Lot 3
  • 3

Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Elder

Estimate
25,000 - 35,000 GBP
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Description

  • Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Elder
  • the holy family, the flight into egypt beyond
  • oil on oak panel

Provenance

Acquired by the Conde de Casa Rojas during the early part of the 20th century;
Thence by family descent.

Condition

"The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has been slightly thinned and cradled earlier in the last century. There is a single joint slightly to the right of centre, which was reglued and retouched. The upper left side of the painting does have some little raised flakes, but there is no evident movement anywhere else. The fine rich paint surface is beautifully unworn, with occasional small old retouchings that have discoloured. The quite rough retouching down the joint is the most disturbing and clearly overlaps original paint. Elsewhere there are just a few small retouched flakes on the upper legs of the Child and in His lower outstretched hand, one or two in Joseph's beard and occasionally on his red drapery to the right. One brief crack is retouched in the lower curve of the cheek of the Child, and a slanting scratch touched out along the jawline of the Madonna. The arm of the putto above and in his outer leg there are small retouchings with another in the background just above his arm. There are a few gratuitous touches at the waist of St Joseph on the flight into Egypt in the distance and on the bank nearby. In the tree above a diagonal line of darkened retouching runs up into the background across the wing of the putto. The top and base edges are messy with dark old varnish and retouched old scuffs, while the side edges are good. The corner of the table near the base on the right has a thickened old retouching with a wider patch by the ledge near the lower left edge. The robe of the Madonna is fine apart from a patch of retouching on the shoulder with a diagonal scratch in the background above, and an occasional minor retouching lower down. There is also some light strengthening in the hip of the Child. Although these rather clumsy little incidental old retouchings are distracting, fundamentally the paint is healthy and unleached; above all it is unworn. There is a fine craquelure and the modelling is rich and unbroken, for instance in the head of St. Joseph, the Madonna's face or the detailed personality of the putto. Even the distant flight into Egypt has intact flowing brushwork intact. This report was not done under laboratory conditions."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Catalogue Note

This well-preserved panel was unknown both to Georges Marlier, when compiling his catalogue raisonnĂ© of Pieter Coecke's work in 1966, and to subsequent scholars, and is therefore a fine addition to the master's oeuvre. The composition exists in several known variants, and perhaps the best known of these is reproduced by Marlier from the Joly collection, Bruges.1 Broadly speaking, the majority of known variants follow the overall design of the Joly picture, in which Joseph leans in through the window with his left hand open, and a river landscape punctuated by two houses and a tall tree in leaf recede behind him. Of the Joly figural type the only major variation in the background landscape occurs in a panel recorded by Marlier as in the collection of Arthur De Heuvel, Brussels, in which the protagonists sit or stand before a classical architectural setting.2 The present work is one of two works of a second compositional type, in which Joseph's left hand clasps a fruit and he stands before a landscape with a Flight into Egypt; the other variant was sold in Budapest in 1925.3


1.  G. Marlier, La Renaissance Flamande. Pierre Coeck d'Alost, Brussels 1966, pp.237-240, reproduced fig. 179. Another version of this type sold Brussels, Galerie Elisabeth, 4 April 1939, lot 115 as "Gossaert".
2.  Idem, reproduced p. 241, fig. 180.
3.  Sold Budapest, Ernst Museum, 23 November 1925, lot 527, as 'Suiveur de Bernard van Orley"; see Marlier, p. 240, no. 8.