5. Two Heads fragment.

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06/04/2012

5. Two Heads fragment.

Two Heads of Women, possibly Andrea di Lione.

Oil on Canvas, 32 x 45.5 cm, possibly 1626-27.

PRIVATE COLLECTION, U.K., (on long term loan to Dulwich Picture Gallery).

Provenance.

According to Blunt (1960, 1966), this was a fragment of a picture representing the Adoration of the Golden Calf “painted for an unnamed Neapolitan patron.” Poussin’s biographer, Félibien, recorded the existence of this picture, saying it was damaged in the Masaniello revolt of 1647, but that a fragment was saved and brought to Rome, when he saw it between 1647 and 1649. It belonged to the Earls of Carlisle, and passed by inheritance to George Howard. In a Burlington article of 1947 Blunt had described the emergence of a small canvas containing two heads of women as lot 39 in a Christie’s auction of three years earlier. This came from a sale of pictures at Castle Howard, with an attribution to Guido Reni. It was bought by Cecil Liddell, and passed by inheritance to his two brothers, Guy and David Liddell, and to his niece, Mrs John Booth. It is currently on long term loan to Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Related Works.

The types, particularly the woman on the left are related to Andrea di Lione’s San Francisco pastiche of a lost original which was dealt with the last post.

Engravings.

The composition from which this fragment supposedly emanates was never engraved; therefore nobody knows what the lost composition looked like.

Drawings

None.

Description and Theme

No specific theme, unless assumed it is connected to the Golden Calf composition.

Technical Notes and Connoisseurship Issues.

In 1949 Blunt described the canvas thus: “The condition of the picture is remarkable. Apart from a small amount of damage along the lower edge and a few stoppings the paint is still completely fresh. The stretcher, which dates at latest from the early eighteenth century, is not the original, since the picture has been relined, though at such an early period that a very close examination was necessary to establish the fact. On the back are the figures 50, painted on the canvas itself and also on a label which appears to be of the eighteenth century.” Blunt exhibited it in his Louvre exhibition of 1960 (no.13) and inserted in his CR of 1966 (no. 27). PCP has seen the fragment before, but honestly cannot recall its colours, nor can I find a colour reproduction. In view of this it will be helpful to repeat Blunt’s description of the colour scheme and details from Blunt’s 1949 article:

“The heads in the painting are about three quarters life-size. That on the left, looking down, is of a woman with auburn-brown hair, bound in the classical manner with a crimson fillet. Over her shoulders is a golden-yellow cloak, from under which appears a white dress. The other head is seen in profile looking upwards and also out of the composition, her hair being partly gathered under a white cloth covering the back of her head. The most striking feature of the painting is the combination of broad and solid modelling with freedom of handling and subtlety in the treatment of light, which glances across the features without destroying the classical firmness of their form. This fusion of almost opposite qualities is typical of Poussin's large paintings of about 1627-1629. The technique and handling are again those of Poussin in the later twenties. The dark bolus ground on which he normally worked is in certain parts deliberately left visible, especially in the hair of the woman on the left which is constructed mainly by touches of golden-brown paint over the almost raw ground. The golden drapery is painted with greater freedom and with the rich impasto to be seen in the priest in the St. Erasmus, the poet of the Inspiration and in all the figures of the St. Catherine. In certain points of detail the St. Catherine presents the closest parallel, particularly in the painting of the heads. The method of indicating the eyebrows with a single very firm stroke of the brush is to be found in the left-hand head in the fragment and in the Virgin in the Cook painting; and the curious shadowed outline of the chin in the profile figure is repeated in the same figure, as well as in the mourning mother of the Innocents. There is even a similar weakness in both paintings in the clumsy way in which the ear appears from under the hair. Finally, the curious device of indicating the eye-lashes with single dark strokes can also be seen in the St. Catherine and other pictures of the time.”

In his later monograph, Blunt extended Poussin’s sphere of influence to take in such paintings as Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love where he believed the heads of the women, particularly the right one, had their origins. Whilist not denying that this type may derive from Titian, the massive stumbling block is that this fragment stylistically resembles Andrea di Lione’s version of the Adoration of the Golden Calf in San Francisco. What puts its non-autograph status beyond doubt is that, as Stephen Conrad- who’s viewed it many times at Dulwich- says it is 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. In the words of Wright, whose opinion Stephen is conveying:

“The attribution to Poussin of the Two Heads is further demolished by the X-Ray which reveals a fragment of a large Landscape with ruins- most probably the Colosseum. Unfortunately for those who continue to believe that the picture is a fragment from the large lost composition the landscape revealed in the X-Ray is at right angles to the heads thus supposing an impossibly large landscape for the canvas to have been reused in the horizontal instead of upright position.”

Blunt knew about the X-Ray, as he reproduced it in his monograph on Poussin ( fig. 72). It did not dissuade him from his theory about the fragment; indeed, it served to convince Blunt that here, as elsewhere, Poussin had met with little success at a first attempt and therefore revised his design. Blunt made the same kind of argument about the recently stolen Midas (Ajaccio) which had also been X-rayed by the Louvre in 1960. Though Blunt noted the X-Ray of the 'Two Heads' proved Poussin painted "large compositions at a fairly early date", he failed to come to the same conclusion as Wright, presumably because he had so much invested in his theory of Poussin's early stylistic development. Despite the problem detailed above, the curators of the 1981 Edinburgh exhibition took Blunt's view, declaring it "obviously a very early work." The Edinburg curators compared it with the St Catherine in the same museum, a Poussin problem I will return to in the next entry.

The fragment also provides a salutary object lesson is how a connoisseurial argument can unravel unless the authenticity of the foundation is verified beyond doubt- the technical evidence put paid to that. Cracks had become to appear in the edifice in 1973 with Rosenberg removing the San Francisco pastiche from Poussin’s oeuvre. Obviously this had dire consequences for the fortunes of the fragment, which has typographical and stylistic associations with the San Francisco picture. Yet Blunt continued to hold out for the fragment as a Poussin piece, as is made clear in a review of Thuillier’s CR in 1974. It looks like Blunt went to his grave convinced that the fragment was by Poussin's hand. A year after Blunt’s death in 1983, Wright observed that the two heads were both derived from different periods of Poussin’s career: one obviously had some lineage with the San Francisco Golden Calf; the other was based on the head of a nymph in Poussin’s London Bacchanal before a Term of Pan, of about 1634.
This practice of combining motifs from different periods would really come into its own after Poussin’s death in 1665. The recent appalling Baptism of Christ serves to demonstrate that fact.

I'll do a post on Andrea di Lione, and his significance to Poussin at a later date.

Attribution Views

Blunt, 1966 + (1628-9)

Blunt, 1974 + (similar to Edinburgh St Catherine).

Thuillier, 1974 + (1629-30).

Wild, 1980 + (c.1630).

Edinburgh, 1981 exh., Brigstocke et al + (1627-29).

Wright, 1984, – (pastiche)

Wright, 2007 – (pastiche).

PCP, 2012 (as per Wright).

Relevant Literature.

Catalogues

Anthony Blunt, Exposition Nicolas Poussin, (Museé du Louvre), 1960, no. 13.

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

Hugh Brigstocke et al, Poussin: Sacraments and Bacchanals (Edinburgh, 1981), no. 3.

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, “Poussin Studies II: Three Early Works,” Burlington Magazine, Vol. 89, No. 535 (Oct., 1947), pp. 266-271.

Anthony Blunt, “The Complete Poussin,” (review of Jacques Thuillier’s CR), Burlington Magazine, Vol. 116, No. 861 (Dec., 1974), pp. 760-763.

Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, (Washington, 1967, rep, London, 1995), 77,81,83,90,179.

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