On 2 July 2024, The Madonna of the Cherries, one of Quentin Metsys’s most celebrated paintings, is being offered in the Old Masters Part I sale at Christie’s in London - following a landmark rediscovery.
Depicting the Virgin and Child, the picture is modest in size, and would have been intended for private devotion: the viewer is brought into intimate closeness with the holy figures. It dates from the 1520s - the mature period of Metsys’s career. .
Metsys was the founding figure of the so-called Antwerp School of painting - his followers a century or so later including Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.
He was renowned for his portraits and religious works, a famous example of the latter being a triptych known as the Altarpiece of the Joiners’ Guild for Antwerp Cathedral (today in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
Even more celebrated was The Madonna of the Cherries. Fascinating proof comes in the form of a picture from 1628, The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, by the Antwerp School painter Willem van Haecht.
It depicts an actual moment 13 years earlier, when the wealthy spice merchant and renowned art collector Cornelis van der Geest was visited by the regents of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Albert VII of Austria and Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia. We find them all in the vast fantasy Kunstkammer at Van der Geest’s harbourside mansion, where - amid myriad fine paintings - the regents are said to have offered to acquire one work in particular: Metsys’s The Madonna of the Cherries.
All trace of Metsys’s painting was lost following its sale (to an unknown buyer) after Stevens’s death in 1668. Its huge popularity had resulted in many copies of it being painted, but none was ever deemed of sufficiently high quality to be considered Metsys’s original.
The painting reappeared at a sale in Paris in 1920, but by then it was disguised by several additions, most notably a translucent green curtain drawn across the window and landscape. With this overpainting and a thick layer of discoloured varnish, the work was offered for sale at Christie’s in 2015 as a studio version. It was only after the transformative subsequent conservation that scholars were able to recognise the work as the prime version of Metsys’s masterpiece.
This is one of the great paintings of Flemish art. Its rediscovery offers collectors a fresh bite at some very special cherries.
Classic Week - Art from antiquity to the 20th century - takes place from 2 to 10 July 2024 at Christie’s in London. Highlights include Titian’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the rediscovered The Madonna of the Cherries by Quentin Metsys and Frans Hals’s Portrait of a gentleman of the de Wolff family. The pre-sale view opens on 28 June.
For more information: www.christies.com/stories/the...
26 июл 2024
