Lot 35
  • 35

Herri met de Bles

Estimate
200,000 - 300,000 GBP
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Description

  • Herri met de Bles
  • Extensive coastal landscape with the Calling of Saint Peter
  • signed on the rocky bluff with the artist's device of an owl, and inscribed on an old label affixed to the reverse: Del Civetta
  • oil on oak panel  
     

Provenance

Heinz Kisters (1912–1977), Kreuzlingen, Switzerland;

By whom sold to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967);

By descent to Adenauer's heirs, by whom sold back to Heinz Kisters;

His sale, ('Collection formed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the Property of Heinz Kisters’), London, Christie’s, 26 June 1970, lot 33, where unsold;

Thence by inheritance.

Exhibited

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, and Münster, Landesmuseum für Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte, Sammlung Heinz KistersAltdeutsche und Altniederländische Malerei, 25 June – 15 September and 6 October – 17 November 1963, no. 61.

Literature

K. Löcher, 'Berichte Nürnberg', in Pantheon, 6/12, 1963, p. 398;

Sammlung Heinz Kisters, Altdeutsche und Altniederländische Malerei, Nuremberg 1963, no. 61, reproduced, plate 100;

W. Weemans, Herri Met de Bles : Les ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d'Erasme, Paris 2013, pp. 227–41, reproduced figs 152–59.

Condition

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Herri Met de Bles. Landscape with the Calling of St Peter. Signed. This painting is on a perfectly flat, thin, slightly bevelled, oak panel. The entire lower landscape itself has been beautifully preserved in every minute detail. Skies have always tended to suffer over time, and there seems here to have been some wear but also two short vertical signs of pressure, as though something had been leant against the uppermost part of the painting, one vertical about 6cms long in the upper left of the sky and another rather briefer in the upper right sky. These have slightly cracked and marked the surface, and have retouching visible under ultra violet light. The original veil of blue glazing in the right sky has also been worn exposing the quite warm underlying base tone of the sky. This is also apparent in the sky on the left and there are scattered retouchings across the sky and along the edges. There is also some slightly raised craquelure in this upper left area in the distant hillside and the sky. Within the beautifully intact lower landscape there are just a very few little darkened old retouchings, for instance on the distant hillside near the water just beyond the rocky central bluff, with a little touch perhaps on the beach near the apostles cooking fish, and along occasional edges. However the minute detail remains startlingly intact and supremely beautiful throughout. 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

After the death of Joachim Patinir in 1524 Herri Met de Bles became the most celebrated exponent of the new genre of landscape painting in the southern Netherlands. His paintings typically combined panoramic viewpoints in the World Landscape style with an abundance of detail and lively observation, and were prized far and wide, notably by the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. The present panel combines all of the elements that made him famous. The subject here is taken from the Gospel of Saint John, XXI, 6–10; the figures enacting it are typically set in an immense vista, dwarfed by the towering, fantastical bluffs and buildings above and beyond them. In the foreground on the edge of Lake Galilee, Christ appears to his disciples for the third time following his resurrection. Saint Peter is seen trying to reach Him across the waves, while to the right the figures appear again in a slightly later episode gathering to grill the fish they have just miraculously caught. The remarkable eagle-shaped overhang in the rocks may be intended as a symbol of the Evangelist and thus refers to de Bles’s biblical source. Upon it may be spied a small owl sitting in a cleft, a pun on the painter’s nickname (civetta in Italian) and his frequent form of signature.

 

The figures of Jesus, Peter and the other disciples in their boat in the foreground of the composition derive from a drawing depicting Christ's calling to Saint Peter ascribed to Herri Met de Bles, one of a series of drawings in the so-called 'Antwerp Sketchbook' today in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, Staatliche Museen (fig. 1).1 Bles's authorship of the drawings has been contested, but five relate directly to panels by him, and it is now thought that they are the work of a hand or hands in his circle or workshop. The drawing seems to have been the basis for a group of seven panel paintings of this subject, of which the present panel appears unquestionably to be the finest. These fall into three groups. The first, in which the figures are set below a towering rocky crag with a coastal landscape receding to the left and fields and hills rising to the right, includes this panel, together with a slightly larger version, seemingly from Bles’s workshop or following.2 A second design, known in two versions, neither autograph, sets the figures to the left of a barren crag with the sea beyond and fields to the right, and include the little water mill also found on the extreme right of the present picture.3 A third group of three panels, which show the same figures before a coastal town with moored shipping, are closer in overall design to the drawing itself, but again none appears to be of autograph quality.4 The subject of the Calling of Saint Peter was evidently a favourite of Met de Bles or his patrons, and roughly a dozen paintings on this theme are recorded. Other panels of broadly similar design to the present work, but with slightly different figures, were in the Coray-Stoop collection, sold Fischer, Lucerne 25 July 1925, lot 35, and that formerly with Goudstikker in Amsterdam in 1926, and now in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.

   

1. Inv. nr. 79 C 2, fol. 28r. See N.E. Muller, 'Technical analysis of the Princeton Road to Calvary', and H. Bevers, 'The Antwerp Sketchbook of the Bles workshop in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett', in N.E. Muller, B. Rosasco and J.H. Marrow, Herri Met de Bles. Studies and explorations of the World Landscape tradition, Princeton 1998, pp. 24–26 and 39–48, reproduced fig. 17

2. Panel, 40 x 58 cm. Sold Vienna, Dorotheum, 3 April 1997, lot 159 (as attributed to Cornelis Massys).

3. Sold London, Sotheby’s, 22 April 2004, lot 2, and Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, inv. 2475.

4. Sold London, Sotheby’s, 27 April 2006, lot 6; formerly with Galerie Bruno Meissner, Zurich, and in the Stichting P. and N. de Boer, Amsterdam, in which the figure of Saint Peter is omitted.