John Hamilton

By tradition in the collection of the Princely Family of Liechtenstein;
Given to Baron Salomon Mayer von Rothschild, 1822, and hung in Schilldersdorf, Moravia, before 1843;
Thence by descent to Baron Alphonse Mayer von Rothschild, Vienna (inv. no. AR918) (listed in the Rothschild 1938 inventory in Vienna as after Rubens);
Confiscated from the above in 1938 by the Nazi authorities and restituted to the Rothschild family, 1947;
With N. Coburg;
Baron Jungenfeld;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 6 December 1989, lot 7;
There acquired by Carlton Hobbs;
William Rondina, New York;
By whom sold, New York, Sotheby's, 26 May 2016, lot 43;
Where acquired. 

F. Kunth, Die Rothschild'schen: Gemäldesammlungen in Wien, Vienna 2006, pp. 212-213 (as after Rubens).

When offered in 1989, this lot was said to have been signed and dated: J. B. A. George de Hamilton Pinx 1753.  This signature suggests an attribution to John Hamilton, an artist active in Vienna in the mid-18^th century.  The son of Ferdinand Philipp von Hamilton (1664-1750), John Hamilton was from a family of court painters who specialized in still-life and animal scenes and worked in many prominent European courts, including that of Charles V and the House of Liechtenstein.  The design relates to a pair of paintings, possibly pendants, executed by Peter Paul Rubens in circa 1615.  The lion and the tiger here are based on details from Neptune and Amphitrite, a painting that once formed part of the Schönborn collection in Vienna that was sold in 1881 to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin and later destroyed during World War II.