Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
MOST of the debates conducted in these pages are serial in form: arguments put forward in one issue are countered some months, or even (for the pace of scholarship is not always swift) some years later. Readers may there-fore be surprised to find that this issue of the Magazine, unusually, presents two radically opposed articles on the same subject. Four large cartoons (Figs 1, 6, 17 and 21) were acquired just over three years ago, reportedly for over one million pounds, by the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. The cartoons were clearly intended as guides for weaving tapestries and are thus reversed, as the left handshake in the Meeting of the two generals (Fig. 1) and the placing of the sword in the left hand in the Combat (Fig.21) immediately demonstrate. They are Flemish seventeenth-century work, probably from the years around 1630. One of them quotes fairly directly from a Raphael tapestry cartoon in the V. & A. (Figs 17 and 20) and three of them bear an obvious, if unclear, relationship to oil sketches by Rubens (Figs 1, 2 and 3; 6 and 9; 17 and 18). No related tapestries, however, are recorded and there is no known documentary reference to the cartoons before this century. Beyond that, almost everything about them is matter for dispute.
LONG a topic of private conversation among Rubens scholars, the authorship of four cartoons for tapestry which the National Museum of Wales acquired in 1979 (Figs 1, 6, 17 and 21) has recently been much debated in newspapers and even on television. They were accepted as Rubens's own work at the time of the purchase, supported by a statement by Professor Michael Jaffé - quoted in the only publication hitherto devoted to the works - to the effect that 'they are their own documents, the brilliance of their execution is self-evident, and nothing can be seen in them which is not by Rubens's own hand'. Yet many scholars have begun to question this attribution and I am grateful to the editor of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE for the opportunity to present the case against them, though many of my colleagues could surely have done as well, if not better.
IN 1979 the National Museum of Wales acquired four full-scale cartoons for tapestry, prepared in the traditional way by painting in gouache on montages of roughly rectangular sheets of paper (Figs 1, 6, 17 and 21). These cartoons were such as would have been prepared for the use of low-warp weavers. Virtually intact, however, they show no sign of having been cut into vertical strips, as they would have needed to be, had they been so used. Both pictorial style and content manifest a close connection with Rubens about 1630. Their survival, in remarkably good condition for such fragile material more than three centuries old, is due partly to their not having been through the hands of weavers, partly to their having, at least from the early nineteenth century, been mounted on canvas and stretched so that they might be displayed on a wall. The old stretchers, constructed of spruce and Lombardy poplar, were in the case of two cartoons marked 'di Rubens'; and these stretchers were presumably made for a marchese Stampa, or for some previous owner in North Italy.
TWO representations of St Jerome's vision of the Trinity are known to me, both Florentine: a predella panel (Fig.27) from Francesco d'Antonio's Rinieri altarpiece (c.1430), re-assembled now in the new Musée du Petit Palais in Avignon, and Andrea del Castagno's fresco (1454-55) in the Corboli chapel of SS. Annunziata (Fig.26). The subject, extremely rare in the iconography of St Jerome, has puzzled commentators.
COURBET'S early years in Paris are among the least well documented of the artist's life. Between his arrival in the capital on the pretext of studying law in '1840 and the outbreak of the February Revolution in 1848, evidence as to his professional and personal contacts is extremely scanty. In particular, the evolution of the artist's political convictions has remained almost impossible to chart. Courbet's own remarks on this subject are vague and contradictory, and there has been a tendency among historians to regard certain ex post facto statements with caution. In a short autobiographical sketch sent to Victor Frond in 1866 Courbet - writing in the third person - says of this period.
THE early work of Jean-Louis Forain has been little studied by modern scholars, despite the artist's inclusion in four of the Impressionist exhibitions. In the last few years substantial efforts have been made to correct this situation, with a retrospective exhibition and the publication of a monograph. Both these contributions unavoidably omitted an important painting that has recently come to light after almost a century of obscurity. This painting (Fig.30) reappeared at auction as Le Noctambule although, as we shall see, its original title was Place de la Concorde. Executed in 1884, it is of particular interest because it was shown in 1886 at the final Impressionist exhibition, and because the treatment of its subject suggests a particular attitude to a theme then current in the contemporary iconography of urban life.
FOLLOWING a final, incapacitating attack of madness in August 1889, John Ruskin lived in seclusion at Brantwood, his estate in Lancashire, until his death on 20th January 1900. After this collapse, Ruskin published nothing and took pen in hand only rarely. The letter of 22nd December 1894 to Clarence G. Hoag, published here for the first time (see Appendix), is one of only four known letters that he wrote after 1889. By far the longest of these, it offers a rare glimpse into Ruskin's feelings during the long silence of his final years. Now in the Charles Roberts Collection of the Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pennsylvania, the letter was donated by Clarence G. Hoag in 1949.
