Old Masters Day Sale
Old Masters Day Sale
Property from a Private Collection
Attributed to Jan Stephan van Calcar
Portrait of a gentleman, three-quarter length, wearing a black cap, a black-slashed singlet over a red shirt, holding a sword and a dagger, standing before a green curtain
Lot Closed
July 8, 01:21 PM GMT
Estimate
60,000 - 80,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Property from a Private Collection
Attributed to Jan Stephan van Calcar
Cleves circa 1499 – 1546 Naples
Portrait of a gentleman, three-quarter length, wearing a black cap, a black-slashed singlet over a red shirt, holding a sword and a dagger, standing before a green curtain
with an old inscription on the reverse: Palma il Vecchio
oil on panel
unframed: 108.8 x 75.1 cm.; 42⅞ x 29⅝ in.
framed: 129.5 x 96.6 cm.; 51 x 38 in.
By descent to his son, Sir George Lindsay Holford, K.C.V.O., C.I.E., C.B.E., C.V.O. (1860-1926), Westonbirt, Gloucestershire;
His posthumous sale, London, Christie's, 15 July 1927, lot 31 (as Giovanni da Calcar), for 2,300 Guineas to Buttery;
Horace Ayherst Buttery (1902-62);
His posthumous sale, London, Christie's, 24 May 1963, lot 63;
Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 5 July 1991, lot 83 (as Attributed to Calcar);
With Colnaghi, New York, 1994;
Private collection, Milan;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 10 December 2009, lot 145 (as Attributed to Calcar), for £65,000, where acquired.
Since 1927, when it was sold from the collection of Sir George Lindsay Holford, this striking portrait has been attributed to the itinerant Netherlandish painter Jan Stephan van Calcar. The artist learnt his trade in Venice where he was a pupil of Titian from 1536-37, but the only identifiable works from this period are the influential woodcut illustrations in the anatomical treatise De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius. Only one signed oil painting exists, the portrait of an unknown man in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. 79), the date of which is only partly legible but which is considered to date from the 1540s.1
NOTE ON PROVENANCE
This portrait was part of the celebrated collection of Sir Robert Stayner Holford (1808-92), although it left the family collection at his son's posthumous sale in 1927. Sir Robert inherited a huge fortune in 1838 which allowed him to collect on a grand scale. He acquired a great deal of his collection from William Buchanan, William Blundell Spence and at the sale of the Aylesford Collection, but he also travelled widely throughout Europe picking up pictures wherever he went. Holford eventually housed his collection at Westonbirt in Gloucestershire, which he had designed in the Elizabethan style by Lewis Vulliamy (1791-1871) and there, in addition to a collection that Waagen considered second only to that of the Marquess of Hertford, although superior in breadth and taste, he planted one of the finest arboretums in England, which survives to this day.