Juan van der Hamen y León

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This beautiful painting is painted on canvas and mounted onto panel but this was certainly not done recently and although the canvas could be removed from the panel, this is not necessarily recommended. The paint layer is extremely dirty and dull, and if it were to be cleaned and varnished, this beautifully preserved work would respond immediately. There are hardly any losses that we are aware of and although retouches may be required around the edges, the condition is clearly lovely.
"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."

The present still life is a beautifully preserved and recently discovered addition to the oeuvre of Juan van der Hamen y Leon.¹ Though apparently unrecorded, it may be compared to a small but well documented group of pictures which were listed in the 1631 post-mortem inventory and appraisal of Van der Hamen's studio. That inventory lists many small paintings of flowers and fruit, as well as landscapes, in unusual formats – square, octagonal, and circular – as distinguished from others described as garlands (usually ovals on a rectangular support) with sacred or historical scenes in the center. For example, number 30 in the studio appraisal catalogues "Diez y siete pajarillos con sus frutas en circulo con sus molduras negras (17 small, circular pictures of birds with their fruits, in black frames)."² Additionally, number 38 in the artist's studio records flower paintings of a similar type: "Dos flores bosquejadas en circulo con sus molduras (two circular flower paintings, sketched, with their frames)."³  Though the present work can not be securely linked with any of these listed inventory pictures, it is clear that van der Hamen executed numerous pictures in this format.

In its minute rendering of detail and careful study of individual flowers, van der Hamen here demonstrates his skill as the artist who primarily introduced many of the developments which would become widespread practice in Spanish still-life painting. Certainly he did more than any artist to develop the taste for flower paintings, which earned him numerous commissions and the repeated praise of the great poet Lope de Vega, a close personal friend.⁴ The interest in collecting naturalistic images of flowers, such as this painting, paralleled the extraordinary flourishing of interest in horticulture and gardens among the aristocracy at the court of Madrid in the first third of the seventeenth century.

All of the flowers depicted here can be found in other paintings by Van der Hamen. Most prominent among them, perhaps, is the full-blown pink Rosa Centiflora. Similar renditions of this opulent blossom can be found in the artist's well-known Offering to Flora (Museo del Prado, inv. no. P02877), of 1627, as well as the extrodinary Still Life with Artichokes, Cherries, and a Vase of Flowers (Museo del Prado, inv. no. P07907), also of 1627. The white Alba rose, viewed side-on, is similar to depictions of the same flower in a pair of small flower paintings on copper, which are plausibly attributed to Van der Hamen in a New York private collection.⁵ Similar roses can be found in the Wreath of Flowers with the Vision of Saint Anthony, in the Meadows Museum, where the modeling of the white petals with decisive brush strokes of thick white paint bears marked similarities with the same flower here. In the companion piece to the Saint Anthony, one can see an orange blossom at the lower left that is again extremely similar to the one shown here.

We are grateful to William Jordan for proposing the attribution to van der Hamen, based on photographs, which he has since confirmed from first hand inspection, and for his assistance in the cataloguing of this picture.

 

1.  The picture was painted on canvas and then adhered to a circular walnut panel; there is no evident cusping as a result of its having been tacked to a stretcher. This has resulted in the unusually good state of preservation of the paint texture, rendering minute details easily visible.
2.  W.B. Jordan, Juan van der Hamen y Leon, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1967, vol. II, p. 216.
3. Jordan 1967, op. cit., vol. II, p. 217.
4. W.B. Jordan, Juan van der Hamen and the Court of Madrid, exhibition catalogue, Madrid and Dallas 2005-6; see also: Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, "Ars vs. Natura: Lope de Vega y Juan van der Hamen y León,"  pp. 27-43.
5.  Jordan 2005, p. 247, cat. nos. 49 and 50.