PROPERTY FROM THE FAMILY OF EMILE WOLF
Wallerant Vaillant
PORTRAIT OF A MAN
LOT SOLD.
10,625 USD
Details & Cataloguing
Old Master Drawings including the Collection of Professor Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann
|
New York
New York
Wallerant Vaillant
LILLE 1623 - 1677 AMSTERDAM
PORTRAIT OF A MAN
Black and white chalk and stumping on blue paper;
signed and dated, upper right: W Vaillant fecit / 1652
393 by 339 mm; 15½ by 13½ in
Read Condition Report
Read Condition Report
signed and dated, upper right: W Vaillant fecit / 1652
393 by 339 mm; 15½ by 13½ in
Provenance
Emile Wolf, New York,
thence by descent
thence by descent
Catalogue Note
Wallerant Vaillant was a pioneering specialist in striking monochrome portraits. As a printmaker, he was the first to specialise in the dramatic, tonal medium of mezzotint, making various influential technical innovations, and as a draughtsman he developed an original and distinctive technique for drawing monochrome portraits in black and white chalks on blue paper, which in many ways parallels the visual effects of his mezzotints.
Perhaps the high point of his career came when he was commissioned, in 1658, to take the portraits of the dignitaries who gathered in Frankfurt-am-Main, to elect the next Holy Roman Emperor, following the death of Ferdinand III. For a fuller account of Vaillant's achievements as a portraitist, and his Frankfurt portraits of 1658, see William W. Robinson's recent entry on the drawing from the series, the portrait of Johann Philipp von Schönborn, Archbishop of Mainz, now in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums.1
This portrait of an unidentified sitter, though executed several years before the artist's seminal journey to Frankfurt, shares many visual qualities with the important series of drawings that he made there, qualities that are particularly evident thanks to the sheet's excellent state of preservation.
1. W.W. Robinson, with contributions from Susan Anderson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt. Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass., 2016, pp. 287-9, no. 86
Suggested Lots
Old Master Drawings including the Collection of Professor Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann
|
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