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Lot Essay
On 23rd August 1615, the wealthy spice merchant and renowned art collector Cornelis van der Geest was honoured with a visit by the regents of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Albert VII of Austria and Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia. While the reason for their visit was that van der Geest’s home, located on the harbour of Antwerp, afforded them a view of a mock sea battle on the river Scheldt, it is what they saw inside that gained the event its place in the annals of art history. From van der Geest’s princely Kunstkammer of paintings, Albert and Isabella made his most prized picture the prime motive of their visit: Quentin Metsys’s Madonna of the Cherries. In the following decade, the event would become the centrepiece of Willem van Haecht’s painting The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest of 1628 (Antwerp, Rubenshuis; fig. 1), and written about in the first monographs on Metsys by Franchoys Fickaert (1648) and Alexander van Fornenbergh (1658), the earliest examples of such works dedicated to a single artist. In the embellished accounts of this vignette, the regents, enamoured of the painting, competed in their love for it with the patrician, offering to acquire it from him, only to be refused despite Albert’s entreaties:
‘The archduke so fell in love with this picture of Mary that he used all the means of the suitor to acquire the same. But since two minds with but a single thought were opposed to each other, the owner’s and the archduke’s, his Highness was rejected with the most respectful courtesy and [the owner’s] own love prevailed above the favour of the prince’ (van Fornenbergh, op. cit., pp. 25-6, translated in Schwartz, op. cit., p. 46).
It is in this climate of appreciation that Antwerp’s rich artistic heritage is seen to have begun with Quentin Metsys, at the centre of which The Madonna of the Cherries stood as the apotheosis. Encompassed by the treasures of van der Geest’s cabinet, Metsys provided the artistic link between the past and future of Flemish painting, from the meticulous realism of the Eyckian legacy to the inventive feats of the brush that would give rise to Metsys’s heir, Peter Paul Rubens.
The painting disappeared from public view in 1668, and remained unrecognised when it reappeared again in 1920, by then disguised due to additions, including a translucent green curtain over the window, a change to the Virgin’s waist and an alteration to her shoulder that would obscure the ear of the throne. In 2015, when it was sold in these Rooms, with the overpainting and a thick layer of discoloured varnish, scholars continued to consider it as a fine example of one of the studio variants of the artist’s prototype. Subsequent conservation, which saw the removal of both, was transformative, revealing the exceptional condition of the original paint surface and enabling scholars to recognise it as the prime of Metsys’s Madonna of the Cherries.
While the enormous popularity of Metsys’s composition resulted in many copies of van der Geest’s painting, until now, none was ever deemed of sufficiently high quality to be Metsys’s prime, or matched the composition so exactly to that painted by van Haecht and described by van Fornenbergh. Van Haecht’s Gallery was the closest thing in existence to an inventory of van der Geest’s collection, and as its resident keeper, he will have assuredly rendered it from life, capturing the present work right down to its most unique details, from the minute sails of the windmill in the landscape and the V-shaped stalk of the grapes on the parapet, to the delicate folds of the Christ Child’s flesh and the translucent pattern of veins across the Virgin’s skin (fig. 2). Such precise correlations attest to this being the picture that van Haecht copied, with Metsys’s execution so beyond duplication that it could not be absorbed by any other artist.
*FOR THE COMPLETE ENTRY, PLEASE SEE THE SALE CATALOGUE
‘The archduke so fell in love with this picture of Mary that he used all the means of the suitor to acquire the same. But since two minds with but a single thought were opposed to each other, the owner’s and the archduke’s, his Highness was rejected with the most respectful courtesy and [the owner’s] own love prevailed above the favour of the prince’ (van Fornenbergh, op. cit., pp. 25-6, translated in Schwartz, op. cit., p. 46).
It is in this climate of appreciation that Antwerp’s rich artistic heritage is seen to have begun with Quentin Metsys, at the centre of which The Madonna of the Cherries stood as the apotheosis. Encompassed by the treasures of van der Geest’s cabinet, Metsys provided the artistic link between the past and future of Flemish painting, from the meticulous realism of the Eyckian legacy to the inventive feats of the brush that would give rise to Metsys’s heir, Peter Paul Rubens.
The painting disappeared from public view in 1668, and remained unrecognised when it reappeared again in 1920, by then disguised due to additions, including a translucent green curtain over the window, a change to the Virgin’s waist and an alteration to her shoulder that would obscure the ear of the throne. In 2015, when it was sold in these Rooms, with the overpainting and a thick layer of discoloured varnish, scholars continued to consider it as a fine example of one of the studio variants of the artist’s prototype. Subsequent conservation, which saw the removal of both, was transformative, revealing the exceptional condition of the original paint surface and enabling scholars to recognise it as the prime of Metsys’s Madonna of the Cherries.
While the enormous popularity of Metsys’s composition resulted in many copies of van der Geest’s painting, until now, none was ever deemed of sufficiently high quality to be Metsys’s prime, or matched the composition so exactly to that painted by van Haecht and described by van Fornenbergh. Van Haecht’s Gallery was the closest thing in existence to an inventory of van der Geest’s collection, and as its resident keeper, he will have assuredly rendered it from life, capturing the present work right down to its most unique details, from the minute sails of the windmill in the landscape and the V-shaped stalk of the grapes on the parapet, to the delicate folds of the Christ Child’s flesh and the translucent pattern of veins across the Virgin’s skin (fig. 2). Such precise correlations attest to this being the picture that van Haecht copied, with Metsys’s execution so beyond duplication that it could not be absorbed by any other artist.
*FOR THE COMPLETE ENTRY, PLEASE SEE THE SALE CATALOGUE