Alessandro Algardi, Relief: The Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Fitzwilliam Museum.

NEW YORK - The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University possesses one of the finest collections of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes in Great Britain, and this February a group of thirty-six of them will be seen for the first time together in America in a presentation at New York's Frick Collection. Dating from the turn of the sixteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth century, the period that saw the flowering of the bronze statuette as an independent art form, the sculptures are remarkable for their exquisite beauty and refinement. Many of the works in the exhibition are from the collection bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum by the sister of Lieutenant Colonel Mildmay Thomas Boscawen, an explorer, naturalist, and botanist, who owned large plantations in East Africa. Included are masterpieces by such renowned Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculptors as Vincenzo Grandi and Alessandro Algardi, as well as outstanding bronzes by Netherlandish, German, and French masters, which are rare among the Frick's predominantly Italian holdings. Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, seen in conjunction with the Frick's permanent collection, will provide visitors with a rare opportunity to explore the depth and range of European bronze sculpture. Presentation of the exhibition in New York is made possible, in part, through the generous support of Peter and Sofia Blanchard, Lawrence and Julie Salander, and The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, with additional support from the Fellows of The Frick Collection. It is being coordinated for the Frick by its Associate Curator Denise Allen and is accompanied by a catalogue and public lecture.

Comments by Director Anne L. Poulet, "This presentation is the third in a series of remarkable exhibitions at the Frick highlighting the bronze statuette, beginning with the 2003 exploration of the oeuvre of Willem van Tetrode, followed in 2004 with the unveiling of the distinguished Quentin collection. With each, we hope to have encouraged the general and scholarly public to take a renewed look at an art form that inspired the most talented Renaissance and Baroque sculptors. Furthermore, given that our own bronzes-on view throughout the Frick mansion-offer a sense of Henry Clay Frick's personal taste, we are particularly pleased to present the Fitzwilliam works assembled by Colonel Boscawen as yet another compelling chapter in the collecting history of the medium."

Lieutenant Colonel Boscawen (1892 - 1958), a younger son of the 7th Viscount Falmouth, was educated at Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge. After distinguishing himself in the First World War, he moved to Tanganyika and ran a successful business producing sisal hemp near Moa. A renowned explorer, naturalist, and botanist, Boscawen became an avid collector of sculpture, favoring bronze over any other medium because of its resilience to the African climate. His real love was medals, plaquettes and statuettes from the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, which he acquired from the London art market through the agency of trusted dealers who sometimes sent bronzes to Africa for Boscawen's approval. The surviving correspondence reveals Boscawen to have been a most discerning collector, whose exacting tastes earned him a reputation as a connoisseur. Because he was desirous of having nothing but the best, he constantly refined his collection.

Self-effacing to a fault and very reticent, Boscawen has remained an obscure figure until recently, when a significant portion of his collection of bronzes, and several other works of art, entered the permanent collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Now, thanks to the rediscovery of more than forty letters that Boscawen wrote to his dealers in London, a wealth of new information has emerged about his activities as a collector and, at long last, the full scope and scale of his remarkable collection may be appreciated.

The Fitzwilliam's Perfume Burner, the Lid with a Funerary Genius is an example of the exquisite functional bronzes produced by the uncle-nephew team of Vincenzo and Gian Girolamo Grandi, who worked in sixteenth-century Renaissance Padua and Trent. Such pieces were highly valued accoutrements to the studies of noble and humanist patrons. Although many examples, primarily candlesticks and bells, from the Grandi shop survive, very few can be attributed solely to the hand of these masters. The Fitzwilliam exhibition will reunite two of their greatest works, the Perfume Burner and The Frick Collection's exquisite Hand Bell, which the bronze scholar Willem von Bode called, “the most beautiful bell in all the world."

Both bronzes are characterized by the extraordinary sharpness of their casting, which allows decorative elements such as swags, ribbons, and escutcheons to stand out in crisply syncopated rhythm. The Perfume Burner and Hand Bell represent pinnacles of luxurious artistry in bronze, a material praised in the Renaissance for its ability to withstand the ravages of time. Emphasizing that the human condition is otherwise, the Grandi crowned each bronze with a bittersweet reminder of life's transience: the putto on the Perfume Burner is shown dousing life's torch, while his counterpart on the Hand Bell is seated on a skull, visible only when viewing the bell from behind.

Bron: Artdaily Tetrode

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Old Master Paintings at Sotheby's New York

NEW YORK - Sotheby's January 2004 sale of Old Master Paintings is highlighted by A Winter Scene with Many Figures Skating on a Frozen River, one of the finest works by the Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp left in private hands. Painted at the dawn of the Dutch Golden Age, probably between 1610 and 1615, it shows the delights of a frozen winter's day enjoyed together by people of all ages: skating; sledging, ice-yachting, fishing and standing about gossiping in their finery, or muffled against the icy chill. Avercamp resolves the apparent contradiction of the physical onslaught of a brutally cold winter's day with the delights enjoyed by the local population in the face of such a potentially severe trial of nature by introducing warm reddish tones: brick, clothing, flags; which provide a visual counterpart to the remorselessly cold gray of the sky and the ice, without diluting their intensity. The present work is estimated to sell for $4/6 million.

Also included is Hendrick Terbrugghen's A Fluteplayer carousing with a young woman holding a roemer (est. $3/4 million), one of the finest paintings by the artist remaining in private hands, and an outstanding example of his virtuosity. Terbrugghen was arguably the most inventive and independent of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, and this picture displays to the full his genius in combining dramatic Caravaggesque lighting with an arresting and original use of color, delivered with breathtaking verve. Dating from 1625, the picture, which depicts an amorous couple, illustrates the artist's refreshingly direct and uninhibited approach to genre subjects in his mature style.

The second half of the eighteenth century is often described by art historians as the golden age of portraiture in Great Britain, not least because it was during this period that that Sir Joshua Reynolds produced his greatest works. Featured in the January 22nd sale of Old Master Paintings is Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mrs. Stanhope (est. $800,000/1.2 million), painted in 1786, at the time of one of Reynolds's most fertile artistic moments. Well established as the leading British artist of his day, and rivaled only by Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds had continued to produce striking and innovative portraits throughout the decade of the 1780's. In the present work, Mrs. Stanhope is depicted in a simple white gown, her pensive gaze upwards adding to her idealized and aloof beauty. This painting is of a type of romanticized portraiture that Reynolds had popularized and that would influence the work of many of his contemporaries, such as George Romney.

Pieter Jansz. Saenredam's Haarlem, the interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, seen from the south west is the fourth and latest of four known paintings by Saenredam of the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem, and is one of the last of his church interiors left in private hands. The church was built to the designs of Saenredam's friend Jacob van Campen between 1646 and 1649 on the site of the demolished medieval chapel of St. Anne, retaining the tower, which had been erected by Lieven de Key in 1613. The Nieuwe Kerk was the only modern building that Saenredam painted, and is thus the only church he painted built in Classical rather than Gothic or Romanesque style. This painting, which is estimated to sell for $600/800,000) first came to light at the Saenredam exhibition in Paris in 1970.

Featured in the European Works of Art section of the sale is a recently discovered bronze by the 16th century Dutch master Willem van Tetrode, A bronze Ecorche figure of a man (est. $200/300,000). This sculpture, which had changed hands within the consignor's family, had gone unidentified until the consignor pulled into a train station and recognized a work resembling his on a poster promoting an exhibition of van Tetrode at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The curator of the exhibition, a van Tetrode expert, confirmed its authenticity, with its detailed muscles and innovative stance. Previous to his discovery, it was learned that the consignor's house was burglarized but that, ironically, the burglar bypassed the sculpture for a television instead.

In connection with the sales of Old Master Paintings and Drawings, and upon the occasion of the reopening of the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna, Austria in March 2004, the curator of the museum, Johann Kraeftner, will present a lecture entitled: The Rebirth of a Princely Palace and its Collections. He will speak on the history, renovation and reopening of the house as well as the history of the collection and the purchasing policy of the Liechtenstein Collections. The lecture will be held at Sotheby's on Sunday, January 18th.

Bron