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Old Master Paintings

Start Your Old Masters Collection for Less Than £1,500

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The second edition of the online-only Old Master Copies auction will feature a vast range of paintings by accomplished followers and students of some of the greatest old master painters. With attractive price points and works that showcase diverse talent from across Europe it is the perfect opportunity to start your own collection of Old Masters. The sale will be open for bidding from 5-13 September 2018. Click above to view a selection of works from the sale with estimates under £1,000.

Old Master Copies Online
Online | 5-13 September 2018

Start Your Old Masters Collection for Less Than £1,500

  • After Nicolas Lancret, A femme avare. Estimate £800–1,200.
    We can tell that the 19th-century artist who painted this picture was copying a print after Lancret’s 18th-century prototype, because the composition has been reversed (as happens in the printmaking process). The scene represents a ballad from 1666 by Jean de la Fontaine: 'A femme avare, galant escroc' ('the lover for a stingy woman is a swindler'), itself based on a 13th-century short story by the great Italian poet and Humanist, Giovanni Boccaccio.
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  • Follower of Sir Anthony van Dyck, The Adoration of the Shepherds. Estimate £300–500.
    This is most probably a later copy after an as yet unidentified work by Sir Anthony van Dyck. During the course of his career Van Dyck painted various compositions in monochrome – usually in grey or brown, with white to articulate highlights and modelling. Although they are often classed together under the rubric of ‘sketches’, his use of monochrome oils is incredibly sophisticated, suggesting forms and atmosphere with the slightest of strokes. It is this spirit that the anonymous artist of this painting has endeavoured to capture here.
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  • After Nicolaes Maes, Old woman spinning. Estimate £500–700.
    This is a later copy after a painting by Nicolaes Maes today in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. It is a quiet vignette of daily life in 17th-century Holland, where paintings of ‘genre’ scenes such as these saw enormous popularity at the time. The woman’s activity should not necessarily be taken at face value, however – most Dutch genre paintings not only reflect the everyday, but also convey moralistic messages, in this case perhaps a model of domestic virtue. Maes, a pupil of Rembrandt, had a particular fascination for depicting (particularly older) women engaged in such tasks.
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  • After Caravaggio, Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy. Estimate £1,000–1,500.
    Caravaggio is one of art history’s most famous and intriguing personalities. The lure of his sensational career and the accounts of his misdemeanours is matched only by the admiration for the paintings that he produced, the impact of which was felt not only by an extraordinary number of his contemporaries, but generations of artists to follow. This copy is an exemplar of the way in which Caravaggio stripped subjects down to the essence of emotion – in this case religious ecstasy – conveyed not through attributes and symbols, but through the contrast between light and dark, the use of colour, and an intensity of human expression.
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  • Flemish School, 17th century, Madonna and Child with Saint Joseph and Saint Francis. Estimate £1,000–1,500.
    While a direct prototype for the composition has so far proved elusive, the author of this work was clearly directly inspired by the leading artists based in Antwerp in the first decades of the 17th century – Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony van Dyck. It is difficult to over-exaggerate the extent of these artists’ pervasive and far-reaching influence. This composition is executed in the spirit of the oil sketches produced by both painters, with dynamic folds of drapery and the forceful devotional expression of Saint Francis’ outstretched hand.
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  • After Gerrit Dou, An old woman reading. Estimate £1,000–1,500.
    This is a later copy after a painting of even smaller dimensions (12.5 x 9 cm.) by the 17th-century Dutch artist Gerrit Dou, today in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. The subject of an old woman reading was popular with Dou and several of his contemporaries, namely Rembrandt, who may be said to have started the craze for this subject matter. Some of Rembrandt’s paintings have been identified as portraits of his mother, and the same has been said of the original of this work. Just as in Dou’s painting, the copyist here has portrayed the model in merciless detail, her wrinkled skin and toothless mouth depicted without flattery. Dou was famed for this fine, meticulous way of painting.
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  • After Hendrik Goltzius, Spring. Estimate £200–300.
    Interestingly, the artist who painted this has used their own invention in choosing the colours for the composition since the original design, by the 16th-century Dutch artist Hendrik Goltzius, was originally black and white – drawn by Goltzius and then engraved by several artists of successive generations. The scene depicts an Allegory of Spring - a girl and a boy study a bird’s nest containing chicks, with a kid goat and a young deer beside them.
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  • After Carlo Dolci, Mary Magdalen. Estimate £200–300.
    Unlike many old master copies, thanks to an inscription on the reverse, we know who painted this work – a 19th-century Canadian artist, Antoine-Sébastien Falardeau, who moved from Quebec to Florence in 1846 to continue his artistic training. He was above all a copyist, and Dolci was one of his favourite models. Falardeau's fellow artist in Florence, Napoléon Bourassa, wrote in 1853: 'Falardeau is doing well in Florence ... I believe that within ten years he will succeed in duplicating the contents of the galleries in Florence.'
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  • After Albrecht Dürer
    Portrait of a man. Estimate £1,000–1,500.
    &
    Portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher. Estimate £1,000–1,500.
    These copies must have been painted by the same hand, probably as part of an initiative to reproduce some of the most famous works from Europe’s leading galleries – the original portraits hang in the Museo del Prado, Madrid and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, respectively. Albrecht Dürer was the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance, and these portraits are two of his most penetrating likenesses – the copyist who painted these small-scale works on copper was clearly attracted to their immediacy and frankness. We know that Dürer was friends with Holzschuher – a member of one of the artist’s native Nuremberg’s most influential families – and his gaze engages the viewer directly. The identity of the other man remains unknown, but Dürer’s distinctive characterisation of the man’s set, determined expression – minutely reproduced here – allows us to imagine this 16th-century personality as if he were alive today.
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