The Property of Edward and Zoë Tennant, Innes House
Lot 22
Samuel van Hoogstraten(Dordrecht 1627-1678)Perspective of an Open Gallery ('The Tuscan Gallery')
Amended
3 July 2024, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £356,000 inc. premium
Looking for a similar item?
Our Old Master Paintings specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistAsk about this lot
Poppy Harvey-Jones
Head of Sale
Lisa Greaves
Head of Department
Samuel van Hoogstraten (Dordrecht 1627-1678)
Perspective of an Open Gallery ('The Tuscan Gallery')
oil on canvas
138.2 x 118.6cm (54 7/16 x 46 11/16in).
oil on canvas
138.2 x 118.6cm (54 7/16 x 46 11/16in).
Footnotes
Provenance
The Collection of James Duff, 2nd Earl Fife by 1808
The Collection of Thomas MacKenzie, Innes House, Elgin, by 1905
The Collection of Francis and Annie Tennant, Innes House, Elgin and thence by descent to the present owners
Exhibited
London, Matthiesen Gallery, Rembrandt's Influence in the 17th Century. Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition, 20 February - 2 April 1953, cat. no. 39
London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Orange and the Rose. Holland Britain in the Age of Observation, 22 October - 13 December 1964, cat. no. 29
Literature
Rembrandt's Influence in the 17th Century. Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition, London, 1953, exh. cat., cat. no. 39, ill.
O. Millar et al, The Orange and the Rose. Holland Britain in the Age of Observation, London, 1964, exh. cat., p. 34, cat. no. 29
W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau/Pfalz, 1983, vol. II, p.1305, cat. no. 900, ill. p. 1383
C. Brusati, Artifice and Illusion. The art and writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten, Chicago and London, 1995, pp. 97, 205, ill., fig. 57
F. Yalcin, 'Van Hoogstraten's Success in Britain', in Thijs Westersteijn (ed.), The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), Painter, Writer and Courtier, Amsterdam, 2013, p. 169, ill., fig. 71
Samuel van Hoogstraten was one of Rembrandt's most innovative pupils and among his most sought-after works today are his remarkable trompe l'oeils, or 'perspectives', such as the present painting, which is an important testament to this painter's imagination and artistic originality, reflecting his profound fascination with perspective and optical illusion.
The artist's magnum opus is a book on painting, the Introduction to the Academy of Painting, or the Visible World (or Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: anders de zichtbaere werelt, Rotterdam, 1678), which is regarded as one of the most ambitious treatises on the art of painting published in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. It covers such subjects as pictorial persuasion and illusionism, the painter's moral standards and the relation of painting to philosophy, referring to various ancient and modern authors. Hoogstraten himself defined all painting as 'a mirror of Nature, making things appear to be that are not, and deceiving in a permissible, delightful and commendable way'. He appears to have literally succeeded in this aim at the court of the Emperor Ferdinand III in Vienna, when the artist was on a tour of Europe in August 1651, and when the emperor saw one of his still-life paintings, commenting that Hoogstraten 'is the first painter who has cheated me!' (see A. Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, Amsterdam 1718, vol. II, p. 157-8).
Perhaps best known to visitors to the National Gallery in London is Hoogstraten's 'Perspective Box', or 'Peepshow' (see fig. 1). The contemporary diarist, John Evelyn commented that they "shew'd me a prety Perspective & well represented in a triangular Box, the greate Church at Harlem in Holland, to be seene thro a small hole at one of the Corners, & contrived into a hansome Cabinet. It was so rarely don, that all the Artists and Painters in Towne, came flocking to see & admire it.' The peepshow was a shortlived phenomenon in the Netherlands in the 17th century and is an aspect of Dutch artists' fascination with perspectival and optical devices. Experiments of this sort and instructional performances played an important part in the lessons given by van Hoogstraten in the teaching studio which he opened in his home sometime after his return to Dordrecht in the 1650s. When Hoogstraten later came to London to work for several years in the late 1650s and early 1660s his work was much in demand, and five pictures are known to have survived from this period, including the present work. Given London's place as a foremost centre for the Scientific Revolution, it is no coincidence that Hoogstraten's experiments with optics were met with enthusiasm by the English cognoscenti.
An intriguing question concerns the position in which such perspectives as the present work were intended to be hung. The Dyrham Park View through a House (fig. 2) now hangs at the end of a corridor at Dyrham, drawing the eye through a succession of rooms to give the illusion that the space is much longer than it really is. However, we know from Pepys's contemporary description when he saw it at Povey's London house that this was not originally the case, but that it hung in a 'closet' and was viewed through an open door (the 'closet' to which Pepys refers to being not a closet in the modern sense, but rather a small room attached to a larger room and generally used for reading, writing and receiving guests in a more informal manner). A clue when it comes to the present painting can be found in Arnold Houbraken's biography of his teacher. When summarising van Hoogstraten's work, he mentions that it consisted mainly of portraits, histories, and 'perspectives in rooms which were seen from outside through a hole made in the wall.' (see Houbraken, op. cit., vol. II, note 8) While Houbraken's description had been assumed to refer to his perspective boxes, the precise words, 'perspective in rooms' (perspektiven in Kamers) clearly refer to rooms and not boxes. Precisely how these 'perspective rooms' would have been set up is not clear from Houbraken's description unfortunately. However, Brusati has suggested that several of van Hoogstraten's extant large perspectives, such as the present work, along with Perspective Portrait of a Young Man Reading in a Courtyard (Sir John Finch?), Perspective Portrait of a Boy Catching a Bird, and Perspective with a Young Man Reading a Book may have been the kind of images to which Houbraken was referring. She writes: 'These pictures appear to have been designed to be seen from several specific viewpoints. While all these pictures appear correct if viewed frontally, they present strikingly different illusions when seen from the side.' (see C. Brusati, Artifice and Illusion. The art and writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten, Chicago and London, 1995, p. 205). Rather like the celebrated skull in Holbein's Ambassadors, in the Finch perspective the anamorphically distorted mask at the top of the arch, for example, which assumes a normal shape when seen from the left or right side, 'functions as a covert explanation of the picture's artifice, and an indication that Van Hoogstraten intended the picture to be seen from differing vantage points. When one does view these pictures from oblique angles, pillars and chairs seem to detach themselves from the picture surface, and spaces in the picture open up into depth. Whatever viewing devices may or may not have been used to look at these pictures, however, they all reveal a similar interest in integrating views and viewings, and all invite the same kind of absorptive looking as the perspective box. But they do so with one significant difference; these images instead of being a finger high, are indeed life-size. They nonetheless posit the beholder as a disembodied eye, just as the perspective box does, making the eye, rather that the body the measure of the viewer's relation to the pictured world' (see Brusati, op. cit., p. 206).
Van Hoogstraten himself, in his Inleyding boasted of his invitation to dine, along with several gentlemen from the Royal Society at the house of Thomas Povey, describing how his host delighted his guests and Povey's dinner invitation together with his taste for the artist's painted deceptions is evidence of the value he placed on the painter's skill as a fellow scientific experimenter. What Pepys admired about van Hoogstraten's pieces of perspective was their ingenuity and the surprising effect they produced, since Pepys and his Royal Society colleagues regarded painting as an art of experiment. It is clearly evident that these people did not regard there to be a gulf between the arts and sciences that is such a common attitude today (something CP Snow famously lamented in his 1959 lecture as "The Two Cultures", being a handicap to the whole of modern western society). At several points in his Inleyding van Hoogstraten represents himself as an experimental investigator of nature, calling the art of painting a 'counterfeiter' and 'investigator of visible nature'; while also explicitly identifying himself as an 'experimenter' in his chapter on recreations for the painter, in which he enumerates the games and playful artifacts devised by certain artists to stimulate their wit and refresh their powers of invention.
The surviving large-scale perspective canvases from Hoogstratens's English period show marble columned courtyards. At least some of these formed part of a series and may well have been part of a scheme of decoration commissioned from Hoogstraten by the Finch family during his stay in England. However, the best-known of his large-scale perspective paintings is the aforementioned View through a House of 1662, now at Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire. Like the latter, the present perspective is free of human inhabitants, but filled with signs of their activities. Most prominent among these are the tools of perspective – the compass and papers – lying on the table in the foreground between two empty chairs. Another large Perspective View of the Courtyard of a House at Dyrham Park is thought to be the 'Great Perspective' purchased by William Blathwayt from his uncle, Thomas Povey in the 1690s. Blathwayt's nephew and clerk, John Povey, recorded when finding an appropriate place to hang the 'Great Perspective' that 'there is a Necessity of placing it in one side of the Best Stair Case where after all by the Elevation and the proper placing of it it promises a Wonderfull Effect'.
Aside from the two paintings that now hang at Dyrham Park, it is widely accepted that van Hoogstraten painted at least four other imposing perspective views during his English period, including the present composition, which Brusati refers to in the following terms: 'One of the most curious of these is an enigmatic architectural perspective, known as the "Tuscan Gallery"' (see Brusati, op. cit., p. 97). The others are: a composition similar to the Dyrham View through a House, with less architectural perspective and a sleeping dog in the foreground, kept in a private collection; a Perspective view with a boy catching a bird belonging to the same collection (the two paintings from this collection were exhibited at Tate Britain, London on the occasion of the exhibition British Baroque: Power and Illusion in 2020, London, 2020, exh. cat., pp. 64-66 and 165, n°51 and 52); and A Perspective view with a woman reading a letter with the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague.
Intriguingly, the owner of the present painting, which matches the type of 'perspectives' that Hoogstraten painted for his London patron, Thomas Povey, is a direct descendant of William Blathwayt's wife, Anne Povey, who was Thomas Povey's sister and who owned a number of works from Povey's collection. Anne's second husband was Thomas Vivian, who was an ancestor of the present owner via Anne's son, Thomas Vivian and Lucy Glynn, through the Barons Vivian of Glynn. Thomas Povey, was, according to his fellow member of the Royal Society, 'a nice contriver of all elegancies and exceedingly formal'. Evelyn recorded his visit to Povey's house on the west side of Lincoln's Inn Fields in July 1664: 'Went to see Mr Povey's elegant house in Lincolns-Inn-Fields , where the perspective in his court, painted by Streater, is indeed excellent, with the vases painted in imitation of porphy and fountains.' That other celebrated diarist of the age, Samuel Pepys was also an admirer of Hoogstraten's work, which he mentioned on several occasions when he visited Thomas Povey's house in Lincoln's Inn. Povey, who was Secretary to the Duke of York, has been described as 'England's first colonial civil servant', being also First Treasurer to the Lords Commissioner for Tangier, a lucrative post in which he was followed by the conscientious Samuel Pepys, organiser of the English navy and frequent visitor to Povey's London residence.
The Hoogstraten perspective at Dyrham Park, which is signed and dated 1662, is generally accepted to be that described by Pepys in his diary on the 19 January 1662, when he saw it at Povey's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields after dining with him there: 'he seems to set off his rest in this plenty and the neatness of his house, which he after dinner showed me, from room to room, so beset with delicate pictures, and above all, a piece of perspective in his closett in the low parler'; and again on the 23rd January 1663, when he paid a visit to Povey: 'above all things I do most admire his piece of perspective especially, he opening me the closet door, and there I saw there is nothing but only a plain picture hung upon the wall.' And on the 29th May, 1664, Pepys wrote in his diary: 'Thence with Mr. Povy home to dinner; where extraordinary cheer. And after dinner up and down to see his house. And in a word, methinks, for his perspective upon his wall in his garden, and the springs rising up with the perspective in the little closett; his room floored above with woods of several colours, like but above the best cabinet-work I ever saw; his grotto and vault, with his bottles of wine, and a well therein to keep them cool; his furniture of all sorts; his bath at the top of his house, good pictures, and his manner of eating and drinking; do surpass all that ever I did see of one man in all my life.'
The 'perspectives in his garden' must be those which John Evelyn mentioned in his diary and there is a pair of landscapes by Robert Streeter, which now hang as overdoors at Dyrham Park which fit this description. Later in Pepys's diary he described how he accompanied Povey to Streeter's studio, where he 'found him, and Dr. Wren, and several Virtuosos, looking upon the paintings which he is making for the new Theatre at Oxford' (this will have been Streeter's painting for the ceiling of Sir Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre). Pepys originally only mentioned Streeter's pictures in the garden and Hoogstraten's 1662 picture in the closet, but the following entry records at least one further 'perspective' that Povey had subsequently commissioned by the time of Pepys's diary entry for the 18 July 1664: 'By and by comes Creed, and I out with him to Fleet Street, and he to Mr. Povy's, I to my Chancellor's, and missing him again walked to Povy's, and there saw his new perspective in his closet.' It appears that Povey was developing a taste for such perspectives. Again, on 21 Sept 1664, Pepy's writes: 'Here I was afresh delighted with Mr. Povy's house and pictures of perspective, being strange things to think how they do delude one's eye, that methinks it would make a man doubtful of swearing that ever he saw any thing.'
In his 2013 monograph on van Hoogstraten, Thijs Westersteijn writes how the present painting 'demonstrates more than the others [in this series of perspective views] how Van Hoogstraten's paintings for English patrons do not really depict Italy, but rather a vision of what the Mediterranean may have been in English eyes. We may therefore put forward the hypothesis that the Dordrecht painter adapted his works to the expectations of his patrons in Britain. This suggestion may explain the clear difference between the 1662 canvas with its Dutch flair and the more "Italianizing" pictures of the later years in England. It is certain that Van Hoogstraten could not have painted these palace views without the experience of his travels, as the architectural style of the Neo-Palladian buildings in England is very different from that of the Palladian buildings and palaces in Italy. The interior court (see F. Yalcin, 'Van Hoogstraten's Success in Britain', in Thijs Westersteijn (ed.), The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), Painter, Writer and Courtier, Amsterdam, 2013, p. 169).
The poem referred to here is Samuel van Hoogstraten's 'On D.L.v. Bos'
Guide', in: L. van den Bos, Guide to Italy, or Description of the Lands and Cities of Italy, which includes the following lines, from which it can be presumed the present work derives its traditional title of 'The Tuscan Gallery' (although the 'gallery' Hoogstraten appears to refer to here denotes 'all of Florence', rather than a particular room):
'This, I think, is the river Arno, and how pretty
is all of Florence, it seems a palace,
as a stately home for the Gods,
where Croesus's treasure fills the gallery
of the Medici princes.
What family knocks on the high temple of Fame's door
as boldly as this one?'
The present painting is a good example of how van Hoogstraten combined his interests in practical experimental concerns with his literary interests, which in Brusati's words 'define his activity as a gentleman artificer and student of nature.' (see. Brusati, op. cit., p. 109). This combination of unusual interests was expressed a few years later in the poem he published in 1669, De Vliegende Faem, met het droevig Bescheit van den Brand der Stad London ('Fleeting Fame, and the pitiful account of the Fire of the City of London'). She goes on to cite the poem in his painting treatise in the chapter on atmospheric perspective in which he discusses the optical effects of smoke, vapour, and mist which the painter must observe: 'Smoke and mist both obscure shadows more than they do light. But while I am speaking of smoke, I cannot forget that beautiful yet pitiable morning, the 12th of September, 1666. It was Sunday, and I was busy working amidst my books in White Street in London, when I became amazed how red and glowing the rays of the sun shone in my room. Whereupon I went to the window and saw that a pink smoke, which I mistook for clouds, was blowing towards the southwest.' (see. Brusati, op. cit., p. 109).
Saleroom notices
Please note that this lot will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on Samuel van Hoogstraten as part of Samuel Van Hoogstraten: A Collaborative Project. See: https://www.codart.nl/feature/curators-project/samuel-van-hoogstraten-a-collaborative-project
