Old Masters Day Sale
Old Masters Day Sale
Paul Vredeman de Vries
An imaginary view of the interior of the Cathedral of our Lady, Antwerp
Lot Closed
July 8, 01:31 PM GMT
Estimate
30,000 - 50,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Paul Vredeman de Vries
Antwerp 1567 - 1616 Amsterdam
An imaginary view of the interior of the Cathedral of our Lady, Antwerp
signed and dated lower left: PAVRS / 1609
oil on panel
unframed: 48.5 x 75 cm.; 19⅛ x 29½ in.
framed: 63 x 89.2 cm.; 24¾ x 35⅛ in
Thence by descent to his daughter Elisabeth Tamm (1875-1958);
Thence by descent to his son Carl Adolf Murray (1899-1972);
Thence by descent to his daughter Dorothea Hårleman (b. 1942);
By whom sold, Stockholm, Upsala Auktsionkammare, 13 June 2019, lot 800;
Where acquired by the present owner.
Ingenjör Claes Adolf Tamms samling av franska, italienska, nederländska , svenska och tyska målningar. Beskrivande förteckning, Stockholm 1928, cat. no. 26 (as Pieter Neeffs The Elder).
Paul Vredeman de Vries was born in Antwerp in 1567. At the beginning of his career, he acted as an assistant to his father Hans, also an architectural painter. After working with his father in Dantzig and Prague, Paul moved to Amsterdam in 1599 and stayed there until his death in 1616. In 1609, however, he took the opportunity of briefly returning to his native Antwerp after the armistice between the United Provinces and the Habsburg Netherlands.
The present work was painted during this short stay in the city, and the architecture takes inspiration from the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, an imposing gothic church and the main place of worship in the area. Vredeman's taste for imaginary architectures is a constant in his artistic practice. It constitutes a point of distinction from the work of his father, who was an architectural theorist (rather than a painter) and mainly depicted real, existing spaces.
Signed and dated and only recently rediscovered, the painting establishes a fixed point in the artist's career and his representation of this subject. Vredeman returned to it several times, recreating the Cathedral with various modifications: a notable example is a work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,1 painted in 1612.
The painting was firstly recorded in possession of Claes Gustaf Adolf Tamm (1838-1925), Swedish Minister of Finance. He was the son of prominent art collector Adolf Gustaf Tamm (1805-1851), but this work is not documented in his estate, and therefore must have been acquired by Claes independently or through his wife. It stayed in the family until 2019.