Johann Christian Klengel

J.G.A. Kläbe (Hg.), Neuestes gelehrtes Dresden oder Nachrichten von jetzt lebenden Gelehrten, Schriftstellern, Künstlern, Bibliotheken und Kunstsammlern, Leipzig 1796, p. 77;
A. Fröhlich, "Glücklich gewählte Natur...", Der Dresdner Landschaftsmaler Johann Christian Klengel (1751-1824), Hildesheim 2005, p. 87, under cat. no. M 6.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This work seems to be clean. The varnish is slightly soft; the work could be hung in its current state if the varnish were slightly improved. The panel appears to have an original join running horizontally though the center and a crack if not an original join running horizontally through the hooves of the horse. There are two vertical reinforcements on the right and left of the panel. Restorations have been added along these two thin cracks. There are restorations in the red coat of the standing figure on the right side. There are only a few other retouches in the darker clouds in the sky. The inscriptions beneath the figures and dogs may not be exactly period, and these have weakened slightly.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Beloselsky (1752-1809), the central figure in this charming portrait, was a member of an illustrious and ancient Russian family.  He was the youngest child of Prince Mikhail Andreevich (1702-55), who had a distinguished naval career under Peter the Great, and his second wife Countess Natalia Grigorievna Tchernishev.  Prince Alexander was educated mostly in Germany and, as was customary for a young nobleman, travelled extensively in Europe.  He developed an ardent interest in the arts, especially music, and while still in his mid-twenties published a treatise on Italian music, De la Musique en Italie (1778).  His intellectual pursuits extended to poetry and philosophy and he corresponded with many of the great intellectuals of the era such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant.¹

In 1780 he was appointed by Empress Catherine to serve as Russian ambassador to the Saxon court in Dresden, a post he would hold for more than a decade.  The present painting portrays the Prince and his family in Dresden in 1790, near the end of his service there, before taking up his new post as ambassador to the court of Victor Amadeus III of Savoy in Turin.  The family is shown in an informal setting in the countryside.  The prince, wearing a bright red riding coat and buff breeches, stands and gestures towards a rainbow appearing in the sky at left.  Princess Beloselsky (Varvara Yakovlevna, née Tatishchev) is shown seated on a rock holding their second child, Marie-Madeleine, on her lap.  Their first-born child, Hippolyte (“Popo”), had died in infancy and is here depicted with a halo of stars around his head, resting on a pillow beside his mother.  In the background at far right is a nurse maid holding an infant.  Though not identified by an inscription as the other children are, it is certainly their daughter, Zinaida, who was born in Dresden in December of 1789.²  Zinaida would grow up to be the famous Princess Volkonsky, wife of Prince Nikita Volkonsky; she was hostess of one of the most influential literary and musical salons in Moscow and, later in Rome, at her Villa Volkonsky on the Esquiline Hill.  In the center foreground are the spaniels, Coco and Mimi, also important members of the family.  Mimi is even mentioned in a letter Prince Beloselsky wrote to his wife in 1792, before she joined him in Turin, assuring her that everyone in the family was well, including “little Mimi."³  At the left side of the painting an elegantly attired groom holds the prince’s horse.  His plumed hat bears the pre-1800 coat-of-arms of the Beloselsky with the cross, crescent and two fishes clearly visible.  An inscription on the painting denoting the name of this figure is difficult to make out.  Years later when living in Rome, Zinaida created an Alleé des Mémoires in the garden at Villa Volkonsky that included a memorial plaque dedicated to three of her father’s most faithful servants, “Peter, Kolmar and Parmen.”⁴  It is tempting to speculate that this male servant, depicted with the family in such an intimate manner, could be one of these three.  Just two years after this portrait was painted, and following the birth of another daughter Natalia, Princess Beloselsky died in Turin in November of 1792 at the age of twenty-eight.  The prince commissioned a marble chapel for her to be built on the banks of the Po.  He eventually married again in 1795 to Anna Grigorievna Kozitsky, daughter of Empress Catherine's Secretary of State and heiress to a great fortune.

At the time of this portrait, Johann Christian Klengel was a leading landscape painter in Dresden.  As a boy he had studied drawing with Charles-François Hutin and Bernardo Bellotto and later apprenticed under court painter, Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich.  In 1777, Klengel was made a member of the Dresden Kunstakademie, where he was later a professor of landscape painting, and in 1786 was made an honorary member of the Berliner Akademie, an indication that his fame had grown beyond Saxony.  Portraits, such as the present painting, are rare in Klengel’s oeuvre.  Another portrait by him, Salomon Landoldt with a servant, horse and dog, dated 1789, depicts the figures standing in the foreground in a similarly flat and expansive landscape.⁵

 

1.  M. Fairweather, The Pilgrim Princess, A Life of Princess Zinaida Volkonsky, London 1999, pp. 5-7.
2.  Though there have been discrepancies in Zinaida’s date of birth, this has been clarified by a note written by her grandmother, now in the Volkonsky archive of the Houghton Library, Harvard, see M. Fairweather, Ibid, p. 282, footnote 1.
3.  Ibid, p. 11.
4.  Ibid, p. 14.
5.  See A. Fröhlich, "Glücklich gewählte Natur...", Der Dresdner Landschaftsmaler Johann Christian Klengel (1751-1824), Hildesheim 2005, p. 87, cat. no. M6, reproduced p. 88.