3. The Adoration of the Golden Calf (Northampton copy)

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05/21/2012

3. The Adoration of the Golden Calf (Northampton copy)

The Adoration of the Golden Calf

oil on Canvas, 87 x 123.3 cm, date unknown.

NORTHAMPTON , Museums and Art Gallery.

Provenance.

The NICE site states this painting was given by Mr Nigel Brown in memory of his father Reginald W. Brown, 1957. R.W. Brown was Curator of the Northampton Museum between 1920 and 1955. No further information is known about the ownership of the painting before Brown, but its provenance might only go back to the nineteenth-century- see below.

The Northampton canvas is one of the many copies made after the famous original in the National Gallery, London. As Humphrey Wine points out, the copies situation is complicated by the existence of variant treatments of the subject, either by or once attributed to Poussin. One is known through a painting in San Francisco, which may reflect an original design by Poussin, but which is definitely not painted by him. PCP thinks it is likely to be a pastiche by Andrea di Lione, more of him in another post.

There is another composition recorded by Félibien, painted for a Neapolitan patron, damaged in 1647, a fragment of which was recorded by Blunt in an English collection. The whole composition is unknown as it was never engraved, and there seem to be no surviving painted copies. This fragment which shows the heads of two women was exhibited in Paris in 1960 (no. 13). This may have been an earlier attempt at the subject as the heads are consistent with Poussin’s style of the late 1620s. Wright (L 4) dates this to 1630, but argues against Blunt’s hypothesis. Rather than discuss this problem here, we’ll postpone this until PCP considers the San Francisco Calf and the fragment in the next entries as it seems logical to consider these all together.

The posthumous inventory of Etienne Gantrel (d. 1706) records another copy of the Golden Calf valued at 60 livres, which Wine believes may have been a copy after Poussin.

Finally, a lost painting recorded in the van Biesum sale, Rotterdam, 1719, may according to Pierre Rosenberg “have been the treatment of the theme providing the basis for the San Francisco work.” According to Blunt in 1966, the San Francisco picture was the one sold in Rotterdam, but eventually he was to reject the picture. As should be obvious by now, reconstructing the evolution of this subject is extremely complicated!

The Northampton copy must be Wine’s no 2 recorded in 1948, as Blunt lists a copy in a private collection, Northampton, dated 1948. According to Wine, the photograph of this picture suggested a copy from the 19^th century, which is at odds with the NICE record which dates the Northampton picture between 1670 and “probably 1741.” The NICE curatorial record adds that “the style of this copy suggests that it might have been made some decades later by an Italian painter.”

Related Works.

Original. LONDON, National Gallery, 1634-35, oil on canvas, 193 x 128 cm.

Other Copies of the London Original: NB, this information is taken from Wine- see below.

1) Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, no. 1931, 99 x 133 cm.

2) Private collection, England, recorded in 1948. According to Wine, the photograph of this in the NG dossier suggests to him a 19^th century copy. Blunt refers to this copy in his CR of 1966.

3) In reverse, a small oil sketch (11 ½ x 15 ½ in.) sold Christie’s 14^th January 1972 (lot 101, 80 guineas). According to Wine, there is a photograph of this in the N.G. dossier.

4) Ader Picard Tajan, Paris, 30^th June, 1989 (lot 196), 56.5 x 71 cm.)

5) Moscow, Pushkin Museum, 114 x 167 cm. Probably a copy dating to the beginning of the 18^th century.

6) A copy said to be by Charles Lebrun was in the Robert Strange sale, Christie’s 5^th March 1773, (lot 109).

7) A variant treatment in a private collection, London, recorded in 1970. Apparently, no photograph of this in the N.G., just a description.

8) A painted version by the 17^th century artist Pierre de Sève (1623-95) for the Gobelins tapestry works was made sometime between 1684 and 1691, probably towards the beginning of this period when the London original was owned by Phillipe de Lorraine. For more on the tapestries, see here.

Wine then goes on to list what “may be copies” of the London original.

1) Lot 101 of the Dufresne sale, Amsterdam, 1770, the recorded size of which was 41 x 68 pouces (i.e. 111 x 184 cm).

2) Item 64 recorded in the posthumous inventory of J-B Maximilien Titon on 12^th August, 1768.

3) The painting of the Adoration of the Golden Calf offered for sale by Aureliano Albano, chief secretary of Prince Carlo Emanuele of Savoy, to another of the prince’s secretaries in a letter of 17^th December 1862 in which Aureliano claimed his painting to be by Poussin and to have been made for the Del Pozzo family.

4) Lancret sale, Paris, Rémy, 5^th April, 1782, lot 332.

5) Dezallier d’Argenville included among works by Poussin then in Rome “the Crossing of the Red sea”, “the Adoration of the Golden Calf” and among those by him in France in one of various unnamed collections, “the Golden Calf.”

6) A painting of the Golden Calf purporting to be by Poussin was exhibited at the Académie Royale de Toulouse in 1783.

7) Not a copy, but a painting of Moses and Aaron holding the Tablets of the Law in which the figure of Aaron is based on the figure in the original in London, is in the parish church of Harwich, Essex. It was acquired from William Paris in 1700.

Engravings

1) By E. Baudet.

2) Anonymous, published by J.F. Cars.

3) Anonymous, published by J. Audran.

4) Anonymous, published by E. Gantrel.

5) By L. Surugue.

6) Anonymous Dutch engraving.

Drawings

No original drawings for the London version exist, though there are may be copies after preparatory drawings. There are about six of these copies listed in Prat and Rosenberg’s catalogue raisonné of the drawings. According to Wine, there may be other drawings connected with the composition that surfaced in eighteenth-century sales

Description and Theme

The source is the Old Testament (Exodus Chap. 24). Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the Law from God, leaving the children of Israel in the care of Aaron and Hur. The people thought Moses would not return so they asked Aaron to make other gods; he made a golden calf and set it up on an altar. Before this the Israelites made offerings and celebrated. On seeing the calf on his return, and seeing the people dancing, Moses grew angry and broke the stone tablets on which God had written the commandments.

The original in London was painted for Amedeo dal Pozzo. It is the pendant to the Israelites Crossing the Red Sea, the Melbourne painting recently restored. The London picture was not separated from its pendant until 1945.

Technical Notes.

No technical information is available on the Northampton copy yet, but judging from the PCF photograph, the picture doesn’t seem to be in good condition.

Additional Remarks.

The Northampton copy is not tremendously important in the scheme of things, but highlights the copy situation with this composition, and other variants. A more pressing issue here is dating. On the PCF site, the Northampton copy is dated between 1700-1741; this is less broader than NICE’s date range which opts for 1670-1741. But, PCP believes that Wine may be right in suggesting that the Northampton picture is a nineteenth-century copy, possibly even by an English artist knowledgeable about Poussin’s designs? Poussin’s compositions with dancing figures like the Golden Calf, Dance to the Music of Time (Wallace Coll.) and the Bacchanal before a Herm (also NG) were much admired by English and Irish painters in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, the Irish artist James Barry incorporated Poussinesque dancing groups into his compositions, like his Grecian Harvest Home. It may be advisable for the PCF to re-label this painting “After Poussin, possibly nineteenth-century copyist.”

Catalogues

Anthony Blunt, Exposition Nicolas Poussin, (Museé du Louvre, 1960), no. 38.

Anthony Blunt, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue, (London, 1966), no. 26.

Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665: Catalogue raisonné des dessins, 2 vols., (Milan, 1994).

Humphrey Wine, The Seventeenth Century French Paintings in the National Gallery, (London, 2001), 314-323.

Wright, C., Old Master Paintings in Britain: An Index of Old Master Continental Paintings Executed before c.1800 in Public Collections in the United Kingdom, London, 1976, p. 165.

Christopher Wright, Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, (London, 1984), no. 86.

Other Literature.

Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, (London, 1995), pp. 238-239.

Walter Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach, (London, 1970), pp. 138-139.

Pablo Pérez d'Ors; Angela Smith, NICE curatorial record.

Posted at 07:34 PM | Permalink

Comments

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Hello David
You might care to know that the fragment of two female heads exhibited in Paris in 1960 has been on loan to the Dulwich Picture Gallery since 2006 from a Private Collection. I have therefore been able to ponder this many times. My friend Christopher Wright, in his second edition of his Poussin Catalogue Raisonné (Chaucer Press 2007, and therefore the most complete CR to date until Pierre Rosenberg's new one, fully updating Blunt, is finished) lists this as L4 (section on Lost and Newly Attributed Paintings), and gives his reasons for rejecting this. Basically, Wright says this is a weak pastiche, stylistically taking two heads by Poussin of different dates, is close in style to the Andrea di Lione in San Francisco, and impossible to accept due to the position the heads would have on a canvas turned around, due to the X-rays at a right angle that show a Colosseum-like building.

Posted by: Stephen Conrad | 05/22/2012 at 10:55 AM

Thanks Stephen,

I must have seen the fragment the last time I was at Dulwich, autumn 2010.

I'll be honest and say that I didn't know that Wright had updated his CR. I'll try to get hold of a copy on inter-library loan, as I don't particularly want to buy another edition of his catalogue. Look out for the next posts on the San Fran Golden Calf and the fragment.I'll incorporate your points about Wright.

I know Rosenberg is working on another CR. I know that a lot of new attributions, and interesting pictures have turned up over the last few years. I'm looking forward to it.

Best- David

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