—this picture bounced around unsold with several dealers before Taubman acquired it in 1996. Until recently, the work was hanging on long-term loan at the Detroit Institute of Arts and, according to sources, it was requested for the first major exhibition on Valentin to be held later this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. Reasonably estimated at $1.5m-$2m, Crowning with Thorns would be a smart purchase at the price for many a museum.
After the Gentileschi, the other great painting in Sotheby’s 28 January evening sale is a previously unrecorded St Martin Healing a Possessed Man by the Antwerp master Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678). Signed and dated 1630, it is a large presentation model for his first important altarpiece commission for the Benedictine abbey of St Martin in Tournai. There are considerable compositional differences between the painting and the finished altarpiece, which is now in the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts. The model is far superior: the powerfully muscular convolutions of the possessed man being held down by his companions, who gaze pleadingly towards the bishop saint, are diluted in the rather fussy altarpiece. Compared to his master Rubens and his rival van Dyck, original works by Jordaens have become rather rare as most of what is available has some contribution from the artist’s workshop. It has to be said that many people are shocked by the picture’s high estimate of $4m to $6m, which one cranky dealer describes as a “very full retail price”.
A particular favourite of mine in the evening sale is a pair of history paintings on copper by the Austrian master Johann Georg Platzer (1704-61) depicting The Dedication of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and the Destruction by Titus of the Temple of Herod in Jerusalem. Little appreciated outside his native Austria, Platzer’s works are perhaps the most extravagantly artificial paintings of the 18th century. His compositions tend to be crowded, and everything—flesh, fabric and foliage—is rendered with obsessive detail. He excelled at scenes of overwhelming spectacle and camp pageantry, as can be seen in the works offered at Sotheby’s. Exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 19th century, the paintings were rediscovered in a small Milwaukee auction house in the late 1980s by a picker, who then sold them at Sotheby’s New York in 1988 for $253,000 (est $60,000-$80,000). Returning 28 years later, they are now pegged at $600,000 to $800,000.
