The Elephant in the Room

I only recently caught up with Christie’s attempt to sell Poussin’s Hannibal Crossing the Alps on a Elephant in July. I’ve been neglecting the art market of late, so I didn’t hear about the auction until this month. My first thought was that it was a shame to separate the Hannibal from its two other Poussins at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

When I told another Poussin scholar about this, he expressed reservations about how the valuations of paintings are disconnected from scholarship, which to him is the elephant in the room, the thing nobody seems to want to talk about. I had to agree. The picture was purchased by one of the most perceptive connoisseurs and patrons of the 17th century: Cassiano dal Pozzo, who was extremely knowledgeable about leading artists like Titian and Leonardo. He clearly saw something in this canvas which led him to pay a sizeable amount for a struggling painter with great potential. And it was one of the twentieth- century’s finest baroque scholars Sir Denis Mahon who included it in an important exhibition of 1999 on Poussin’s early years in Rome. To put this in context, Mahon connected the Hannibal with an undated letter to Cassiano in which Poussin says he has made drawings of the elephant, not an elephant, which he had the impression that Cassiano wanted, and so would make him a present of it. As this letter was a “pathetic, though dignified plea” ( to use Mahon’s words) by an ill and penurious young painter, Mahon argued that the letter motivated Cassiano to tactfully help the painter by paying 40 scudi, a large sum for a work by an unknown artist who had arrived in Rome in 1625, the likely date of this work. Yet although Cassiano showed charitable sentiments, he would not have bought the painting if he had had doubts about Poussin’s abilities.

I doubt if Cassiano bought the Hannibal because it was an “unusual” and “unconventional” subject. From reading the remarks of the Christie’s representative, the picture is presented as a curio, a pictorial oddity that might appeal to a modern patron on the lookout for “unusual” subjects that Poussin rarely painted. That is obviously the view of someone who doesn’t know much about Poussin. A lot of his subjects, both famous and lesser-known, are unusual; many famous landscapes have unusual iconography like philosophers discoursing in groups. And the renowned Mercury consigning Bacchus to the Nymphs/Echo and Narcissus, one of Hannibal’s companions at Harvard, is very unusual. To say that Poussin painted “mostly mythological and religious subjects” is to demean his inventive powers. What about allegories, animals and natural history, battle-pictures, landscapes, philosophical subjects, self-portraits and a plethora of other topics on canvas and on paper. Please Christies, valuations based on real scholarship next time.

These views are reported in this article by Reuters. I’m not surprised that the press would take this line after hearing Christie’s half-hearted “endorsement” of the Hannibal. As for the sale, I may be wrong but I bet it didn’t sell for 3.5 million. Doubtless they were hoping that Poussin’s name would boost interest, not to mention the 21^st equivalent of a Cassiano dal Pozzo with an eye for an “unusual” picture turning up to bid. Perhaps Christie’s thought that if “minor masters” like Scipione Pulzone could fetch 3 million or thereabouts, the same for work for a neglected painting by a major master like Poussin.

I took a photograph of the Poussins when I visited the museum in 2006, though sadly my snap of the Hannibal didn’t come out. I hope the real elephant does stay in this particular room after its travels. There’s too much art wrenched out of museums and propelled around the world.

 

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