36 19th June 2010 master pictures Returning to a successful
■ Master Paintings Week sets out to build on last year’s launch
Anna Brady reports
THE organisers of Master Paintings Weekmake no pretence that this is not, above all, a marketing campaign. And why not? Connoisseurship and serious collectors have never been in short supply in this sector of the market, but appearing approachable to the uninitiated has not always come easily. In the words of joint organiser Johnny Van Haeften, there is still “that awful image of stuffy galleries hiding behind a foreboding
buzzer and velvet curtain”. As with Master Drawings London, accessibility is the buzzword. Dealers put together a package of events to entice people into their galleries; exhibitions, lectures and receptions, which all coincide with London’s major sales of Old Master and 19th century pictures. Last year’s inaugural staging of Master Paintings Week, the brainchild of Johnny Van Haeften, Richard Green and Konrad Bernheimer, was generally lauded as successful in its fundamental aim of increasing footfall and meeting new clients, although how much actual business was done during the week is, as
ever, open to debate. This year the Master Paintings Week formula will remain much the same, with gallery doors across Mayfair and St James’s opening to all from July 3 to 9, complete with the Sunday evening receptions on July 4, which last year were swarming with visitors both old and new. The line-up of 25 dealers and three auction houses includes three new faces – Bonhams, the Florence-based Tuscan art specialists Piacenti Art Gallery (exhibiting at the Asian Art Gallery on Duke Street) and Stair Sainty, who will join forces with Robilant + Voena at 38 Dover Street to host a collaborative exhibition of A History of Taste: Highlights of Italian and French Painting. Now under the ownership of Konrad
Bernheimer, Colnaghi is the world’s oldest commercial art gallery and, from June 16 to July 30, this grande dame of the Old Master scene will commemorate its 250th anniversary with the exhibition Colnaghi – 250 Years of Dealing in Art. This show, and the hefty accompanying book, give an insight into the inner workings of the gallery’s history, bringing out the contents of Colnaghi’s extensive archives of letters, account books and past sale details alongside a selection of prints, photographs, drawings and manuscripts to illustrate their history. The piles of unpublished letters will include one written in 1827 by John Constable to Dominic Colnaghi, asking if he could arrange for the shipment of a landscape (The Cornfield, now in the National Gallery) to Paris for exhibition at the Salon
and provide an introduction to the director of the Musées Royaux. At the core of the show are some of
Colnaghi’s big-ticket sales of the late 19th century to the American millionaires Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon. These include Titian’s Europa, bought from an impoverished Lord Darnley, sold to Gardner and now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It will be both the subject of a display of related material and a lunchtime lecture on July 5 by Jeremy Howard, Colnaghi’s head of research and organiser of the exhibition. But it’s not all letters and records, and
there will be some paintings for sale, among them Henri Stresor’s (1613?-1679) The Oyster Eater, a 3ft 6in x 2ft 11in (1.07m x 89cm) oil on canvas with a price tag of in the region of £1.4m. The Weiss Gallery will also celebrate
their, somewhat shorter, history with a loan exhibition titled The Connoisseur’s Eyeto mark their 25th anniversary. The show runs from June 24 to July 10 and will include the more important works that owner Mark Weiss has sold to UK institutions and private clients over the years, such as the gallery’s first ever sale – a portrait by Gilbert Soest, thought to be of Sir Thomas Tippins (c.1650), purchased by Tate Britain in 1986.
Alongside this will be a selection of paintings for sale, such as the intimate study of Alice More, the second wife of Sir Thomas More, from the Studio of Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1497/98-1543). It is the only surviving contemporary likeness of Alice and, although once considered to be by the hand of Holbein himself, the Weiss Gallery suspect it was more probably produced under his
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