JAN VAN ORLEY | The Visitation

Collection Thierry et Christine de Chirée, Avignon ; 
Sa vente, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, M^e Aguttes, 29-30 mars 2011, n°532, repr. (comme attribué à Antoine Rivalz) ; 
Acquis à cette vente.

Rennes, 2012, n°31 (notice par Stijn Alsteens)

Hinged to the mount at the top with Japan paper tabs. Further tabs attached on the other three sides, to facilitate handling. One or two very minor repaired holes and thin spots towards corners, but overall condition of sheet and medium very good and fresh. Sold unframed.
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Like his illustrious ancestor, Bernard van Orley, Jan van Orley’s reputation rests to a considerable extent on his work as a designer of tapestries, an art form that retained considerable popularity well into the 18^th century.¹  But whereas the earlier Brussels tapestry tradition was closely linked with the artistic production and legacy of Italy, and in particular with Raphael, later years saw much closer ties with France.  Jan van Orley’s technical and compositional approach was typical of his time, and given the relatively limited extent to which his drawings are known and published, it is not, perhaps, surprising they have sometimes been misattributed to French masters – as, indeed, was the present sheet when it was sold in 2011, attributed to Van Orley’s close contemporary, the Toulouse artist Antoine Rivalz (see lot 44).  Only subsequently has the Adrien drawing been recognised as a rather significant example of Van Orley’s elegant drawing style. A rare documentary starting point for Van Orley’s drawing style is, however, to be found in a signed drawing of the martyrdom of a saint, now in Düsseldorf, which shares the distinctive slightly geometric pen work and broad, architectonic washes seen here, and is generally very comparable in style.²  It is not entirely clear what the function of the present drawing would have been, but it does relate fairly closely to the composition of a print of the same subject (fig. 1), one of a series of twenty-eight depictions of scenes from the Life of Christ, all designed by Jan van Orley, fourteen of which (including the print of the Visitation) were engraved by the artist himself, and the other fourteen by his younger brother, Richard.³  The drawing is by no means a direct study for the print, which is smaller in size, vertical rather than horizontal in format, in the same direction, and differing in many compositional details, but the general conception of how the subject should be depicted is none the less similar enough to conclude that the drawing may have been made as some kind of initial idea for the composition.  Indeed, the print series seems to have evolved considerably as it was being created: some images are horizontal, while others are vertical, and the numberings on the plates suggest that there were originally intended to be thirty-two images in the series, even though only twenty-eight were ever actually realised. 

Particularly close to the engraved composition are the positioning and poses of the central pair of figures, and the setting of their encounter at the foot of a staircase, below some kind of grand terrace, with columns soaring up to the top of the composition and a tunnel-like arch below.  Both scenes even include a rather similar parrot in the upper part of the scene, and a little dog approaching the two standing women.  It is, though, worth noting that the general construction of the composition is also heavily dependent on that of the inside left wing of Rubens’s great altarpiece of The descent from the Cross, painted for Antwerp cathedral in 1612-14, which Van Orley most probably knew primarily through the engraving by Pieter de Jode II, which appears to have been based, in turn, on an oil sketch that Rubens made at a later date, around 1632-33.

^1.  See Tapestry in the Baroque. Threads of Splendour, cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Madrid, Palacio Real, 2007, pp. 449-50, 452, 466-70, 483-8

^2.  Düsseldorf, Museum Kunstpalast, inv. FP 4889; see Niederländische Handzeichnungen, 1500-1800, aus dem Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, cat., Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle, 1968, no. 85

^3.  F.W.H. Hollstein, et al., Dutch and Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts, 1400-1700, Amsterdam 1947-2007, vol. XIV, 1956, p. 191, nos. 3-30