- 35
Herri met de Bles
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
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
Literature
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
"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
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.