Marten van Cleve the Elder

Acquired by the grandfather of the present owner.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: This painting on panel has been thinned quite long ago in the last century and laid onto a thick single panel. This itself is slightly bowed. There were originally two joints apparently, although other minor joints may have been made during the thinning process. The central section appears always to have been more prone to raised or flaking paint. There appears possibly to be a narrow added strip along the top, and there have been various old cracks in the sky. Under ultra violet light opaque old varnish can be seen in many areas, although streaks of more recent retouching are also visible scattered about, with much past retouching in the sky and, as so often, in the interstices between the figures. The smoke of the bonfire rises into hazy retouching. Dim strips run along the base and the top edge, with several fairly brief marks scored in the paint in the lower left area. The painting seems to have undergone a certain amount of turbulence a century or so ago, but much beautiful paint was preserved and there has been minimal intervention since the marouflaging and the existing restoration was carried out. A small area has recently been cleaned, showing the figure in a festival outfit holding a flag near the lower right corner. Clearly despite the dim old varnish and patchy retouching, there are many finely intact areas, figures in remarkably good condition amid the old retouched background, with sudden moments of brilliance perfectly preserved such as the central head of a boy. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
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This hitherto unpublished painting by Marten van Cleve is a lively and striking example of this important artist’s independent invention and has been hidden away in a private Spanish collection for the past two generations. Marten van Cleve provides the all-important link between Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger, providing a continuation of the elder Bruegel’s key advances in the art of landscape and genre painting after the latter’s death in 1569 through to his own demise in 1581. By this time Pieter the Younger, born in 1564, was beginning his career as a painter. The originality, liveliness and atmosphere of this painting thus shows Marten van Cleve as a wholly autonomous artist, far more so than his young successor, and is an all-too rare example of his art on a large scale.

The painting depicts the feast of St. Martin, as denoted by the depiction of the saint dividing his cloak with a beggar in a painting decorating the building to the left. In other versions the white flag fought over by three youths in the right middle ground also carries a depiction of this scene. The feast was celebrated on 12^th November and is distinct from other such feast days in the lighting of fires throughout towns and villages. It was a popular festival celebrated until its removal from the Catholic calendar in 1642. Here we see a young boy holding out his hat to be filled with nuts, an elegantly dressed boy to the left holding a monkey by a chain who has just pilfered an apple from a nearby basket. Revellers surround them and scuffles break out in a scene of lively activity.

This is a composition singular to Marten van Cleve and surprisingly was not taken up later by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Another version is known in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dunkirk.¹ A later copy features in the inventory of Arnold Lunden, Rubens’ brother-in-law, in 1641, a painting that Rubens is said to have retouched.

1. K. Ertz, Marten van Cleve, Lingen 2014, p. 137, cat. no. 8, reproduced.