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Lot Essay
With its spirited execution and prescient sense of Romanticism, this newly discovered canvas is a superb addition to the oeuvre of Johann Heinrich Schönfeld. Praised for his inventive history paintings and singularly refined style, Schönfeld was unquestionably one of the great artists of the German baroque, travelling to Italy where he stayed from 1633 to 1651 in Rome and Naples, before returning to work in Ulm and Augsburg until his death.
The soft articulation of the soldier’s features, combined with the picture’s warm, earthy tones produce a portrait of masterful insouciance. Its gracefulness is quite typical of Schönfeld and speaks of the uncanny ‘weightlessness of his images’, so aptly described by Herbert Pée (in ‘The Rape of the Sabines by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld’, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, LXXIV, no. 9, November 1987, p. 368). Although his oeuvre focused in the main on mythological subjects and religious compositions, there are examples of depictions of single figures elsewhere in his corpus. Close comparison, in terms of technique and subject, can be made with the signed portrait of a soldier (formerly Koelliker collection, later Brun Fine Art), underlining that this is a rare, but not isolated, canvas. Of course, similar such figures, shown full- or half-length, can be seen in the work of other Neapolitan artists of the early to mid-seventeenth century, who almost certainly influenced Schönfeld, notably Salvator Rosa, such as his renowned Self-portrait as a warrior (Palazzo Chigi Saracini, Siena). The present canvas was most likely produced during Schönfeld’s stay in Naples in the 1640s, or shortly after his return to Germany in the 1650s. Indeed, the facial type, with its typically elongated and elegant features, is similar to the philosopher in his Vanitas drawing in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, with its comparable air of melancholy, which is dated to the 1650s.
Schönfeld’s name was first associated with this canvas by Federico Zeri, who tentatively attributed the portrait to the artist in a handwritten note on the reverse of a photo in his archive. When the picture was then exhibited at the Finch College Museum of Art, a show organized by Robert Lee Manning in 1969, its attribution had been lost and it was instead listed as an anonymous work. It was leant to the exhibition by its then owner, Asbjørn Lunde, a New Yorker born to Norwegian parents, who became one of the great collectors of Norwegian and Swiss pictures, particularly landscapes.
The attribution has been independently confirmed, in private communication to the present owner, by Giuseppe Porzio and Riccardo Lattuada.
The soft articulation of the soldier’s features, combined with the picture’s warm, earthy tones produce a portrait of masterful insouciance. Its gracefulness is quite typical of Schönfeld and speaks of the uncanny ‘weightlessness of his images’, so aptly described by Herbert Pée (in ‘The Rape of the Sabines by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld’, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, LXXIV, no. 9, November 1987, p. 368). Although his oeuvre focused in the main on mythological subjects and religious compositions, there are examples of depictions of single figures elsewhere in his corpus. Close comparison, in terms of technique and subject, can be made with the signed portrait of a soldier (formerly Koelliker collection, later Brun Fine Art), underlining that this is a rare, but not isolated, canvas. Of course, similar such figures, shown full- or half-length, can be seen in the work of other Neapolitan artists of the early to mid-seventeenth century, who almost certainly influenced Schönfeld, notably Salvator Rosa, such as his renowned Self-portrait as a warrior (Palazzo Chigi Saracini, Siena). The present canvas was most likely produced during Schönfeld’s stay in Naples in the 1640s, or shortly after his return to Germany in the 1650s. Indeed, the facial type, with its typically elongated and elegant features, is similar to the philosopher in his Vanitas drawing in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, with its comparable air of melancholy, which is dated to the 1650s.
Schönfeld’s name was first associated with this canvas by Federico Zeri, who tentatively attributed the portrait to the artist in a handwritten note on the reverse of a photo in his archive. When the picture was then exhibited at the Finch College Museum of Art, a show organized by Robert Lee Manning in 1969, its attribution had been lost and it was instead listed as an anonymous work. It was leant to the exhibition by its then owner, Asbjørn Lunde, a New Yorker born to Norwegian parents, who became one of the great collectors of Norwegian and Swiss pictures, particularly landscapes.
The attribution has been independently confirmed, in private communication to the present owner, by Giuseppe Porzio and Riccardo Lattuada.