Christ with arms crossed
|
| Christ with arms crossed |
|---|
| 1657/1661 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 109.2 x 90.2 cm |
| The Hyde Collection , Glens Falls , Warren County , New York |
Christ with Arms Crossed is an oil painting by an unknown Dutch painterattributed to Rembrandt van Rijn until the 1960s. The work isexecuted in portrait format on canvas and was painted around 1659. The owner, The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls , Warren County , New York , describes the painting as an original by Rembrandt to this day.
description
The painting shows the life-size half-length figure of a young man with arms crossed in front of his torso, the left arm placed over the right. The man is painted half-left and looks at the viewer with his head slightly tilted. He is bareheaded and his dark brown hair, parted in the middle, falls in waves to over his shoulders, he wears a light full beard. The figure is dressed in a dirty red robe and has thrown a dark cloak over his left shoulder. The figure's face is illuminated by light falling from above. The chest and the visible hand are highlighted in different shades by indirect light against the dark, amorphous background.
The painting is neither signed nor dated. It has the format 109.2 × 90.2 cm and is painted with oil paint on canvas.
reception
The Christ portrait has been known since the early 18th century and was undisputedly considered an authentic work of Rembrandt until the second half of the 20th century. In 1883 Wilhelm Bode added it with the number 352 to his list of Rembrandt's works. In his catalog raisonné published in 1900, the picture is contained in the sixth volume with the number 415. This was also followed by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot , who performed the painting with the number 162. In 1935 it was included in his catalog raisonné of Rembrandt's paintings by the art historian Abraham Bredius with the number 628. Kurt Bauch performed the painting in 1966 with the number 229. Horst Gerson included the picture in his own catalog in 1968 with the number 368 and took over the number 628 in his 1969 adaptation of the new edition of Bredius' directory.
In 1956, the Austrian art historian Otto Benesch called the Christ with Crossed Arms the “most monumental painting of its kind”, based on the secular and religious portraits in Rembrandt's later work. In the same year Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner described it as the "central figure" of an assumed series of four evangelist portraits , to which he counted the apostle Matthew with the angel in the Louvre . It is now certain that Matthew is part of a cycle of six apostle portraits .
In 1965, the American art historian Seymour Slive published an essay on a small-sized Christ head that had been in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge , Massachusetts since the previous year . This was the seventh in a series of portraits of Christ all attributed to Rembrandt at the time, which, in the opinion of Slive and many of his colleagues, formed a uniform group. The same young man, a Jew from Rembrandt's neighborhood, served as the model for all these portraits. One of these tronies , now in the Louvre Abu Dhabi , related Slive to the Christ with arms crossed . Slive saw a clear similarity between the two images in the physiognomy and posture of the model and speculated that Rembrandt initially planned the half-length as a larger version of the shoulder piece and, driven by his incredible creative power, depicted a completely new aspect of Christ's personality. Rembrandt was practically unable to copy himself without creating something new. Of the seven head images, only two are currently accepted as works by Rembrandt or one of his students , in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Art historian David de Witt , curator for European art at the Agnes Etherington Art Center , in Kingston , Ontario, Canada, also considered two of the head images to be authentic, the one in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie and one in the Philadelphia Museum of Art . He believes that the two small head images are oil sketches that Rembrandt made in preparation for the great Christ with his arms crossed . In 1969 Horst Gerson called the painting a beautiful interpretation of the ideal image of Christ.
In 1988, Rembrandt connoisseur Gary Schwartz published a critical essay on the imputation and depreciation practice of the Rembrandt Research Project , in which he gave details of the Christ with arms crossed . Shortly before, Schwartz was able to receive photographs of a restoration of the painting carried out in 1958. The footage revealed that at some point the middle section of the canvas had been cut out and replaced. The painting is therefore to a large extent not the work of Rembrandt, but the work of a restorer. In addition, the surface of the painting is in such a poor condition that little can be seen of the original effect. In the catalog raisonnés of Rembrandt by Christian Tümpel ( Rembrandt. Mythos und Methode , 1986), the Rembrandt Research Project ( A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings , 1982–2015) and Volker Manuth ( Rembrandt. All paintings , 2019) the Christ with arms crossed does not appear mentioned more.
Provenance
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The painting was in the collection of the French Cardinal Joseph Fesch , a half-uncle of Napoleon Bonaparte , in the early 19th century . Fesch has built up a collection of supposedly more than 20,000 paintings over more than 40 years. On March 17, 1845, it was auctioned in the Palais Ricci in Rome, after which it was in the possession of an M. de Forcade in Paris. The next owner was the Austro-French art dealer and collector Charles Sedelmeyer , also in Paris, who acquired the painting on April 2, 1873. Only Hofstede de Groot named a Mr. Bamberger in Paris as the following owner, but this could have been confused with one of the many other portraits of Christ attributed to Rembrandt at the time. As early as 1883, Wilhelm Bode indicated the Russian Count Orloff-Davidoff in Saint Petersburg as the owner of the painting . The statement in the catalog raisonnés by Adolf Rosenberg and Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner published around 1900 that the picture was in the possession of the Paris collector Rodolphe Kann is based on an error by the authors.
After the October Revolution , the painting fell to the Soviet state. In 1927 it was in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Like many works of art in the possession of the Soviet Union, the Christ with his arms crossed was sold abroad to procure foreign currency. It was sold in 1933 by the Berlin gallery van Diemen & Co. to the US paper industrialist Louis Hyde. Hyde died the following year, and his widow Charlotte expanded the couple's art collection to three times its size by their death in 1963. As early as 1952, she brought the art collection to an endowment . Three months after Charlotte Hyde's death, her home with the art collection was presented to the public as The Hyde Collection .
Exhibitions (chronological selection)
- Vienna, Austrian Museum for Art and Industry . Exhibition of the Sedelmeyer Collection, 1873
- Paris, Palais du Corps Législatif , 1874
Web links
- Christ with Arms Folded , description of the painting on the Hyde Collection website
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Wilhelm Bode: The complete work of Rembrandt. History, description and heliographic reproduction of all the master's pictures, with a study of his life and his art. Sixth volume . Charles Sedelmeyer, Paris 1901, pp. 62–63, work no. 415, digitized .
- ↑ a b Cornelis Hofstede de Groot : Descriptive and critical list of the works of the most outstanding Dutch painters of the XVII. Century. Sixth volume. Paul Neff, Esslingen and F. Kleinberger, Paris 1915, digitized, Heidelberg University Library , work no.162.
- ↑ Abraham Bredius : Rembrandt. Schilderijen. W. de Haan, Utrecht 1935, digitized version, Heidelberg University Library . German: Rembrandt. Painting. Phaidon-Verlag, Vienna 1935. English: The Paintings of Rembrandt. London 1937, plant no.628.
- ↑ Kurt Bauch : Rembrandt. Painting. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1966, reprint 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-005007-3 , no.229.
- ↑ Abraham Bredius: Rembrandt. The complete edition of the paintings. Third edition. Revised by Horst Gerson. Phaidon, London 1969, ISBN 0-7148-1341-9 , work no.628.
- ^ Horst Gerson: Rembrandt paintings. Meulenhoff International, Amsterdam 1968. German: Rembrandt paintings. Complete works. Vollmer, Wiesbaden 1968, work no.368.
- ^ A b c Gary Schwartz : Connoisseurship: the Penalty of Ahistoricism. In: The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship 1988, Volume 7, No. 3, pp. 261-268, doi: 10.1016 / 0260-4779 (88) 90032-5 .
- ^ Seymour Slive : An Unpublished Head of Christ by Rembrandt . In: The Art Bulletin 1965, Volume 47, Number 4, pp. 407-417, doi: 10.1080 / 00043079.1965.10790777 .
- ^ Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. VI. Rembrandt's Paintings Revisited. A Complete Survey . Springer Science + Business Media, Dordrecht 2015, ISBN 978-94-017-9173-1 , works 217a and 217b Oil study of Christ , pp. 605–609.
- ^ David de Witt : The Bader Collection. Dutch and Flemish paintings . Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada 2008, ISBN 978-1-55339-094-7 , pp. 273-274, footnote 2.
- ^ Wilhelm Bode : Studies on the history of Dutch painting . Vieweg, Braunschweig 1883, p. 603, work no.352, digitized .
- ^ Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner : Rembrandt. Recovered paintings (1910–1922). Second, worked through edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart et al. 1923, p. 124, digitized .
- ↑ Christ with Arms Folded. The Hyde Collection, accessed March 12, 2020 .