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Lot Essay
Having completed his training with Abraham Bloemaert in Utrecht and later Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert in Amsterdam, Jan Baptist Weenix moved to Rome around 1642, where he joined the society of northern artists known as the Schildersbent and earned the name ‘Ratel’ (Rattle) due to a speech impediment. This Italian sojourn had a decisive effect on Weenix's artistic production upon his return to Amsterdam four years later, as indicated both by his continued penchant for staging scenes within Italianate landscapes and his use of the signature Gio[vanni] Batt[ist]a Weenix. Following a move to Utrecht in 1649, the artist's works began to be characterised by their increasingly monumental figures, a point that is strikingly evident in the life-size snarling dogs fighting over meat in this painting.
While relatively rare in the artist’s oeuvre, another example of Weenix taking an animal as his principal subject, albeit on a smaller scale, is in his celebrated Goat Lying Down in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (84 x 132.5 cm.). In his treatment of a subject of this nature on a monumental scale, Weenix was clearly influenced by his slightly older Flemish contemporary, Frans Snyders, a pioneer of the genre.
Achille Fontaine was a passionate and eclectic collector. Following the tragic, early death of his beloved wife Augustine Flament in 1862, Fontaine devoted himself to buying paintings, decorative arts and sculpture. His activities as a collector, indeed, were so great that by 1904 Fontaine had exhausted his funds and was forced to sell a number of his treasured artworks, including pictures by Rubens, van Dyck, Holbein, Guardi and Panini. In the catalogue to the sale, held in Paris at Galerie Georges Petit, the writer and critic Léon Roger-Milès described the collection as 'so rich and so varied’, adding that ‘Mr. Fontaine-Flament is one of the most fervent and enlightened amateurs...For nearly forty years, [he] abandoned himself to his taste for painting…as a man who knows what he wants, he has gathered right and left…works of high taste’.
The picture was given the title, La raison du plus fort, in the nineteenth century, if not before, as indicated by the label on the reverse. It is taken from the tale of The Wolf and the Lamb by Jean de la Fontaine, where he writes: ‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’. It is usually understood to mean that intellectual valour is always trumped by physical force, a variant of a similar principle expressed by the Latin motto ‘ubi maior minor cessat’. It is a concept whose moral relevance, meaning and complexity for the human condition has endured for centuries.
While relatively rare in the artist’s oeuvre, another example of Weenix taking an animal as his principal subject, albeit on a smaller scale, is in his celebrated Goat Lying Down in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (84 x 132.5 cm.). In his treatment of a subject of this nature on a monumental scale, Weenix was clearly influenced by his slightly older Flemish contemporary, Frans Snyders, a pioneer of the genre.
Achille Fontaine was a passionate and eclectic collector. Following the tragic, early death of his beloved wife Augustine Flament in 1862, Fontaine devoted himself to buying paintings, decorative arts and sculpture. His activities as a collector, indeed, were so great that by 1904 Fontaine had exhausted his funds and was forced to sell a number of his treasured artworks, including pictures by Rubens, van Dyck, Holbein, Guardi and Panini. In the catalogue to the sale, held in Paris at Galerie Georges Petit, the writer and critic Léon Roger-Milès described the collection as 'so rich and so varied’, adding that ‘Mr. Fontaine-Flament is one of the most fervent and enlightened amateurs...For nearly forty years, [he] abandoned himself to his taste for painting…as a man who knows what he wants, he has gathered right and left…works of high taste’.
The picture was given the title, La raison du plus fort, in the nineteenth century, if not before, as indicated by the label on the reverse. It is taken from the tale of The Wolf and the Lamb by Jean de la Fontaine, where he writes: ‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’. It is usually understood to mean that intellectual valour is always trumped by physical force, a variant of a similar principle expressed by the Latin motto ‘ubi maior minor cessat’. It is a concept whose moral relevance, meaning and complexity for the human condition has endured for centuries.