Oil Paintings Market News

Last July, with the help of two assistant, The Croatia painter Dezulo Hilogravk finished the biggest oil painting in the world “Wave” in the Polongjudge Barback in the capital of Croatia Zagreb, which took half year for creation. In order to paint on the canvas with a total area 13000 square meters, they have used at least 2.5 tons pigments. After been completed, the oil painting is 6.44 kilometers long, 2.13 meters high, and more than 6 tons weight. Latter confirmed by Guinness world record that it was the biggest oil painting in the world until now.

However, because there is not art museum can be able to collect or display such a giant work, that Hilogravk have to endure suffering and cut it into pieces to auction, and then he will possess the income in the child philanthropy.

It is reported that the first fragment of oil painting “Wave” was purchased by an Australian collector. Hereafter, the rings from worldwide that want to buy makes the author Hilogravk very busy.

The biggest oil painting in the world ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

Feb. 19, 2008 — The oldest known oil painting, dating from 650 A.D., has been found in caves in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, according to a team of Japanese, European and U.S. scientists.

The discovery reverses a common perception that the oil painting, considered a typically Western art, originated in Europe, where the earliest examples date to the early 12th century A.D.

Famous for its 1,500-year-old massive Buddha statues, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, the Bamiyan Valley features several caves painted with Buddhist images.

Damaged by the severe natural environment and Taliban dynamite, the cave murals have been restored and studied by the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo, as a UNESCO/Japanese Fund-in-Trust project.

“Since most of the paintings have been lost, looted or deteriorated, we are trying to conserve the intact portions and also try to understand the constituent materials and painting techniques,” Yoko Taniguchi, a researcher at the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo, told Discovery News.

“It was during such analysis that we discovered oily and resinous components in a group of wall paintings.”

Painted in the mid-7th century A.D., the murals have varying artistic influences and show scenes with knotty-haired Buddhas in vermilion robes sitting cross-legged amid palm leaves and mythical creatures.

Most likely, the paintings are the work of artists who traveled on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route between China, across Central Asia’s desert to the West.

The researchers analyzed, with different methods, hundreds of samples. Three different centers — Tokyo’s National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France and the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute — carried out the tests.

Infrared microscope, micro X-ray diffraction, and micro X-ray fluorescence produced accurate chemical images of the paintings. Gas chromatography confirmed and refined the identification of organic compounds.

“We discovered that a particular group of caves were painted with oil painting technique, using perhaps walnut and poppy seed drying oils. They also have multi-layered structure as if they were like canvas paintings of Medieval period,” Taniguchi said.

Synchrotron beam analysis made it possible to identify the compounds used in the different layers of painting.

“These layers are very thin, and it was really important to analyze each of them selectively. Indeed, the paintings are done with a mixture of several ingredients. They are never present as a pure compound,” Marine Cotte, a researcher at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, told Discovery News.

Analysis showed the layers were made up of natural resins, proteins, gums, oil-based paint layers and, in some cases, a resinous, varnish-like layer.

“It is amazing how the ancient people knew the nature of  materials well, such as protein, gum, resin, oil, pigments and dyes, and also how to prepare and combine them effectively,” Hidemi Otake, a painting conservator at the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties of Japan, told Discovery News.

Murals in many of the Bamiyan caves featured various painting materials and techniques that had been employed through the ages.

“Some caves have rough wall surfaces and matte finishes, and others have very smooth surface, and some have a transparency and shininess. Some paintings have glaze-like layers on top of paint,” Otake said.

According to top Afghan archaeologist Zemaryalai Tarzi, president of the Association for the Protection of Afghan Archaeology, the discovery is important as it testifies Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage.

“My Japanese colleagues are conducting scientific research and an inventory of these fragments with courage and perseverance. But the discovery is yet not as important or significant as what the murals of Bamiyan used to be before their disappearance and destruction,” Tarzi said.

Tarzi was Afghanistan’s director general of archaeology and preservation of historical monuments until 1979, when he was forced to flee the country a few months before the Soviet invasion. He believes further research is necessary to establish the possible role of India and China in developing the technique.

“It would be very important to know if one can attribute this invention to Bamiyan alone,” Tarzi said.

—

Source: Discovery Channel

Oldest Oil Paintings Found in Afghanistan ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

“Two years ago, I spent about 40,000 RMB buying an oil painting on the Shanghai Art Fair Young Artists Introduction Exhibition, whose market price increases to 250,000 RMB now.” An art ware investor told reporter happily yesterday.    Becomes famous quotation promoted
The Shanghai Art Fair Young Artists Introduction Exhibition has a short history for only 2 years, but people are impressive of the performance of those new artists who became famous from it. Many nameless young artists became famous overnight through the introduction exhibition, and chose by gallery, collector or inventor, then during short 1-2 years, their popularity and market quotation would have raised in varied degrees. The hostess of a gallery situated in Tianzi Fang told reporter that the outstanding artists they found form the Art Fair Young Artists Introduction Exhibition now had already become main force of gallery’s artists. These young artists with bright artistic styles, and their work’s quotation already rose about 2 times.
The increase scope is reasonable or not after reporter contrasted the passed two sessions of recommended artists’ initially and the present market quotation, and found that the increase of work price of most artists was considerable. Especially the first introduction exhibition in 2006, to those attends artists, most of their works’ price raised from 20% to 4 times, and some works even raised more than ten times unexpectedly. Is it reasonable for such high rise? The organization team member of this Art Fair Young Artists Introduction Exhibition Mao Wencai said, the Art Fair Young Artists Introduction Exhibition chooses those young potential artists from national wide with academic judgment. Most of these artists haven’t experienced commercial hypes and packing, which meant that they were not famous.
Free to offer stage
The Young Artists Introduction Exhibition is a public welfare project of Shanghai Art Fair, which offers stage and opportunity to young artists. This session of Shanghai Art Fair will be held from 10th September to 14th in Shanghai World Trade Commercial City. At the appointed time, The Shanghai Art Fair Young Artists Introduction Exhibition that will be held grandly on the 3rd floor east hall, will become the spotlight again.

This Introduction Exhibition is sponsored by the Shanghai Art Fair Organizing committee, the Shanghai Culture and News media group, the Liberation Daily syndicate, the Wenhui Xinmin unite the syndicate, the east Shanghai international culture film and television group, and undertook by the Shanghai art fair committee culture art developed Limited company, Luo Fuzi  art reservation. More than 40 young artists will be introduced by 7 renowned critics, planer to the public.

More new people in artistic circles and price of works rise rapidly ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

THE group show of the recent works of Mansur Rahi, Wahab Jaffer, Sajida Hussain and Farrukh Shahab’s titled ‘Intrusions’ opened at The Collectors Galleria, Cultural Complex, Ferozepur Road on Friday.

The group show is a living testimony of the artistic creations of four top artists of the country with their latest works spanning over around two years. All the paintings have been done in oil.

Mansur Rahi, has a very strong expression in art terms since his lines are quite masculine while colours are more of the soil with a tint of pink here and there. He focuses his work on human form and figure. Mansur has brought eight works to the exhibition for the pleasure of art lovers and general public.

Sajida Hussain’s work seems to have striking resemblance to Rahi’s style as far as the form and the composition of the paintings is concerned. Sajida, however, has used more colours since her palette is more extensive and her main theme is women in various forms and moods. It is a delightful experience to view Sajida’s works which give you a refreshing feeling as well as a food for thought. Sajida has displayed 10 paintings in the Collectors Galleria in this exhibition. Farrukh Shahab’s works are actually a brilliant display of a master’s strokes as well as a glimpse into his intellect. Farrukh’s works are inclined towards abstract while remaining in the realm of realism at the same time. The overall impact of his paintings is spell binding and spectacular. He has brought 13 oil paintings to this group show. Wahab Jaffer, again a prominent and established artist in the Pakistani art circles, has displayed 11 oil paintings in multi-coloured compositions. Wahab seems to love painting the heads. All 11 paintings are a real pleasure to watch with his peculiar oblong faced paintings of the heads with a cuckoo’s nest on some. Wahab’s work is simply mesmerizing. The exhibition will continue till November 12, 2008 at The Collectors Galleria.

Group show opens at The Collectors Galleria ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

From Paul Gauguin’s sensuous Tahiti to Winslow Homer’s austere New England coast, visionary painters invested exotic locales and landscapes with human emotions that still touch viewers on many levels.

Journeying to harsher lands, painters like William Bradford and Rockwell Kent infused the polar regions with the barren magnificence of places indifferent to human aspiration.

They are among the standouts in a dramatic, groundbreaking exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum that brings together for the first time striking works by 15 pioneering explorer-artists who depicted the romance and mystery of the Arctic and Antarctica throughout the great age of polar exploration.

Organized by PEM curator Sam Scott, “To the Ends of the Earth” is visually stunning, informative and accessible to a wide range of viewers.

Best of all, it allows visitors to experience vast, forbidden lands through the fresh eyes of artists who painted scenes unlike anything known to most of the world at that time.

“Never before have so many outstanding Western paintings of the Arctic and Antarctic been brought together in one place,” said Scott, associate curator of maritime art and history.

Focusing on a century of polar art from 1830 to 1930, he has organized the exhibit around painters - except for Kent, Bradford and American Frederic Edwin Church - little known to the general public. As a strategy, it succeeds brilliantly by requiring viewers to see anew these regions through the fresh eyes of under-appreciated artists, like Lawren S. Harris, David Abbey Paige and William H. Smyth, as they encountered it.

Subtitled “Painting the Polar Landscape,” this show runs through March 1.

It features more than 50 paintings, maps, notebooks, one film and one photograph that reveal how explorers and artists from the United States, England, Canada and Scandinavia depicted the collision between humans and nature in ways both traditional and novel.

It is organized into three parts, each occupying a gallery and representing an aesthetic and human theme. They are: “Theater of Heroism,” “Conscientious Witness” and “Terrible Majesty.”

Visitors will see acknowledged masterpieces like Bradford’s monumental “Sealers Crushed by Icebergs,” a 10-foot-wide oil painting from 1866 depicting a mountainous glacier crumpling a ship as sailors flee to barren ice floes. Hanging in the middle of the first gallery, Church’s glorious nocturnal panorama, “Aurora Borealis,” from 1865 turns the fragile human world upside down. Lit by a single lamp, a tiny vessel sits ice-locked beside an glacial mountain and beneath an immense curtain of shimmering colors.

Taking a minimalist approach, American Paige painted en plein air subtly tinted pastels of little humans bent by driving winds. Working into the mid-20th century, Canadian Harris employed modernist techniques to paint scenes of primal beauty.

Yet Kent (1882-1971) emerges as the American artist who most immersed himself physically and emotionally in the stark beauty of Newfoundland and Greenland for five years including time in Alaska with his 8-year-old son. More formally trained than most in the show, Kent painted the Arctic with an impressionist’s fascination with the dance of light on ice and sea. Yet in paintings like “First Snow, Greenland” and “Resurrection Bay,” he incorporated abstract techniques to convey the elemental power of a place he considered “all that is beautiful in art and man, the virgin universe.”

As straightforward as a snowball to the nose, this exhibit sends visitors on a parallel expedition through fierce seas, inhospitable expanses of snow and ice, and finally into the maw of solitude.

There is little that is more lovely or lonely than George Curtis’ 1867 oil painting “Polar Sea” depicting the broken mast of a lost vessel drifting by a jagged iceberg.

And if a New Englander in early November can’t relate to that frigid and forlorn scenario, go check out Monet’s water lilies.

Yet this show also explores how artists of different backgrounds adapted techniques to portray human drama where little, except imminent destruction, was obvious.

Icelander Johannes Kjarval infused his 1931 “Summer Night at Thingvelir” with a warm expressionist palette. In a peaceful oil depicting summer on Baffin Island, Canadian A.Y. Jackson is one of the only artists to make indigenous people his subjects.

Leading an opening day tour, Scott said the paintings in the show reveal artists’ differing representations of an environment that confounded familiar responses.

Most of the 19th century paintings were done about the time Romantic poets in England and Europe sought to experience the sublime in untamed nature and exotic landscapes.

“Some saw the heroic in man’s attempt to conquer the unknown. Others, moved by the landscape’s sheer power and perceived invulnerability, evoked a spiritual response,” said Scott.

He observed that for explorers and artists of Romantic temperament, the polar regions were the last uncharted terra incognita to test “human aspirations against the environment.”

Source: Daily News Tribune

Paintings of polar landscapes at Peabody Essex Museum are cool ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

NEW YORK - An oil-on-canvas painting by Spanish artist Juan Gris was auctioned Thursday for $20.8 million, surpassing its presale estimate of up to $18.5 million.

The 1915 painting “Livre, pipe et verres” (”Book, pipe and glasses”) was the top seller at Christie’s impressionist and modern art evening sale. Of the 82 pieces up for auction, 46 were sold.

Other sold items included Picasso’s 1934 oil-on-canvas painting “Deux personnages (Marie-Therese et sa soeur lisant)” (”Two figures (Marie-Therese and her sister reading)”). It fetched $18 million, in line with its pre-auction estimate.

Wassily Kandinsky’s 1909 “Studie zu Improvisation 3″ (”Study of Improvisation 3″), an oil and gouache on board in the artist’s painted frame, was auctioned for $16.9 million. Its presale estimate was $15 million to $20 million.

Source: Forbes

Gris, Picasso, Kandinsky paintings auctioned in NY ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

Christie’s auction of Impressionist and Modern art on Thursday was packaged for the market as it existed six months ago, but the results reflected a more cautious and often grim new reality.

It wasn’t all bad news. A richly detailed Cubist painting by Juan Gris brought a record price of nearly $21 million.

But those moments were rare in an evening overstuffed with mediocre examples by first-rate artists like Monet and Matisse. During the summer, when Christie’s experts put the sale together, they had buyers in mind for many of these works. But when the worldwide economic picture turned ugly, a large number of collectors fled the art market as they saw their wealth diminish.

Surprisingly, even with the Dow Jones industrial average plunging more than 400 points on Thursday, Americans represented 61 percent of the buyers, with Europeans (a category that includes Russians) trailing at 26 percent. And despite the drop in oil prices, Middle Eastern collectors were still buying art, making up 2 percent of the buyers.

Thursday night’s sale included a sweeping range of material, from classic, sun-dappled Impressionist landscapes to late, distorted Picasso nudes. In the end, the sale totaled $146.7 million, well under its low estimate of $240.7 million. Of the 82 works for sale, 36, or more than 40 percent, of the auction went unsold.

Still, the results painted a slightly more encouraging picture of the market than those on Wednesday for “The Modern Age,” Christie’s sale devoted to two estate collections.

The bidders on Thursday were controlled and careful, but Christie’s executives seemed much relieved afterward, having sold the works in which they had large financial stakes. “There’s still a great deal of money left in the art market,” said an optimistic Christopher Burge, Christie’s honorary chairman in America and the evening’s auctioneer. “But we have to look at a new, reduced price level.”

That applied even for the best works. When “Book, Pipe and Glasses,” the Juan Gris, came up, three bidders methodically went for the painting, which has a distinguished exhibition history. Two hopefuls on the telephone competed with Franck Giraud, a New York dealer. It was Mr. Giraud who took home the winning $20.8 million bid, paying above the painting’s high $18.5 million estimate. (After the sale he said he had bid on behalf of an American collector whom he declined to name.)

(Final prices include the commission to Christie’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000, 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million, and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Another item that saw enthusiastic bidding was a beautifully rendered work on paper by Schiele, “Sitting Woman in Underwear, Back View,” from 1917. It had belonged to Serge Sabarsky, the New York dealer who died in 1996. Estimated to bring $700,000 to $1 million, the work sold to David Benrimon, a New York dealer, for $1.59 million.

For much of the evening, however, bidding was sluggish, and when things sold, they often just squeaked by. While there were two interested bidders for Picasso’s “Two People (Marie Thérèse Walter and Her Sister Reading),” a 1934 canvas depicting the artist’s mistress and her sister, the painting brought $16 million, or $18 million with fees, right at the low estimate.

The image on the sale catalog’s cover, Kandinsky’s “Study for Improvisation 3,” sold at its low estimate. A colorful 1909 canvas of a horse and rider, a forerunner of the artist’s groundbreaking abstract paintings, it brought $15 million (its low estimate), or $16.8 million including Christie’s fees.

For many works there were no takers at all. A 1947 Matisse cutout, “Two Masks (The Tomato),” that was being sold by the artist’s family was estimated at $5 million to $7 million. Despite the distinguished provenance and the vibrant work itself, it failed to sell. The same was true for many Impressionist canvases by Monet, Pissarro and Renoir.

Giacometti sculptures have been particularly big sellers in recent years, and on Thursday the artist’s “Three Walking Men I,” conceived in 1948, was on the block. In 1999 at Sotheby’s in New York it brought $5.7 million. Christie’s estimated it would fetch $14 million to $18 million, but even with two bidders it went for only $11.5 million. Before the sale there were rumors that one contender would be the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, but the buyer was Robert Landau, a Montreal dealer.

“I know the market’s adjusting, but you have to get good things when you can,” Mr. Landau said after the sale. “Fortune favors the brave.”

Gris Sets Record in Slow Christie’s Auction ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

China Daily website worldwide online news: According to the report of the American media on September 17th that a Venezuelan President Chavez’s oil painting is auctioned last week for 255,000 US dollars, which was aim to raise fund for his political party.
The name of this painting is “The Yare Moon”, and was created by Chavez when he was serving a prison sentence in Yare Prison after his coup failure in 1992. It described a full moon that seen from jail’s iron window, and there were some red characters at the bottom of the iron window: “long long life, little strokes fell great oaks!”
Chavez’s ally and Congress assemblywoman Bravo told the journalist on 15th that this oil painting’s quotation was 14,000 US dollars, and there were probably 40 people participated in the competitive bidding, and finally it was bought by 3 Venezuelan merchants. This painting’s price was higher than that of same of the Venezuelan top artists’ works. Bravo said that her colleagues were shocked by this price, but they all thought that this oil painting was a symbol of the Venezuelan history.

Chavez’s oil painting drew in prison was auctioned with high price ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

As Birmingham prepares to host a major exhibition of one of its most famous artistic sons, Terry Grimley looks at the legacy of watercolourist David Cox.

———————-

Considering it’s the second largest city in the UK, Birmingham has produced disappointingly few artists of renown.

Two figures from the 19th century, David Cox and Edward Burne-Jones, stand out. David Bomberg, widely regarded as one of the greatest British painters of the 20th century, was born here in 1890, but his family moved to London almost immediately.

Probably the most internationally-known living artists born in the city are the sculptor Raymond Mason, who has lived in Paris since the late 1940s, and abstract painter John Walker, long based in New York.

Cox and Burne-Jones suffered years of neglect due to the vagaries of art fashion. In Burne-Jones’ case it was part of the backlash against all things Victorian in the first half of the 20th century, and it is interesting to reflect while Cox is primarily associated with an earlier phase of British art, he remained active for the first 20 years of Victoria’s reign.

Burne-Jones underwent international rediscovery ten years ago when an exhibition marking the centenary of his death was shown in New York, Paris and Birmingham. Now the 150th anniversary of Cox’s death, next year, has prompted a major exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.

The exhibition comes to Birmingham in the new year, the catalogue has been published here by Yale University Press. It’s a real coffee table book, the first of its size dedicated to Cox and perhaps a sign an artist who has been taken for granted is about to win renewed respect.

The main catalogue essay is by Scott Wilcox, curator of prints and drawings at Yale, with a number of specialist contributions, including one by Victoria Osborne of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery on Cox’s relationship with his home town and one by Charles Nugent on the problem of Cox forgeries.

Known mainly as a painter in watercolour, Cox is one of the major figures in the golden age of that medium and of English landscape painting, which began towards the end of the 18th century and might be thought of ending with the death of Turner in 1851.

Cox was born in Heath Mill Lane, Digbeth, in 1783 and gained early experience as a theatrical scene painter. He moved to London in 1804 to pursue this career, but gravitated to the form of art for which he is best known. Between 1814 and 1827 he made a living as a drawing master in Hereford, returned to live in London until 1841 and “retired” to Birmingham, settling at Greenfield House in Harborne (which still survives), where he died in 1859.

Cox, evidently held in great affection in his home town, seems to have been a typical Brummie in his self-effacing dedication. The absence of egotism or scandal would certainly have done little to commend him to biographers.

You might think of him as a prominent member of the supporting cast to the great stars of the early 19th century golden age, Turner and Constable, and at times his work shows an affinity with each. He had a particular fascination with that most British of preoccupations, the weather.

Though his work is closer to Turner, who also worked extensively in watercolour, where Cox followed a parallel development from the tinted drawings of the topographical tradition towards a freer, romantic approach, he was temperamentally closer to the stay-at-home Constable.

He certainly had little of Turner’s wanderlust, making limited ventures across the Channel and increasingly coming to rely on well-trodden subjects, particularly North Wales.

And yet, among a vast output that can be repetitious, a painting like The Night Train (1849) leaps out as a powerful image of European romanticism. In the less familiar version in Leeds City Art Gallery the horses who stand motionless in the Birmingham version have been stampeded by the distant train, calling Gericault or Delacroix to mind.

Scott Wilcox is much concerned with the broadness and roughness of handling which became progressively more apparent in Cox’s later works and the sometimes negative responses of critics who found it excessive. During these years Cox famously took to using “Scotch” paper, a coarse variety of wrapping paper later marketed to artists as “Cox paper”.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a case was argued for Cox as a precursor of Impressionism. This was based less on his roughly painted late watercolours than the oil paintings he began producing in the 1840s (he also produced a small but tantalisingly fresh group of oil paintings at the beginning of the century). Perhaps it’s largely to do with the coincidence of subject matter the loosely painted beach scenes produced in Lancashire and North Wales easily call to mind Boudin.

The Cox-as-Impressionist idea is interestingly absent here, aside from references to a book published in France in 2000 which evidently took this as its premise. Historic perspectives change, and maybe we are less concerned than we were 40 years ago with demonstrating all roads lead to Impressionism.

Cox’s reputation among enthusiasts for British watercolour has never dimmed – which partly, with the additional confusion of Cox having an artist son with same name, accounts for some of the problems of attribution which have been exacerbated by deliberate forgery. It is fascinating to learn from Charles Nugent’s essay even works included in the 1983 centenary exhibition at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery have since been found to be by others.

To make a forger’s job worthwhile art has to be valuable, and there is a revealing essay by Stephen Wildman, formerly of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, charting the rise and fall of Cox’s reputation and corresponding prices commanded by his work. The Skylark, sold for £50 in the year of Cox’s death, was bought by the industrialist Joseph H Nettlefold for £2,300 in 1873. A century after Cox’s death its value must have fallen to somewhere near the first figure (in cash terms, that is, leaving aside the difference in value of £50 in 1959). Just at that time eight paintings acquired through the Nettlefold bequest were disposed of by the Museum & Art Gallery for derisory sums.

This is an embarrassing episode to recall at a moment when Cox appears once more to be coming into his own. Not surprisingly, there is no reference to it in the catalogue of an exhibition in which Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is an active partner.

Source: Birmingham Post

New outing for David Cox paintings ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News

This Bruegel painting is the highlight of a stupendous new show of works from the Royal Collection. Richard Dorment traces its astonishing history
When is a painting finished? Is it the moment when the artist lays down his or her brush? Or when the canvas is signed? Or do great pictures, as I believe, have a life of their own, continuing to evolve even after they leave the studio?
Of course, colours can fade or darken over the years, but meaning can change, too, depending on who owns a work of art, where it is displayed and how it is treated. Time itself can impinge on the reading of an image when a later generation interprets it through the prism of its own experience, often in ways that the artist may never have intended.
There could be no better example of this phenomenon than Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Massacre of the Innocents in the Royal Collection. Painted in 1565-67 and acquired more than a century later by Charles II, it shows a snow-covered Flemish village in the dead of winter, with new-fallen snow covering pitched roofs, icicles hanging from eaves, bare branches, a frozen pond and patches of hard earth visible under trampled snow.

Of course, colours can fade or darken over the years, but meaning can change, too, depending on who owns a work of art, where it is displayed and how it is treated. Time itself can impinge on the reading of an image when a later generation interprets it through the prism of its own experience, often in ways that the artist may never have intended.

There could be no better example of this phenomenon than Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Massacre of the Innocents in the Royal Collection. Painted in 1565-67 and acquired more than a century later by Charles II, it shows a snow-covered Flemish village in the dead of winter, with new-fallen snow covering pitched roofs, icicles hanging from eaves, bare branches, a frozen pond and patches of hard earth visible under trampled snow.
# Art Sales: Colin Gleadell on the Scott Collection
# Market News: New York takes a break

This bleak landscape makes a suitable backdrop for a scene of pure horror - the murder by King Herrod’s soldiers of all male children in Palestine under the age of two. But, instead of setting the Biblical story in a faraway land in the distant past, Bruegel shows men and women of his own time, dressed in contemporary clothing and living in a prosperous village with two-storey brick houses and a substantial church of stone.

A master of narrative invention, he steps back to give us a bird’s-eye view of the carnage so that our eye must move slowly across the picture surface to examine each heart-rending episode in turn: a father falls to his knees to beg a mounted solider to spare his child; a couple implore a killer to take their daughter instead of their son; troops use pikes, axes and a battering ram to break down doors; mounted knights in armour guard the approach to the village to block the only means of escape. So beautifully painted is every detail that we can almost hear the cries of anguish carried in the cold air, the grunts of the soldiers and the methodical clink of cold steel.

If you’ve been looking at the reproduction of the picture as you read these words, by now you may be wondering about my eyesight. Instead of slitting the throats of infants, the soldiers are killing turkeys, a goose and a doe. Distraught mothers weep not over bloody corpses, but over hams, a cheese or nondescript bundles spread out in the snow. This is because the picture we see today looks very different from the one Bruegel painted.

The first owner, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, ordered that all the dead babies be painted out and replaced with animals, objects and foodstuffs. His intention was to turn a scene of massacre into one of mere plunder. Perhaps the subject was too distressing for a collector as cultivated as Rudolph, but more likely the Emperor did not feel comfortable with a picture showing the massacre by a king of his own subjects.

Especially troubling to Rudolph would be the figures on horseback - two sergeants in red coats on the left and the smiling young herald on the right. Unlike the thugs who only carry out their orders, they are clearly men of higher rank, representatives of the government, and so directly answerable to the ruler.

Then, too, Rudolph was a Habsburg, and Bruegel’s picture was an undisguised allusion to atrocities committed in Flanders under the harsh rule of the Spanish branch of his family. By having it repainted, the Emperor sought to mitigate the cruelty of a picture that in its own time must have been as inflammatory as Picasso’s Guernica. Rightly, modern conservationists have decided to leave the changes ordered by Rudolph intact. Not only are they now part of the picture’s history, but they add new layers to its meaning.

And that is not the end of the story. Rudolph’s alterations created a scene that to modern sensibilities may be even more resonant of calculated evil than the picture as originally painted.

For one thing, the absence of blood and gore creates an atmosphere of eerie stillness, as though we are watching a silent film in slow motion. Then, too, the changes somehow make the actions of the soldiers in rounding up their victims look more deliberate than frenzied. Instead of slaughtering their victims on the spot, it now looks as though the army is taking the children away to be disposed of elsewhere. Because we aren’t distracted by the sight of blood in the snow, it is easy to imagine the scene after the troops have gone, when numb silence descends on the village once more, leaving these people to face their loss.

You can see Bruegel’s remarkable picture in Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace.

Because the Queen’s Old Master paintings are normally dispersed among her residences, it is easy to forget how rich in masterpieces the Royal Collection is - and what a superb team of curators and conservationists is employed to give us stupendous shows like this.

To take just a few highlights, Rubens’s virtuoso oil sketch for his altarpiece The Assumption of the Virgin hangs near his panoramic Winter: Interior of a Barn, the brushwork in the first so apparently spontaneous that it looks as if it was dashed off in an hour, the second methodically painted to create a miracle of natural observation.

In this gallery alone we find five Van Dycks, ranging from his sensual depiction of his mistress Margaret Lemon to some of his most beautiful religious paintings, including his wonderful Mystic Marriage of St Catherine.

As well as belonging to the Flemish school, what all the pictures in the show have in common is their Royal provenance, an invisible historical dimension that, in most cases, adds immeasurably to their interest. For example, the taste of Frederick Prince of Wales (father of George III) was so discerning that the mere fact that a painting was in his collection made me look at it twice, whereas Prince Henry (older brother of Charles I) did not live long enough to develop a sophisticated eye for pictures.

George IV’s taste for Dutch low-life genre paintings surprised me, but, boy, did he buy some great ones, including David Teniers the Younger’s silvery study of fishermen on the seashore. The bold purchase by the 20-year-old Queen Victoria of a mural-size mythological painting by Rubens and Franz Snyders, on show in an adjoining gallery, impressed me. That it was so hideous I found myself rubbing my eyes in disbelief only added to its fascination.

But I could go on all day. The show is on until April 26, but don’t put off your visit. It is one of the most enjoyable of the year.
# Information: 020 7766 7301

Source: telegraph.co.uk

The Royal Collection: bloody secrets of a masterpiece ©2008 Oil Paintings Market News