Sir Anthony van Dyck

Sir Francis Cook, 1st Bt. (1817-1901), Doughty House, Richmond, by 1869;
Thence by descent and sold ("The Trustees of the Cook Collection") London, Christie's, 2 December 1983, lot 121.

Manchester, City Art Gallery (on loan), circa 1960-65;
Washington, National Gallery, Anthony van Dyck, 1990-1991, no. 89;
New Orleans 1997, no. 16;
Baltimore 1999, no. 15.

Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at Doughty House, Richmond. (Belonging to Sir Frederick Cook, Bart., Visconde de Monserrate) London 1907 & 1914, p. 19, cat. no. 43, in The Long Gallery;
E. Schaeffer, Van Dyck: des Meisters Gemälde, Klassiker der Kunst, vol. 13, Stuttgart and Leipzig 1909, p. 22, cat. no. 22;
W. von Bode, Great Masters of Dutch and Flemish painting, London 1909, p. 37;
J.O. Kronig, A Catalogue of the Paintings at Doughty House, Richmond, & Elsewhere in the Collection of Sir Frederick Cook, Bt., Visconde de Monserrate, ed. by Herbert Cook, vol. 2, London 1914: Dutch and Flemish Schools, cat. no. 248, reproduced, as in The Long Gallery;
G. Glück, Van Dyck, des Meisters Gemälde, Klassiker der Kunst, vol. 13, Stuttgart and Berlin 1931, 2nd rev. ed., pp. 72, 527, reproduced;
Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at Doughty House, Richmond, Surrey, in the Collection of Sir Herbert Cook, Bart., London 1932, p. 35, cat. no. 248 (in The Long Gallery as "The Magdalen");
F. van den Wijngaert, Antoon van Dyck, Antwerp 1943, p. 30, reproduced, fig. 5;
E. Larsen, L'Opera completa di Van Dyck, 1613-1626, Milan 1980, cat. no. 42, reproduced (where dated to circa 1615-16);
A. McNairn (ed.), The Young van Dyck, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa 1980, p. 147;
E. Larsen, The Paintings of Anthony van Dyck, Luca 1988, vol. II, cat. no. 227, reproduced, and under cat. no. 28;
A.K. Wheelock, S. Barnes, J. Held (eds.), Anthony van Dyck, exhibition catalogue, Washington 1990-1991, cat. no. 89, pp. 327, 347, reproduced;
New Orleans 1997, p. 39-41, cat. no. 16;
Baltimore 1999, pp. 38-41, cat. no. 15;
S. Barnes, N. de Poorter et al, Van Dyck:  A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2004,  p. 59, cat. no. I. 42, reproduced;
A. Vergara and F. Lammertse (eds.), The Young Van Dyck, exhibition catalogue, Madrid 2012, p. 199, cat. no. 8, pp. 116-117, reproduced in color. 

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 work on paper mounted onto panel has been recently restored and is in beautiful condition. There is no reason why it should not be hung in its current state. It is obviously quite quickly painted, and the arm on the right side and the lower part of the picture are intentionally very unresolved and are undamaged. The face seems to be more clearly defined. Under ultraviolet light, one can see a few dots of retouching around the edges and in a few spots in the hair. There are no retouches in the neck and arm except on the right edge. In the face itself, there are only retouches beneath the jaw by the hairline.
"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."

Van Dyck’s early oil sketches are the most immediate and inventive records of the young artist’s creative genius. This freely painted study on paper was likely executed circa 1617-18, when van Dyck was merely eighteen years old and a new apprentice in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens.

The picture has traditionally been understood as a study depicting The Penitent Magdalene. The sitter, who gazes upwards with her head resting in her hand as her hair falls over her shoulders, adheres to the traditional iconographic traditions of the Magdalene imagery, for example as seen in a large full-length, and similarly early Penitent Magdalene, in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. 103). That female figure displays an almost identical gaze and upward head tilt to the present subject.¹ Despite the clear connections with traditional Magdalene depictions, however, the sketch has never been linked with a specific, larger finished painting of that subject. This is not entirely surprising given the versatile nature of the studies produced in the Rubens studio. The sitter may have been a studio model, whose likeness would have been recorded in various figure studies, and later incorporated into other multi-figure compositions. Such a practice would have been well known to van Dyck given its widespread use in Rubens' studio. The notion of creating, keeping, and re-using studio studies made from life was first developed by Frans Floris in the Southern Netherlands, and later embraced by Van Dyck’s Flemish contemporaries, in particular Rubens and Jacob Jordaens. These were often recycled in a sense, or used on numerous occasions, and seem to have functioned in certain cases as figure types which could be used repeatedly. 

Such is the case with the present sketch, whose subject in one sense works as a Magdalane "type", but also appears in quite startlingly different subjects. Van Dyck rather seamlessly incorporates this specific figure into an entirely different, and rather diametrically opposed subject, that of the Drunken Silenus (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen). By re-imagining the figure in this large scale mythological scene (which should be dated to after the present sketch), van Dyck immediately imbues the sitter with an entirely new set of character traits. What in one sense is a pensive, quiet depiction of a religious figure, serves in another sense as a sensual and outwardly seductive temptress. Such malleability in its functionality lend credence to the argument that the sketch may never have been originally intended as a Magdalene at all, but more generally an emotional and gripping depiction of a woman midway through an engaging thought process, religious or seductive as it may have been.

The painting may be identical with a picture listed in the inventory of Jan-Baptista Anthonie, who is recorded as owning two “Magdalene tronies”, both laid on panel, “Een geschetste Magdalenatronie geplacht op’t pinneel van Van Dijck”.²

Given this sketch’s immediacy and confident handling it is unsurprising that a number of contemporary and later copies are extant. The best of these was formerly in the Stroefer collection (oil on panel, sold, Munich 28 October 1937, lot 35).

We are grateful to John Somerville, Keeper of the Cook Collection Archive, for his help in cataloguing this lot.

1. José Juan Pérez Preciado suggests that this picture was not intended to be a study for the Rijksmuseum Magdalene, but rather that this study was intended to serve as a model by which to capture a specific pose or set of gestures (see Literature, A. Vergara and F. Lammertse (eds.) 2012, p. 116)

2. Translation: “A sketched Magdalene tronie pasted onto panel by Van Dyck." See Barnes et. al. 2004, under cat. no. I.41.