4. The Adoration of the Golden Calf (San Francisco pastiche).

The Adoration of the Golden Calf

Oil on Canvas, 99.4 x 128.6 cm, possibly 1626-27.

SAN FRANCISCO, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. (Click on this link for the zoom function on the Kress Coll. site).

Provenance.

First published by Johnstone in 1919, but the picture described here as a “logical design” seems to bear no relation to the clumsily conceived picture in San Francisco

According to Blunt in 1966, this is not the National Gallery version because its recorder, Sandart, does not mention a pendant, which he would have had he been referring to the London version; that was a pendant to the Melbourne Israelites Crossing the Red Sea. Blunt thought the San Francisco work was the painting mentioned in the van Biesum sale in Rotterdam in the 18^th century, and was probably seen by Richardson in the Flinck collection, Amsterdam, before 1722. A painting of the same subject was in the Dufresne sale, Amsterdam, (22/8/1770). In 1919, the San Franciscan picture was with the Sackville Gallery, London, and was said previously to have belonged to the Earl of Harewood, and then to have been in the Estate of Rudolph Bottenweiser. After being sold by the Sackville it was in the E. May collection, Paris. Later it was with Heinemann, New York, from whom it was bought by the Kress Foundation and presented to the museum in 1952.

Related Works.

Fragment of a version of the Adoration of the Golden Calf painted for an unnamed Neapolitan patron, Mrs John Booth, Manor Park, Southwell, Nottinghamshire, 1627-9, now on temporary loan to Dulwich Picture Gallery. This picture will be dealt with the next entry. 

Engravings.

Jean-Baptiste de Poilly, (1669-1728). In a note to his 1995 article, Keazor says that in 1960 “Blunt ruled out both drawing and engraving as proofs of authenticity by hypothesising that the painting could have been created by a follower on the basis of Poussin's drawing, while Poilly could have transmitted this early falsification under the name of Poussin.”

Drawings

Windsor, Royal Library, R11884: Verso of the Intervention of the Sabine Women, black chalk. Blunt disputed the subject on the recto and said that it was the Victory of the Israelites over the Midianites. Clayton maintains the recto is the Sabine intervention.

Description and Theme

See this entry on the Northampton copy of the London version for description of subject.  

Technical Notes.

According to Johnstone, the paint is deleicately laid on over a red bole ground, which shows through in places. Though this might be consistent with Poussin's early technique, including the harmonisation of colours in the Venetian manner, it does not prove authorship. The technical examination has not been helped by what Keazor called " a somewhat harsh cleaning” in 1957. That restoration campaign took away the last digit of the date. In 1988, Oberhuber described the picture “either a copy of an important painting by Poussin of around 1629/30... or as the very damaged and rubbed original.” See below for a discussion about attribution. In 1977, Eisler observed that the painting was “badly preserved,” which owes much to the disastrous cleaning of 1957. 

Additional Remarks.

Dating.

There has been a problem with dating. Blunt says the date on the painting originally read “N.P.1629,” but Martin Davies thought it was 1626. According to Blunt, in 1966, this view was “generally accepted.” As Clayton explained in 1994, the last digit disappeared during cleaning in 1957. Clayton is also right to point out that none of Poussin’s early paintings are dated; therefore the date on the San Francisco Golden Calf might be “totally spurious.” It's certainly the case that Poussin tends to sign his name on objects in works of the 1630s, not in the previous decade. Based on an analysis of space composition in Poussin’s compositions of 1630, Clayton judges that the de Young painting was done in 1630, and if the “inscription on the San Francisco painting had any basis in fact, it presumably read NP 1629.”

Sources and Influences.

Originally, Blunt had no hesitation in accepting the San Francisco picture as autograph; it was considered authentic in his CR of 1966 (no. 25). However, it is difficult to understand why Blunt would grant authorship to Poussin of such an unbalanced and inept composition in the first place. It is true that some figures resemble Poussin’s own; but against this must be set the uncharacteristic colour, the hard metallic tone, and the dry handling. This seems to be a jumble of different artistic sources such as Mantegna, Titian, and various others. The altar boy with his candelabrum seems a reminiscence of figures from Mantegna’s Triumphs of Ceasar, "The Elephants." while the urn on the drapery is obviously purloined from Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne.  Poussin never operates in this way; if he borrows a quotation, he assimilates it into his own pictorial language. PCP had come to these conclusions about sources independently of Keazor, though the latter notes that the Titian derived-urn on drapery also features in Poussin Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Munich) of the early 1630s. Poussin also used the motif on the London Triumph of Silenus, which as a very problematic picture merits another entry. While we’re still on the source hunt, Keazor identifies the small jug with leaves stuck in as originating in the famous Roman frieze from the Temple of Neptune, displaying instruments used for sacrifice and published in a mid-sixteenth-century engraving by Nicolas Beatrizet in Antonio Lafrery's Speculum Romana Magnificentiae. Keazor also observes that Poussin “has followed quite closely the form of the metal oinochoe (vase) with a laurel branch, third from the right in the second row of the engraving, as well as the two plates”. The relevance of all these influences is whether this erudition and archaeological detail supports the view that this composition is Poussin’s own. That obviously brings us to the question of attribution. 

 Attribution.

The San Francisco picture was first rejected by Rosenberg in 1973, and as Keazor notes, Blunt welcomed with much relief the suggestion of putting this weak picture outside Poussin’s oeuvre. Blunt noted in the same year “I have always found this picture distasteful, and difficult to fit into the early period of Poussin.” Most Poussin scholars favoured the rejection; but in 1988, characteristically Oberhuber went his own way and tried to optimistically slot it into Poussin’s early development, though whether he saw it as autograph or copy is unclear.   Oberhuber’s argument partially depends upon the resemblance of the kneeling man in the foreground’s similarity to a follower in the Virgin Appearing to St James (Louvre, about 1631). This figure with arched back he sees as Poussin’s attempt to create an architectonic emphasis in the Golden Calf, but even accepting the similarity of the two figures, the whole composition lacks Poussin’s careful construction and deliberation. There is a world of difference from the sophisticated baroque of the St James to the mix and match crudity of the San Francisco picture.

There is some debate about whether the San Francisco painting is a copy or a pastiche. It was in 1973 that Blunt and Rosenberg started to call the painting an old fake, or pastiche; and it was Rosenberg who first attributed the work to the Neapolitan painter, Andrea di Lione. Blunt had argued in a much earlier article that Andrea visited Rome and saw Poussin’s neo-Venetian works from the late 1620s. In 1982 Rosenberg listed the San Francisco picture as “a copy of a lost original”, a view that has been strengthened by the existence of a matching composition on a drawing at Windsor. See Clayton’s remarks above. The copy issue will have to remain in abeyance, but PCP is in accord with Wright who in 1984 called the painting a “curiously incompetent picture,” more likely a pastiche, which is a view Wright presumably maintained in his revised CR of 2007? It is almost beyond doubt that Andrea is the author of the San Francisco painting; this artist has a tendency to appropriate motifs from Poussin’s art and insert them into his own. A key issue here is whether Andrea abstracted them from an original composition by Poussin from the late 1620s, or other paintings with similar motifs in the next decade. The urn appears in autograph paintings of the early to mid-1630s; could Andrea have been quoting from those?

For convenience, here are the attribution views of scholars (+ = acceptance, – = rejection)

Blunt, 1966 + (date reads 1626 not 1629 as previously thought).

Badt, 1969 + (1626).

Blunt, 1973 –

Rosenberg, –  1973 (Andrea di Lione).

Thuillier 1974, – (good copy of lost original of 1629).

Eisler 1977 + (1626, badly preserved).

Wild, 1980 – (copy of work by Poussin of 1629).

Rosenberg, 1982 – (pastiche).

Wright, 1984, – (pastiche).

Oberhuber, 1988. It is difficult to determine Oberhuber’s view. He labels it “possibly an excellent copy”, but does not say in his catalogue whether it is after Poussin, or autograph. In his discussion, it “remains a valid document for the development of Poussin’s work.” This was the view of Thuillier in 1974. Whether one should argue Poussin’s development on the basis of what seems a variant or pastiche is an issue that didn’t seem to trouble Oberhuber too much.

Wright, 2007 -? (pastiche).

PCP, 2012 – (pastiche by Andrea di Lione). This corresponds to Rosenberg’s position of 1982, and Wright’s of 1984 and 2007.

Literature.

Catalogues

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

Martin Clayton, Poussin: Works on Paper, (London, 1995), no. 22.

C Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, European Schools Excluding Italian, (Oxford, 1977), no. K1876, pp. 269ff.

Konrad Oberhuber, Poussin: The Early Years in Rome, (Fort Worth, 1988), no. 82.

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

Christopher Wright, Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, (revised, London, 2007), need to check.

Other Literature.

Anthony Blunt, “A Poussin-Castiglione Problem: Classicism and the Picturesque in 17th century Rome, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 3, no. 1, (Oct, 1939-Jan, 1940), 142-147.

Anthony Blunt, “La premièr période romaine de Poussin,” Nicolas Poussin: Actes du Colloque Poussin, (Paris, 1960), Vol. 1., p. 164.

Anthony Blunt, “Poussin's' Death of Germanicus lent to Paris,” Burlington Magazine, Vol. 115, No. 845 (Aug., 1973), pp. 533- 536.

Walter Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach, (London, 1970), p. 138.

Henry Keazor, “Poussin, Titian and Mantegna, and the Adoration of the Golden Calf at San Francisco” Burlington Magazine, Vol. 137, No. 1102 (Jan., 1995), pp. 12-16. See Keazor for expansive bibliography on this painting.

J.H. Johnstone, “An Early Picture by Nicolas Poussin,” Burlington Magazine, XXXV, 1919, p.9.

 

 

 

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