Cleveland Museum of Art
Gold Box (1728–29), Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier
Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, the Turin-born French craftsman who in 1724 became Master Goldsmith at the court of Louis XV and was appointed official designer for the king’s bedchamber and cabinet at Versailles a few years later. Meissonnier designed objects for European nobles, from clocks to chairs, picture frames to entire rooms, all characterised by extravagant rococo decoration. Many of his pieces were melted down or lost during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and only five objects definitively attributed to him made from precious metals are extant. The Cleveland Museum of Art has acquired one of those: a gold snuffbox decorated with lapis lazuli, bought at a private sale facilitated by Christie’s. The snuffbox was made for the dowager Queen of Spain, Maria Anna of Neuburg, and bears her coat of arms alongside that of her late husband, Charles II. It was stolen by the Nazis from the Parisian collector David David-Weill, but was recovered and returned to him after the end of the Second World War. The snuffbox will be one of the highlights of the exhibition ‘Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier: Rococo Goldsmith in Focus’, which opens at the museum in October.
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Sir Reginald Mohun and Dorothy Mohun (née Chudleigh) (c. 1602), unknown artist
The Yale Center for British Art has acquired a full-length portrait of Sir Reginald Mohun, Cornish aristocrat and MP, and his third wife, Dorothy Chudleigh, which was painted to celebrate their marriage in 1502. The work, produced by an unknown artist, may look like a typical double portrait from the Tudor period, but it is thought to be the first time in British art history that a husband and wife were depicted together at full length. If the faces of the newlyweds give little away in terms of expression, the artist has clearly chosen to focus our attention on the couple’s stance – arms interlinked – and their clothing, which includes details such as a circular pendant worn by Dorothy that seems to be made from porphyry, a stone that has long symbolised enduring love.
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
Large preliminary sketch for Resurrection (1915/16), Max Beckmann
When the First World War broke out Max Beckmann volunteered as an orderly, serving in France and Belgium. In 1916 he suffered a severe nervous breakdown and was discharged the following year, by which time his art had become gloomier, characterised by distorted figures, darker palettes and more distressing subject matter. Perhaps the most nightmarish work he ever produced – and the largest in scale – is Resurrection, a massive, hellish vision of tangled bodies that he probably began mapping out while serving in Strasbourg in 1915 and continued to work on after his breakdown. Since 1964 the painting has been in the collection of the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, which has now acquired a study for the painting – thought to be his final preparatory drawing before he put brush to canvas. With the paper divided into grids, the drawing allows us to see how Beckmann used precise geometric framing to create his expression of organised chaos. The work is now on display in the museum’s Beckmann room, opposite the finished painting.
Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse
Still life with a bouquet of pink and white peonies in a glass vase, and fruit and flowers on a ledge (first half of 17th century), Bernardo Strozzi; Barber Shop (second half of 17th century), Master of the Blue Jeans
The Fondation Bemberg in Toulouse, the pink-bricked home of the collection of the late Georges Bemberg, has announced its acquisition of two 17th-century works from Galerie Canesso at TEFAF Maastricht earlier this year. One is a vibrant still life by Bernardo Strozzi, called Il Cappuccino because he became a Capuchin monk at the age of 17 and lived in a monastery in Genoa for the next decade. The work is centred on a vase of pink and white peonies against a beige background that recalls Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, the master being a major influence on Strozzi. The other is also Caravaggesque in its use of tenebrism: a scene from a barber shop by a Flemish painter active in Lombardy in the late 17th century. The artist is known only as the Master of the Blue Jeans, due to several paintings that seem to show figures wearing denim, including Woman Begging with Two Children, which was bought by a private collector and donated to the Pinacoteca cantonale Giovanni Züst in Mendrisio, Switzerland, last month.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
A girl with a basket of tulips, lilacs and other flowers, on a balcony before a landscape (c. 1836), Emma Soyer
Emma Soyer (1813–42) is far from a household name but in her day she was a prodigy: she first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London when she was a teenager and gained numerous portrait commissions as a result. ‘No female artist has exceeded this lady as a colourist,’ her obituarist wrote in the Times when she died at the age of only 28, ‘and very few artists of the rougher sex have produced portraits so full of character, spirit and vigour.’ Of some 400 works Soyer is said to have produced, only a handful survive, but the National Gallery of Victoria’s acquisition of this portrait of a girl carrying a lavish floral display testifies to a growing interest in Soyer’s work. It comes just over a year after the Yale Center for British Art announced their acquisition of Soyer’s Young Mariner and Dog (1833).
