Jan Breughel the Younger, Frans Francken the Younger

With Galerie De Heuvel, Brussels;
Acquired from the above by Baron Coppée in July 1927;
Thence by descent.

Tokyo, Tobu Museum of Art, The World of Bruegel. The Coppée Collection and Eleven International Museums, 29 March – 25 June 1995, no. B41.

S. Speth-Holterhoff, Les peintres flamands de cabinets d'amateurs aux XVII^e siècle, Brussels 1957, p. 118, reproduced fig. 48;
M. Eemans, Jan Brueghel, Brussel 1964, reproduced fig. 53;
U. Härting, Studien für Kabinettbildmalerei des Frans Francken II, Hildesheim, Zurich and New York, 1983, cat. no. A297;
U. Härting, Frans Francken the Younger, Freren 1989, pp. 58, 113 and 354, cat. no. 388 (as on panel);
S. Leclercq et al., La Collection Coppée, Liège 1991, pp. 88–89, reproduced (as on panel);
M. Wilmotte, in the catalogue of the exhibition The World of Bruegel. The Coppée Collection and Eleven International Museums, Tokyo 1995, pp. 138–139, cat. no. B41, reproduced (as on panel).

In excellent overall condition. The transfer from panel to canvas was successul and the paint surface is in very good condition and stable throughout. The varnish layer has now discoloured. There is a only small number of minor scattered old discoloured retouchings, and even the tiniest details are beautifully preserved.
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The figures are the work of Frans Francken the Younger, while the landscape and still-life elements are the work of Jan Brueghel the Younger. The figures may be identified as the Nereid Amphitrite, who holds a shell and represents Water, the Muse Urania, who holds an Armillary Sphere symbolic of Air, the goddess Vesta, whose brazier signifies Fire, and lastly the goddess Ceres with her traditional cornucopia, as the Element of Earth. In the distance on the right haymakers attend to their fields, while to the left nereids and sea creatures disport in the distant sea. The figure group of the four Elements recurs, but in larger format and without the landscape background, as an overmantel in Cornelis de Baellieur's depiction of the interior of a picture gallery (fig.1) painted in 1637, and now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 1902).¹ This would accord with Härting's dating of around 1630 and probably provides a terminus ante quem for the present work. Another closely related version of the design, also unsigned and with figures again by Frans Francken, but without any of the foliage on the left of the composition and with the triumph of Amphitrite in the far left distance, was sold London, Christie's, 16 December 1998, lot 6 (£160,000). Two further versions employ broadly similar landscape settings but use very different figure groups; that formerly in the collection of the Prince de Bauveau Craon sold London, Sotheby's, 24 March 1971, lot 98, and now in the Getty Museum, and another in which the figures of Amphitrite and Vesta are replaced by those of Neptune and Vulcan (present whereabouts unknown).² As here, the figures in both paintings are the work of Frans Francken the Younger.

A label on the reverse records that the painting was transferred from panel to canvas in 1928 when the painting was with Galerie de Heuvel in Brussels.

 

 

1. See A. Grebe et al., The Louvre: All the Paintings, New York 2011, p. 332, reproduced.
2. Reproduced in K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601–1678), Freren 1984, pp. 371–72, cat. nos. 207 and 207a.