Among the Old Masters lots in the coming Artcurial sale on September 15 is a picture that is easy to walk past: a winter landscape, oil on oak panel, 31.5 × 43.5 cm, catalogued Attribué à Anthonie Verstraelen and estimated at €15,000–20,000. A tree-lined road under a smoked-amber winter sky, a distant church spire, a covered wagon waiting on the right. It is the sort of quiet Dutch winter scene that hangs in a thousand drawing rooms.

Then you notice what the figures are doing. Two horsemen have wheeled to a halt in the middle of the road, and three men on foot are closing in on them with poles and long guns. This is not a skating party. It is an ambush — and, unusually, the picture told us so in its own words. When it last sold publicly, in Munich in 1937, the auction house wrote the subject on the back of the catalogue photograph: Winterlandschaft mit Überfall — winter landscape with a hold-up. That title turns out to describe far more than the painting.

A name that keeps moving

Anthonie Verstraelen (Gorinchem c. 1594 – Amsterdam 1641) was a specialist in winter scenes who worked in the orbit of Hendrick Avercamp, the great deaf master of the Dutch ice. He is a shadowy figure — no monograph, a thin and much-debated body of work, pictures that sold cheaply even in his own lifetime.

What makes this panel intriguing is that it does carry a monogram — just not Verstraelen’s. On the large tree at the right is an “HA,” the monogram associated with Avercamp himself. Over three centuries the name attached to the picture has wandered:

• HA monogram — the initials of Hendrick Avercamp, recorded on the tree

• “Netherlandish master, 17th century” — anonymous, as the Berlin museums catalogued it in 1937

• “Alsloot?” — a later pencilled guess at the Flemish painter Denis van Alsloot

• Anthonie Verstraelen — today’s attribution

Each was somebody’s best guess in a room with a picture and a deadline. The argument over who painted it is, frankly, the least remarkable thing about it.

The bank and the gallery

The remarkable thing is the provenance. It begins: Galerie Matthiesen, Berlin; deposited with the Dresdner Bank as security for art-backed loans; acquired from the Dresdner Bank in August 1935 by the Prussian State.

The Galerie Matthiesen was one of the leading dealerships of Weimar Berlin. Its owner, Franz Zatzenstein-Matthiesen, was a Jewish dealer who — like most of the trade — ran on credit, pledging pictures to the Dresdner Bank against loans. In 1933 he was forced to leave Germany, re-founding his business in London, where it survives today. He left the loans, and the pictures securing them, behind.

What happened next fills an entire scholarly book, cited in the catalogue: Lynn Rother’s Kunst durch Kredit (Berlin, 2017), which reconstructs how the Dresdner Bank came to hold some 4,400 works through years of such credit deals — a striking number of the debtors Jewish. In August 1935 the Prussian State bought the entire hoard for 7.5 million Reichsmarks, one of the largest single art transactions of the Nazi era, and distributed it among the Berlin state museums. Our little ambush in the snow (Rother, p. 403) went in with it.

Sold twice

Here the story takes a turn the tidy catalogue rather glides over. The Berlin museums did not keep the picture. Just two years later they consigned it to Julius Böhler in Munich and sold it — the RKD’s documentation cards preserve the proof, one inscribed plainly “Sale of the Staatliche Museen Berlin, Munich, 1 June 1937,” lot 697. The panel that had been swept up in a coerced mass purchase in 1935 was quietly turned back into cash across an auctioneer’s rostrum in 1937, catalogued as anonymous. Whatever wrong had been done was not undone; the picture was simply monetised again and moved on.

And move on it did. From Munich it passed to the collection of Max Vygen, reappeared at Sotheby’s London on 21 March 1973 (lot 17), was bought by the London dealers Brod Gallery, and sold on 4 April 1974 to Baron and Baronne Vaxelaire in Brussels — where it stayed, by descent, for fifty years. Long enough to become simply the winter scene over the mantel.

The reckoning, at last

Which is why one line near the end of the catalogue matters most: the picture is offered following a protocol of agreement between the current owners and the heir of the Matthiesen gallery. A private settlement — the Vaxelaire descendants and the Matthiesen heir have agreed terms and cleared the title.

It is a fitting resolution, because the Matthiesen case is not a simple tale of loot. When the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz restituted five paintings to the Matthiesen descendants in October 2024, it was careful to acknowledge both the damage of Nazi persecution and the reality of ordinary pre-1933 bank debts. Both are true, and the grey between them is why these matters end in negotiated settlements rather than verdicts. Our panel could not be part of the 2024 restitution — the museum had sold it in 1937 — so its reckoning came privately, ninety years on.

And so a small winter landscape comes to market with a clear conscience and, at €15,000–20,000, a measured estimate. It has been attributed to three different painters, seized in all but name, sold off by the very museums that absorbed it, and passed through four countries before an agreement finally set it right. All the while it has been showing us an ambush on a lonely winter road — a robbery. Its seventeenth-century painter meant it as a traveller’s fright, a frisson for the buyer safe indoors. He could not have known how exactly his little Überfall would come to describe the picture’s own long journey.

Swanevelt, Herman van (1603–1655). (Landscape with several people walking past a Roman tomb). Drawing, pen and sepia ink, pencil, 15.7 × 25.5 cm, monogrammed ‘H.S.’ in lower right corner. Foxed. Estimate: €200-300

Intrigued by the work I started my research journey in the usual place, the RKD-site, to see if any clues would emerge.

Two drawings, mirrored

The first thing I noticed was that the drawing had a near-twin. The RKD’s online database has a sheet — rkd.nl/images/103298 — by Swanevelt: same composition, same medium, same dimensions. A Roman tomb in a landscape, three figures examining its reliefs, travellers approaching on a path. Trees framing the view. The Italian campagna stretching into the distance. Except it was the mirror. The tomb stood on the left of the composition; the RKD sheet’s tomb stood on the right. Everything reversed. The drawing was exhibited in Teyler’s Museum in 2000 and is (was?) part of the John and Marine van Vlissingen Foundation.

The mirror relationship is the first thing the Old Master drawings literature trains you to notice, because it usually points to printmaking. If two drawings of the same composition exist in opposite orientation, one of them is probably a copy made after a print — because the standard etching process reverses the artist’s drawing on the plate.

So I went looking for the print.

A French publisher and a contested attribution

It surfaced quickly. Claude Goyrand (c. 1618–1665) etched the composition; Pierre Mariette I published it in Paris with the king’s privilège. It is catalogued as Hollstein “after Swanevelt” 25 and Bartsch 320–322. Impressions are in the Rijksmuseum, the National Gallery of Art Washington, the British Museum, and many other major print collections.

The plate carries a slightly misleading inscription — “H. Swaneveltus inu. et sculp.” — claiming Swanevelt as both designer and etcher. Mariette was selling to a public who knew Swanevelt as a major Dutch Italianate name in Paris; invenit et sculpsit raised the price. Bartsch later corrected the record: Goyrand etched the plate, Swanevelt only made the design drawing. The print is one of a pair. The Rijksmuseum’s catalogue title for the series is Twee Landschappen — Two Landscapes. Two compositions, sold together.

This was the first time the research opened up. A single drawing on the Bubb Kuyper desk had become a node in a wider network: a Dutch Italianate composition, etched in Paris by a French printmaker, published with royal privilege, distributed across Europe.

Finding the pendant

If the print is one of a pair, where’s the second drawing?

That was the next question, and the RKD answered it. A reference photograph at imageslite/953044 shows two drawings mounted side by side on a single old collector’s mount. The top drawing is the tomb composition; the bottom is a different but visibly related Italianate landscape with a hilltop town. The mount is inscribed “Herman Swanevelt” in an old hand at the upper right.

The bottom drawing — the pendant — turned out to be in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, inv. 24344. Anne-Charlotte Steland’s 2010 catalogue raisonné lists it as Z 1.48 and describes it as the design study for Goyrand’s second print of the pair, Hollstein 26. So now there were four objects on the table: the Bubb Kuyper drawing, the Vlissingen mirror sheet, the Utrecht pendant, and the printed pair by Goyrand.

Richardson Senior

This was the moment I sat down properly.

The Centraal Museum had acquired the pendant from an anonymous sale at Sotheby Mak van Waay, Amsterdam, on 15 November 1983, lot 221. The 1983 sale catalogue survives in the RKD’s documentation file. It reads:

Jonathan Richardson Senior. The English portraitist and connoisseur, one of the greatest drawings collectors of the early eighteenth century. Died 1745; his immense collection dispersed at Cock’s sale of February 1747. His marks — Lugt 2169 cited here, also Lugt 2183 and 2184 — are among the most prized in the field. Sheets with Richardson provenance still anchor the top of dealer catalogues.

The mount with the “Herman Swanevelt” inscription, the HTB collector’s stamp on its verso (a baronial coronet over an interlaced HTB — I haven’t identified it yet, the Fondation Custodia in Paris will help), the historic pair-status — all of that sits in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century chain that I’m still mapping. But the Richardson line is locked in for the pendant.

The obvious first question is whether the Richardson chain extends to my drawing too, since the two were mounted as a pair. I’ll come back to that.

The orientation problem

Here is where the research started to twist.

If the Bubb Kuyper drawing is the companion of a documented Hollstein 26 design study, the obvious hypothesis is that it’s the design study for Hollstein 25 — the other print of the Twee Landschappen pair. But there’s a problem. The standard etching process reverses the drawing on the plate. So if my drawing were the design source, it should be mirrored from the printed image. It isn’t. The tomb in my drawing is on the left; the tomb in Goyrand’s etching is on the left. Same orientation.

The Vlissingen drawing — mirror to the Bubb Kuyper, mirror to the print’s orientation — is the one that looks like a design study under standard printmaking convention. I spent a day building an alternative explanation. Maybe Goyrand counter-traced — flipping the design before etching it onto the plate, so the print would preserve the artist’s original orientation. Counter-tracing is documented for reproductive prints where the publisher wanted the print to look “as the artist drew it.” The Mariette inscription, claiming Swanevelt as etcher of his own design, would be marketing for exactly that. It held together. Under counter-tracing, my drawing could plausibly be the design study; the Vlissingen sheet could be a workshop copy; the pair on the mount made sense as someone’s careful assembly of two related autograph designs.

Then I found the 1983 catalogue entry.

“A study in reverse”

Four words in a forty-three-year-old auction catalogue overturned the dossier.

The 1983 Sotheby Mak van Waay cataloguer described the pendant — the documented Hollstein 26 design study, the sheet that anchored the whole reading — as “a study in reverse for a print.” In auction-catalogue language, “in reverse” means mirrored from the print. Standard direct-trace process. No counter-tracing.

If the design study for Hollstein 26 is mirrored from its print, the design study for Hollstein 25 should be mirrored from its print too. That isn’t the Bubb Kuyper drawing. That is the Vlissingen drawing.

The Bubb Kuyper drawing — in the same orientation as the printed etching — is therefore not the design source. It is something else.

The most coherent reading: it is an autograph repetition by Swanevelt of his own published composition, made after the print, in the print’s orientation. The “H.S.” monogram in the lower right supports that — design studies are typically unsigned; finished autograph repetitions are routinely monogrammed as a sign-off gesture. Swanevelt is documented to have made finished autograph drawings of his successful published compositions for the collector market.

That is a step down from “Goyrand’s design source.” It is not a step down from “important sheet.” Autograph repetitions by major Italianate masters of their own published designs are still serious objects, and the documented pair-history with the Utrecht pendant still places the drawing in a coherent corpus. But the conclusion changed materially on the strength of four words in a 1983 catalogue.

But…

Just before I sat down to write this article, I looked again at the RKD mount photograph and at the Bubb Kuyper catalogue image of the Bubb Kuyper drawing.

The figures match. The tomb matches. The medium matches. But the right edge doesn’t.

The Bubb Kuyper drawing (left) has a substantial framing tree on the right side of the composition — a trunk and foliage extending the full height of the sheet. The drawing on the RKD historical mount appears to end at the two-traveller group, without the tree. The dimensions differ too: the pendant is recorded at 154 × 246 mm; my Bubb Kuyper drawing is 157 × 255 mm.

A centimetre, roughly. Just enough for a tree. Are they the same drawing, photographed at different framings — and the historical mount happens to cover that strip on the right? Or are they two different drawings, both Swanevelt-school, both of the same composition, but separately produced?

I don’t know yet. I’ll know when the drawing physically arrives and I can compare it to the mount, look for the tree under any overlap, take it to raking light, check the dimensions edge to edge. What it brought me so far is a well-spent friday, and an exciting journey into Herman van Swanevelt.

Among the offerings in De Zwaan Auctioneers’ upcoming spring sale in Amsterdam is a half-length panel measuring 72 × 60 cm: Portret van Geeraert van Schoonhoven (1567–1630), bewindhebber van de VOC-Kamer Zeeland. It is catalogued as “Toegeschreven aan Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt (1567–1641)” and comes from the private collection of Jacob Gelt Dekker.

The Painting and Its Subject

The work shows the sitter in the standard three-quarter pose favoured by Mierevelt: dark attire, a prominent white cartwheel ruff, and a coat of arms in the upper left confirming the identification. Geeraert van Schoonhoven was a senior director of the Zeeland chamber of the Dutch East India Company during the critical early decades of Dutch overseas expansion. Portraits of VOC bewindhebbers from this period are historically interesting, reflecting the merchant elite that powered the Golden Age.

Stylistically, the panel displays the crisp linear modelling of the face, precise rendering of the lace ruff, restrained palette, and warm dark background typical of Mierevelt’s workshop practice around 1620–1630. Both artist and sitter were born in 1567, making the chronology a comfortable fit.

Attribution History and RKD Documentation

RKD records reveal an instructive attribution journey. Early 20th-century auction appearances (notably at Frederik Muller in December 1902 and again in 1935) carried an attribution to Bartholomeus van der Helst (c. 1613–1670). This was a common enough error at the time: van der Helst’s smoother, more polished Amsterdam manner was fashionable, and the general “Dutch Golden Age portrait” aesthetic invited the confusion. Later scholarly review, reflected in the RKD cards, correctly shifted the painting back into the Mierevelt orbit. The linear precision, panel support, and overall restraint align far more closely with the Delft master than with the younger Haarlem/Amsterdam artist.

Mierevelt ran one of the most productive portrait workshops of the period. He and his assistants produced numerous variants and replicas for a clientele that valued dignified likeness above artistic bravura. The cautious “toegeschreven aan” in the current catalogue is appropriate auction-house language for a work that shows strong workshop characteristics without a visible signature or ironclad provenance chain to the master’s hand.

Provenance and Market Context

The recent ownership by Jacob Gelt Dekker — a collector known for his interest in Dutch history and founder of the Kura Hulanda Museum — provides a respectable modern provenance. Earlier passage through Dutch trade channels in the first half of the twentieth century is documented but not especially distinguished.

In the current market, good Mierevelt-attributed or studio male portraits of this format and quality typically realise in the low- to mid-thousands of euros at Dutch auctions. The VOC association and named sitter add modest historical premium, while the estimate of €2,000–€4,000 reflects realistic expectations for a solid but not exceptional example. Comparable workshop pieces have performed steadily in this range in recent years.

This is a competent, period-authentic Dutch Golden Age portrait that fits squarely within Mierevelt’s established production. It offers an accessible entry into early 17th-century Dutch portraiture and the world of the VOC elite, without claiming masterpiece status. Pre-sale viewing at De Zwaan is recommended for a direct assessment of condition and surface quality.

On 21 May, Lempertz in Cologne will offer a refined and characteristic Pieter de Hooch from his mature Amsterdam years. Titled Woman Sewing by a Window with a Maidservant and Child (signed and dated lower right “P. Hooch f. 1670 (?)”), the 68 × 58.4 cm canvas carries an estimate of €120,000–140,000 and currently stands at €90,000 with no bids recorded yet. For collectors of Dutch Golden Age genre, this is one of the more appealing de Hoochs to appear on the market in recent seasons.

The Painting: Light, Status, and Maternal Tenderness

De Hooch’s genius lies in his ability to suffuse everyday domestic scenes with poetry. A well-dressed young mother in a gold-colored jacket trimmed with white fur and a vivid red skirt sits at an open window, absorbed in her needlework. A maidservant, basket in hand and cloak over her arm, gently leads the child toward the door. The little boy glances back at his mother with a smile of anticipation; the mother returns the affection with quiet contentment while never lifting her eyes from her sewing. A small dog watches attentively.

The real protagonist in this work is the light. Sunlight pours through the leaded casements, catching the glint of window mullions, the warm red-brick façade and tree visible outside, and the subtle heraldic device in the glass — a virtuoso passage that simultaneously demonstrates technical brilliance and signals the elevated social standing of the household. The tiled floor, the fall of fabric, the differentiated illumination on each figure: all are handled with the crisp yet atmospheric touch that defines de Hooch at his best.

Peter Sutton, the leading scholar on the artist, has repeatedly emphasised de Hooch’s originality in pairing orderly, light-filled interiors with intimate domestic themes, particularly the mother-child bond. In this respect the present work is exemplary. The absence of men (busy with commerce) throws the harmonious management of the prosperous household into relief — a theme de Hooch made very much his own after his earlier Delft period.

Provenance and Scholarly Pedigree

The painting’s history is excellent. It passed through distinguished collections including the Marquis de Crillon, Princess de Polignac, William McKay, E.S. Borthwick-Norton, and the important Dutch collection of D. de Geus van den Heuvel. It has been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902, in Delft in 1962, and elsewhere, and appears in all the major catalogues: Hofstede de Groot (nos. 12 & 68), Valentiner (no. 110), and Sutton 1980 (no. 145). The verso carries the expected labels confirming this unbroken and transparent chain of ownership.

Market Context and Assessment

De Hooch’s auction record stands well above the current estimate: top interiors from the 1660s have exceeded €1 million in strong markets, though smaller or later works trade in the mid-to-high six figures. This 1670 example sits comfortably in the middle of his Amsterdam production — not one of the absolute Delft masterpieces, but of fine quality, good size, and with an appealing narrative. The relining is old but stable; the surface appears well preserved with the characteristic subtle craquelure of the period.

At €120–140k estimate, the painting looks sensibly pitched for today’s market, where Dutch Golden Age pictures of this calibre continue to find ready homes among both European trade and private collectors seeking museum-quality works with solid provenance. Pre-bidding will start at €90,000.

For those who appreciate the quiet dignity, masterful light, and human warmth of Dutch 17th-century genre, this is a rare opportunity. Pieter de Hooch may never command Vermeer prices, but his best interiors occupy a special place in the canon — and this one is a very good example.

Something to look forward to on May 21 at Lempertz. I will be watching the sale with interest.

Last week I clicked into the catalogue of a Stair, a regional auction house in Hudson, New York, and found a small picture on copper, eighteen and a half by twenty-three and a half cm, of a Mediterranean harbour with a Spanish galley, a man-o-war, and an Apollo fountain, signed and dated in the lower right ABRAAM CASEMBROOT IN ET P Ao 1646. The catalogue line read “Attributed to Abraham Casembrot (c. 1583–c. 1658): Harbor at Messina.” The estimate was eight hundred to twelve hundred dollars.

The estimate, as of this morning, is no longer the relevant number. The current online bid is $7,500, with two days still to go before the sale. Five distinct bidders are on the lot and they probably know that this is the real deal.

The painting on the block is the artist’s last known dated work — catalogue number A4 in the only modern monograph on him, Annemarie Beunen’s article in Oud Holland of 1995 — and the artist is one of the strangest, least-studied, and most quietly significant Northern painters of the seventeenth century. He left four paintings to the world. He worked not in Rome, not in Naples, but in Messina, on the eastern shore of Sicily, where he eventually served as Dutch consul. Almost nobody outside a narrow Dutch art-historical circle has heard of him.

A Bruges merchant’s son who went south

Casembroot was born in Bruges, sometime before 1593 — the parish records don’t survive — into a city by then well past its medieval glory but still tied, by old merchant networks, to the long-distance Mediterranean trade. The Zwin had silted up; the great Hanseatic Kontor was closed; the trade had moved first to Antwerp and then to Amsterdam. But Bruges merchants kept houses in Sicily and in the Levant well into the seventeenth century. There was still a Bruges colony of weavers, ship-chandlers, and silk-buyers in Messina when Casembroot would have been a young man, and there was a regular packet line from Flanders to the Sicilian ports. He came from the network.

What is unusual is what he did with it. From the 1610s through the 1670s, a steady line of Dutch and Flemish painters made the trip to Italy: Cornelis van Poelenburch and Bartholomeus Breenbergh in the 1610s and 1620s, Pieter van Laer (il Bamboccio) in the 1620s and 1630s, then Jan Both, Jan Asselijn, Nicolaes Berchem, Adam Pynacker, Johannes Lingelbach. They went to Rome, joined the Bentvueghels club, painted the Campagna and the ports of Civitavecchia and Anzio, and most of them went home. They sold their Italianate pictures to Dutch collectors who wanted Mediterranean light at Amsterdam prices — a self-conscious foreign genre, made for export.

Casembroot fits none of that pattern. He did not go to Rome. He went south of Rome — well south, past Naples, all the way down to the Strait of Messina, which in the early seventeenth century was the cosmopolitan port for Sicily’s grain trade, the silk trade with the Levant, and a busy traffic in slaves, fish, and silver. He did not go home. He died in Messina in 1658, two years after the great plague of 1656 that emptied the city. His estate was inventoried by the Spanish vice-regal administration. The few surviving documents Beunen unearthed show him not as a cottage painter making homesick vedute for visitors but as an established figure of the Messinese mercantile community, a married man with a household, eventually serving as the Dutch consul in Messina — the local representative for Dutch shipping in one of the busiest ports of the Western Mediterranean.

That biography reframes everything else. The harbour scenes are not exotic capricci assembled in a workshop in Haarlem from sketches and engravings; they are the work of a man who lived on the waterfront of one of the busiest ports in Europe and who knew, professionally, the ships, the Spanish galleys, the feluche, the guzzi, and the local fishing economy. He is the only Northern painter who can be said to have worked from inside a Sicilian port economy, rather than visiting it. That fact alone — that one painter sat at one specific desk on one specific quay, certifying manifests for Dutch ships — is the thread you pull on if you want to understand why his pictures look the way they do.

Four paintings in the world

His surviving painted oeuvre, on Beunen’s reckoning, comes to four pictures. Not four hundred. Four.

Two of them are small early coppers in private hands in Amsterdam: Caulking a Ship in a Harbour and Ships off a Mountainous Coast with a Fort, each thirteen by twenty centimetres, monogrammed but not fully signed, made probably in the late 1620s or early 1630s before Casembroot had fully resolved his manner. They are pendants. They are charming, modest, and (forgive me) not the reason to know this artist.

The third — The Swordfish Hunt in the Strait of Messina, 1644, oil on canvas, a meter and a half tall — is in the Museo di San Martino in Naples and is the reason. It is a major picture, ambitious, finished, and deeply local: a record of the mattanza, the technique of harpooning swordfish in the channel between Sicily and Calabria, done on a scale and with a directness that no Dutch contemporary attempted. It is what Casembroot is when he is fully himself.

The fourth is the picture is the current one. Same artist, two years on, last dated work, on copper at the more confident size of about nineteen by twenty-three centimetres, with the fully written ABRAAM CASEMBROOT IN ET P Ao 1646 — invenit et pinxit, “invented and painted it” — signature in the lower right. Beunen describes it as “the most harmonious in terms of composition, use of colour, and depth” of the four. By her reckoning, on the existing evidence, this is the most resolved painting Casembroot ever made.

A fifth picture, a Panorama of Messina in the Museo Regionale at Messina, Beunen accepts as probably autograph but does not include in her A list. Beyond that there is nothing — no other painting that scholarship currently signs over to him with confidence.

The Ruffo node

Beunen makes a careful, persuasive case that Casembroot worked within the orbit of Don Antonio Ruffo, the Messinese nobleman whose collection at his death in 1678 contained close to four hundred pictures, including three commissioned works by Rembrandt: the Aristotle with a Bust of Homer of 1653, now at the Metropolitan Museum, and two pendant philosophers commissioned by post over a span of years. Ruffo is the great test case for the porousness of seventeenth-century markets. He collected Northern painting on a Sicilian island in a Spanish vice-realm, and he commissioned Rembrandt by post.

Casembroot was the Northern painter on the spot. The 1644 Swordfish Hunt, now in Naples, almost certainly came out of the Ruffo orbit; the documentary trail on its early provenance points that way. So we have, in this very small painted oeuvre, a Bruges-born Catholic painter who lived as Dutch consul in Messina, mixed with the same patron’s circle as Rembrandt, and made pictures of the working life of the Strait of Messina that nobody else in the Northern tradition was equipped to make. That is not a footnote. That is a node.

It is also, I think, why Casembroot’s small surviving body of paintings rewards close attention out of all proportion to its size. Most minor seventeenth-century Northern painters are minor in the way one expects: provincial, derivative, overlapping with a school. Casembroot is minor in a different way — he is a one-off, geographically and biographically isolated, working at the intersection of two patronage worlds (Sicilian and Northern) that almost no other painter spanned. The smallness of the oeuvre (next to the paintings 32 drawings survived) is a function of his isolation, not of his quality, and the isolation is exactly what makes him interesting.

Circling back to the painting on offer here. The recent past includes a sale at Christie’s in 1987 ($22,000), and this puts the current price into perspective. The $800-1,200 estimate is way too low, and I could see it moving much closer to the 1987 before auction ends. Two days left…

There’s a moment, every so often, when you look at an auction catalogue and the picture won’t let you go.

This week it was a lot at Auctions at Showplace, a Manhattan estate-sale house whose catalogue described it efficiently and a little dismissively: “Figures Seated at a Draped Table in an Interior Scene” by Pieter Willemsz van der Stock, with a perfunctory note that the staffage was “completed by another hand.” Estimate: $2,000–4,000.

The picture itself shows a Dutch classical interior — tall mullioned windows throwing raking light across a black-and-white checkered marble floor, paneled walls articulated with pilasters, a centred niche between two columns, a long draped table — populated by three figures. A woman in citrine yellow and olive green sits at the near edge; a man with a viol stands partly behind her; a bearded gentleman with a falling-band collar holds the far side.

Van der Stock made his living painting these imaginary perspectief interiors — classical architectural fantasies that decorated the homes of mid-17th-century Amsterdam burghers. His autograph oeuvre is small. Barely five of his works have ever passed through Christie’s. The 2024 sale of an unstaffaged interior in Paris brought €30,240; in 2018, a signed version from the Eric Albada Jelgersma collection cleared £32,500 in London. So far, so familiar.

But that one Showplace sentence — “staffage completed by another hand” — turns out to be the most interesting line in the catalogue, and the most underwhelming.

Because the RKD record in The Hague adds two words that change everything: mogelijk Duyster. Possibly Duyster.

Willem Cornelisz. Duyster (1599–1635) is a name that haunts Dutch genre painting. He died of plague in Amsterdam at thirty-six, leaving behind a small body of crisp, economically observed musical companies and guardroom scenes — the kind of figures that dealers chase and museums catalogue. If the staffage is his, two things follow. First, this is not a later “improvement” of an empty architectural panel — it is a contemporary collaboration, executed before 1635, during both painters’ working lives. Second, it places the picture in the well-documented Dutch tradition of architecture-painters teaming with figure-specialists — Van Bassen with Esaias van de Velde, Van Delen with Palamedesz, Steenwijck with Frans Francken. Pairings the market has always treated as genuinely scarce.

The attribution is M. de Kinkelder’s, an RKD researcher whose opinions carry institutional weight. It is hedged — mogelijk, possibly, not settled — but the proposal sits, formally, in the Netherlands’ principal art-historical archive. The Showplace cataloguer either didn’t look, or didn’t care.

There is one final piece, and it is a humbling one. The picture was already at Christie’s once. On 26 February 1997, Christie’s East offered it as Lot 36, estimated $3,000–4,000. It sold for $1,725.

That single line, quietly recorded on the RKD card, anchors the picture’s market more honestly than any modern speculation could. The market has already opined. What has changed in the intervening twenty-nine years is the scholarship: the Van der Stock attribution has firmed up, the Duyster suggestion has been entered, and the 2018 and 2024 results have shown that the artist’s market is real. None of that guarantees a different outcome this time.

But it does mean the picture deserves a second look. The catalogue line “by another hand” is the kind of phrase that buries a painting. Mogelijk Duyster is the kind that brings one back.

On 14 May, it goes under the hammer again. I’ll be watching.

On 28 April 2026, Vienna’s Palais Dorotheum will feature what I believe will be one of the season’s most compelling Old Masters: a large autograph fragment by Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Magdalene (c. 1615–1618), oil on canvas, 148 × 111 cm, still in its handsome Florentine 17th-century carved and gilded frame. Estimated at €100-150,000, the masterpiece immediately shows what it is missing..

The head and upper torso of the saint – the emotional centre of the composition – were cut from the canvas under unclear circumstances, almost certainly during the chaos and looting of postwar Berlin. For years the painting lay rolled in a cellar in a German private collection before being carefully restored. In the catalogue photos the
large rectangular void is discreetly masked with neutral fabric, yet the surviving lower two-thirds retain striking presence and painterly quality.

Understanding the Two Versions

For context, the complete and best-known version of this subject hangs in Florence’s Galleria Palatina at Palazzo Pitti. There, the richly dressed Magdalene turns her gaze upward in spiritual ecstasy, one hand modestly on her breast, the other near a mirror reflecting her former worldly beauty, with a skull as memento mori and the ointment jar placed prominently in the foreground.

The Dorotheum fragment is an autograph replica – meaning Gentileschi herself painted it – of that Pitti picture. Roberto Contini first recognised it as such in 2011, and Riccardo Lattuada has fully endorsed the attribution, dating it to Artemisia’s productive Florentine period. The two canvases are nearly identical in size, but Gentileschi introduced several thoughtful variations, revealing her working method: she often began with cartoons inherited from her father Orazio, then refined details for each version.

Key differences visible here include:

• More dynamic and fluid rendering of the yellow silk drapery

• A shifted, more dramatic position of the ornate red chair

• Elaborate sleeves on the white blouse (the yellow bodice is no longer visible)

• A stronger gesture: the surviving hand actively pushes away the mirror, emphasising rejection of vanity

• The ointment jar moved to the background left and given richer decoration

• Addition of a gold chain on the table and a green fringed cloth

• Intricate acanthus-tendril pattern along the hem of the yellow gown (more detailed than the sketched version in the Pitti picture)

Technical analysis by Gianluca Poldi supports the attribution with typical pentimenti (changes) in the foot and wrist, plus a consistent 17th-century palette of lead-tin yellow, vermilion, ultramarine and red lake. The looser brushwork in the yellow dress even hints at Venetian influences from the Medici collections.

The Power of Absence

The painting is undeniably damaged, with a significant portion of the central figure missing. At the same time, this loss adds a distinct layer of storytelling and visual drama. As noted in the catalogue, the absence of the face creates a visceral impact that some viewers may find reminiscent of contemporary conceptual approaches. Riccardo Lattuada draws parallels with Emilio Isgrò’s creative erasures, Rachel Whiteread’s explorations of negative space, and Edmund de Waal’s installations, where gaps and absence can become as expressive as the forms that remain. The opulent surviving drapery and symbols of worldly luxury heighten the theme of renunciation, even as the work bears the clear marks of its history.

Provenance and Market Context

Provenance traces to Dr. Alfred and Clara Berliner in Berlin, with descent through heirs and private Berlin collections since the mid-1960s. The fragment was exhibited in the landmark 2011–2012 Milan show Artemisia Gentileschi. Storia di una Passione (cat. no. 12).

This offering comes at a strong moment for Gentileschi, with recent high prices and institutional acquisitions sharpening collector interest. A large-scale, scholar-endorsed early replica with such a layered survival story is rare on the open market.

The €100,000–150,000 estimate appears measured – realistic given the condition, yet with genuine upside from the narrative power, exhibition history, and the artist’s rising momentum. What will the market decide on April 28?

In the small but vivid world of Dutch Golden Age genre painting, Gerrit Lundens (1622–after 1683) occupies a delightful niche. Best known today for his meticulous reduced copy after Rembrandt’s Night Watch (now on loan to the Rijksmuseum), Lundens was a prolific painter of intimate domestic and festive scenes—weddings, fairgrounds, barn interiors, and street processions—that borrowed compositional tricks from his famous civic-guard portrait. A fresh addition to this oeuvre has just surfaced: Bildnis eines Knaben im Stall mit zwei Ziegen (Portrait of a Boy in the Stable with Two Goats), an oil-on-panel measuring a cosy 43.2 × 35.4 cm, offered as lot 6059 in Koller Auktionen’s online Old Master & 19th-century Paintings sale (estimate CHF 3,000–4,000).

The scene is disarmingly straightforward yet full of quiet charm. A young boy stands in a rustic stable, flanked by two goats that nuzzle or stand alert beside him. The setting is humble—wooden beams, straw, soft diffused light—but Lundens treats it with the same careful observation he lavished on more crowded compositions. The boy’s pose feels natural, almost portrait-like, while the animals add a touch of everyday rural life that was hugely popular with Amsterdam’s burgher collectors. Small panels like this were Lundens’s bread-and-butter; he created a name with these cabinet-sized works that could hang in modest parlours or be collected alongside larger history pieces.

Harriet Stoop-de Meester’s 2020 study (published in The Rijksmuseum Bulletin) highlights how Lundens repeatedly mined the Night Watch for compositional ideas—crowd control, dramatic lighting, foreground figures silhouetted against lighter backgrounds—and recycled them across at least ten derivatives: five wedding scenes, two fairs, a guardhouse, even a procession with Zwarte Piet. This stable boy fits squarely into that pattern. The intimate scale, the subtle modelling of faces and fabrics, and the way the goats’ pale coats contrast with darker shadows all echo the refined technique seen in his signed The Fair-Goers (private collection) and The Wedding of 1649. Lundens was no mere copyist; he was a skilled genre specialist who absorbed Rembrandt’s lessons and turned them into saleable, accessible pictures for the open market.

Provenance is clean and straightforward: it comes from a private Swiss collection, and in recent cataloguing by Koller Dr Eddy Schavemaker made the attribution to Lundens. Condition notes mention the expected fine craquelure, some localised losses, and a yellowed varnish.

At CHF 3,000–4,000 the estimate feels reasonable for a fully attributed Lundens of this quality. His auction track record shows small genre panels consistently finding homes in the low-to-mid thousands, especially when they carry that unmistakable Dutch warmth and charm like this work. For collectors seeking an affordable, characterful and high-quality work, this stable boy with his two goats is a rare treat—intimate,
well-observed, and a perfect miniature window onto 17th-century Amsterdam life.
The only auction by Koller ends soon…

Today I am presenting a painting that has seen more history than most history books. It’s smaller than an iPad mini – 17 × 13 cm of oil on copper – and it’s signed Eglon vander neer f in the bottom right corner. Painted in 1691, it shows Mary Magdalene in full repentance mode: tears glistening on her cheek, skull in one hand, ointment jar on the ledge, crimson robe slipping off one shoulder like she’s halfway between a sinner and a saint. The copper glows from within, the brushwork is so fine you can count the individual silk threads. It’s quiet, intimate, and heartbreakingly beautiful. But the real story isn’t the tears on her face. It’s everything this little panel has survived.

Eglon Hendrik van der Neer (1634–1703) wasn’t exactly a household name then and he still isn’t now, but wasn’t unsuccessful either. Son of landscape painter Aert van der Neer, he trained in the Dutch “fine painting” tradition, then did what any ambitious 17th-century artist did: followed the money and the faith. He bounced from Amsterdam to The Hague, then packed up for Brussels when the Spanish Habsburgs were in charge and became court painter. By the 1690s he had moved to Düsseldorf to work for the Elector Palatine, churning out elegant portraits and devotional scenes for Catholic patrons. This Magdalene comes straight from that Düsseldorf period –the moment he was blending Dutch precision with the emotional punch the Counter-Reformation loved.

For the next two centuries the painting lived the quiet life of royal property. It belonged to the House of Cumberland — the Ernst Augustus branch of the Hanoverian royal family (the same line that produced the Kings of Hanover after the personal union with Britain ended). It appears in their inventories as early as 1801–03 and was probably part of the museum the family started in the early 1860s, only years before the House of Hanover was annexed by Prussia and the collection was placed under the supervision of the City of Hannover.

The work is clearly listed in the 1905 catalogue of the Fideikommiss-Galerie of the Gesamthaus Braunschweig-Lüneburg (catalogue no. 239, then timidly called “follower of Frans van Mieris the Elder”). Then, in April 1926, the family sold off several pieces of the Fideikommiss-Galerie at Cassirer & Helbing in Berlin. Lot 97 (catalogued as “attributed to Frans van Mieris the Younger”) was bought by a private collector living in the eastern part of Germany. It sat out the entire Second World War without a scratch, but peace brought a different kind of trouble.

In the early 1950s the young GDR decided that even safe-deposit boxes were bourgeois luxuries. The “second wave” of expropriations swept up private art collections, and the Magdalene was confiscated and shipped to the Kunstsammlungen Gera in Thuringia. For fifty years it lived as state property – museum inventory number and all. Then came German reunification and the long, slow process of restitution. In 2003 the painting was finally returned to the heirs of the 1926 buyer.

The verso of this work is a piece of storytelling art in itself. Old labels dating back to the 1803 inventory, the Cumberland era, the Fideikommiss listing and the Gera period connect not only almost two centuries but also remnants of a completely different Europe. It is a fascinating history lesson in itself.

The 17 × 13 cm Penitent Mary Magdalene is listed in Eddy Schavemaker’s catalogue raisonné, part of a selected group of circa 150 works officially attributed to Eglon van der Neer. Only seven or eight works are known to be painted on copper, making this a very rare piece indeed.

If you ever get the chance to own something like this – something that has travelled through three centuries of European madness and still looks like it was painted yesterday – grab it. Because paintings like this don’t just hang on walls. They carry stories. And this one still isn’t finished.

Visit the artwork on my website oldmastersalive.com

In 1938, when Adolphe Schloss’s widow Lucie died, the children faced an alarming situation as war clouds gathered over Europe. The threat from Nazi Germany was imminent, and the position of Jewish families—and their possessions—was increasingly at risk. With tensions rising throughout 1939, the family decided to move the collection to a safer location. On 19 August 1939, 333 paintings were packed into crates and transported by truck to the remote Château de Chambon, an anonymous castle deep in the Corrèze department of unoccupied France. The aim was simple: better safe than sorry.

The decision proved wise. When Germany occupied northern France (including Paris) in 1940, systematic seizures of Jewish collections began almost immediately. While major state collections such as the Louvre were initially treated with more caution, private collections belonging to wealthy Jewish owners became prime targets. The Jeu de Paume museum in central Paris was repurposed as a central warehouse for looted art before many works were shipped to Germany. Hermann Göring, a passionate art collector, frequently visited to select pieces for his own collection. I highly recommend the fascinating memoir Le Front de l’art by Rose Valland, the French curator who played a pivotal role in tracking and recovering looted works after the war.

The Schloss collection was high on the Nazis’ list. Unlike families who fled hastily and left their collections unprotected, the Schloss heirs had acted proactively, making the hunt far more difficult. It took the Germans years of searching, pressure, and even the arrest of Lucien Schloss (one of the sons) before they finally located the crates in early April 1943—nearly three years after the occupation of France. In August 1943 the collection was transferred to Paris after protracted negotiations between the Vichy regime and the Germans over its division. A deal was reached: 49 works remained in France (to be added to the Louvre), 252 were destined for Germany, and the remaining pieces—some with dubious attributions—were acquired by intermediaries involved in the transaction.

The 252 works selected for Germany had an ambitious destination: Adolf Hitler’s planned Führermuseum in Linz, his hometown. On 2 December 1943 they were shipped to the Führerbau in Munich, a temporary depot awaiting the museum’s opening. Our small de Moor painting, measuring only 12 × 11 cm, travelled in crate number 12. History took a different course. The Linz museum was never completed. In the chaotic final days of the Nazi regime, the Führerbau depot was looted by local civilians on 29–30 April 1945, and many works—including the de Moor—disappeared. Soon after the war, efforts to locate and restitute Nazi-looted art began, a process that continues to this day. Many pieces remain missing. In the case of the 252 Schloss paintings sent to Germany, 98 were recovered and returned to the family in the first five to seven postwar years, thanks in large part to Rose Valland’s meticulous records.

Yet memory fades, and dozens of works are still unaccounted for. Every so often a painting resurfaces. In 2025 a small group of seven Old Masters was restituted to the Schloss heirs. The group included works by lesser-known but intriguing artists such as Ary (or Arie) de Vois, Joost van Geel, Willem Kalf—and a charming, well-dressed gentleman by Karel de Moor.

Justice, at last, for this diminutive masterpiece after its tumultuous eighty-year journey..

Please check the JDCRP's pilot project on the Schloss Collection: https://pilot-demo.jdcrp.org/collection/schloss/ for all the extensive research

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In the upcoming “Tableaux et Dessins Anciens” sale at Tajan on December 17, 2025, lot 6 features a pair of oil-on-oak panels by the Flemish painter Martin Ryckaert (1587–1631). Previously held by the Dayton Art Institute, these works are now deaccessioned and offered with an estimate of €1,500–€2,500. This presents an opportunity for collectors interested in early Baroque landscape on an accessible price point.

Ryckaert, active in Antwerp, was known for his detailed woodland scenes influenced by Gillis van Coninxloo and the emerging Baroque style. These panels, dated circa 1620–1630, measure 28 x 19.7 cm (11 x 7.8 in.) each and depict idealized natural settings with small human figures.

The left panel, titled Paysage avec le Repos des Promeneurs (Landscape with Resting Walkers), shows a forested grove with large trees framing the composition. Light filters through the leaves onto a ground covered in plants. In the foreground, figures including a seated traveler with a dog rest against rocks, while a distant view includes fields and hills. The painting uses layered glazes for depth and texture in the foliage and bark.

The right panel, Paysage avec des Fontaines (Landscape with Fountains), portrays a rocky stream with waterfalls flowing into a pool. Trees and cliffs border the scene, opening to a broader landscape with meadows and a remote village. Small figures appear near the water. The panels lack parquet backing, as noted in the catalog, and show typical age-related craquelure but remain in stable condition.

Provenance includes inscriptions linking the works to the 1786 sale of James Boswell, associate of Samuel Johnson. They later appeared at Sotheby’s New York in 1980 (lot 54) before acquisition by the Dayton Art Institute (RKD reference 605997). The deaccession may support institutional priorities such as new purchases or conservation.

Ryckaert’s market shows variability, with median auction prices fluctuating over the past two decades. Data from Mutualart indicates early 2000s medians around $2,000–$5,000, peaking at approximately $110,000 in 2009 due to a major sale at Sotheby’s ($363,994 for a comparable landscape). The early 2010-peak proved to be incidental and current price levels are steady, averaging $5,000–$10,000 in recent years.

It makes the current Ryckaert set an interesting proposition to follow. A low estimate, interesting though not overwhelming provenance and, most importantly, a cool set of Flemish baroque.

Sybrand van Beest (1610-1674) was a Dutch Golden Age painter active in The Hague and (later) Amsterdam. He specialized in small-scale, finely painted genre scenes, still lifes, and occasional portraits. Although not among the most famous names of the 17th-century Dutch school (like Vermeer, ter Borch, or Metsu), he is a respected “kleinmeester” (little master) whose intimate domestic interiors have always appealed to collectors. His career peaked in the 1650s–1660s, and his works are relatively rare on the market.

Sotheby’s is selling this charming small (31x33cm) work from the collection of Hinrich Bischoff. The work is called “Saying Grace” and the picture shows an old woman and a young child (probably her granddaughter) saying grace before a simple meal. This is one of the classic themes of Dutch 17th-century genre painting: the quiet piety of ordinary people, the virtues of humility, gratitude, and family devotion.

Van Beest clearly looked at the Leiden fijnschilders (Gerard Dou, Frans van Mieris the Elder) and at Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam (c. 1622–1668), a direct contemporary in The Hague who painted almost identical “praying old women” and grace-saying scenes. In fact, the provenance in the auction listing shows the painting was sold in 1923 as “Quirijn Brekelenkam” and only later correctly re-attributed to Van Beest. The two artists are frequently confused even today because of their very similar style and subject matter.

The work has a solid provenance, and was on loan at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne until earlier this year. With short time to go, the highest bid is currently GBP 1,800, short of its 4,000-6,000 estimate. A good opportunity to obtain a charming and honest little master..

My fascination for the works of Orazio Gentileschi is not rooted in a deep knowledge of the artist, but dates back to a trip to London in 1995. Sotheby’s hosted an old masters sale at their New Bond Street premises and among the highlights were a Rembrandt from the Bentinck-Thyssen collection (“Cupid blowing a soap bubble”, sold for UKP 3,500,000 excluding fees) and a monumental work by Orazio Gentileschi. While witnessing the Rembrandt’s sale was the actual goal of my trip, the Gentileschi sale made the biggest impression on me.

“The Finding of Moses” was very large in size "(257x301cm) and apart from the actual work and the sale (UKP 4,600,000 ex fees) the connection between the artist and England became clear. The work was possibly commissioned by King Charles I, had an unprecedented provenance in UK royalty and was at the time regarded a national treasure. When the highest bidder turned out to be not British, the bidding was frozen for 24 hours in order to allow a British buyer to step in a match the highest bid. This failed, and the buyer gave the work in a long-term loan to the National gallery in London. In December 2019 the National Gallery was able to purchase the work for UKP 22,000,000.

Gentileschi’s connection with England started in 1626, when Charles I appointed him as his court painter, a journey that would keep in there until his death in 1639. The work we assess today is called “Rest on the Flight into Egypt”. It measures 148x267cm and is an oil on canvas. There are several versions of this work, and not all of them can be clearly attributed to the painter. Dating the work is not 100% clear, and Hampel adds in its catalogue “To date the painting on offer for sale in this lot, a finer version dating to 1625 must be considered. It was formerly held in the collection of the Duke of Buckingham and is now located at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna”. Stylistically, scholars date the current work before 1625 and it is to be assumed that the work is part of a group of earlier works that were sold in a later stage by his sons, who accompanied their father in England.

Visually, the large work comprises two components. The Old man Joseph resting on the left, in a draping pose which shows the Caravaggio influencer. Gentileschi was one of the first followers of the great Caravaggio. On the right the intimate scene of Mary feeding the baby which creates a beautiful balance.

According to Hampel the work comes from a private Austrian collection, and the work has been documented extensively in the past decades. Hampel is expecting a €400-600,000 result when it will be sold on December 4.

Sotheby’s “Old Masters and 19th Century paintings evening auction” on December 3 will bring a serious line-up of high-quality pieces, and this “Portrait of Verdonck brandishing a jawbone” by Frans Hals is certainly one of those. The full attribution of this work, that is known and well-documented in recent history, is quite recent. Only last year the 56,7x42,7 cm oil on canvas work was sold at a local French auction house as an “École DE HAARLEM vers 1650, entourage de Frans HALS”. The sale price of € 61,824, against an estimate of €2,000 to 3,000, could have been an indication that someone did his of her homework.

The subject of the painting, Pieter Verdonck, was a well-know local hero (or troublemaker) in Haarlem, the hometown of Hals. He is not uncommon in period pictures and publications, and the gesture is at once heroic and satirical: in seventeenth-century Dutch slang a “kakebeen” (jawbone) was a sharp-tongued brawler, exactly the reputation Verdonck enjoyed among his contemporaries.

The picture is a deliberate pendant or variant to Hals’s slightly earlier, more restrained Portrait of Pieter Verdonck now in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Where the Edinburgh canvas in Edinburgh shows the sitter in sober three-quarter view, the present work transforms him into a theatrical rebel, turning a private commission into public allegory. The jawbone is both attribute and joke: Verdonck is armed not for war but for the verbal battles he was famous for waging in Haarlem’s taverns and taverns.

Seymour Slive, in his 1974 catalogue raisonné, listed it as the work of an unidentified Haarlem master. By the time of the great 1989–90 Hals retrospective he illustrated it as a comparison piece, still withholding full attribution. The most recent assessment, in the RKD’s ongoing Frans Hals research project (2024–25), records it as “possibly workshop of Frans Hals, painted at the same time as the Edinburgh version,” but connoisseurs now argue convincingly for the master’s own hand throughout.

The estimate of 800,000 to 1,200,000 Uk pounds that Sotheby’s is anticipating next week puts it in line with other smaller-size Hals’ portraits and tronies sold in recent times, just below the multi-million monumental portraits from his hands. I wonder where we will end up next week, looking forward!

Eglon Hendrick van der Neer (1636-1703) is a lesser-known old master and maybe a bit overlooked. Born in Amsterdam as the son of the more renowned landscape painter Aert van der Neer, he bridged Dutch Protestant and Catholic traditions throughout his life and works.

He initially lived in Amsterdam and in the second major city of Holland, The Hague. Around 1682, he moved on to Brussels, in the Spanish-occupied part of the Netherlands at the time, where he developed a good relationship with the Spanish governor and increasingly painted Catholic motifs—such as depictions of saints—alongside representative portraits. In 1687, he was appointed court painter to the Spanish King Charles II. In 1697, van der Neer moved to Düsseldorf, which had been the main residence of the Electoral Palatinate since 1693, and a year later was also appointed court painter by the ruling Elector there.

The work on display today is a small oil-on-copper painting that dates from the German period, showing Saint Maria Magdalene. I choose this one to review over another work that will be sold in December at Sotheby’s in London, which is more prominent and valuable. However, the Maria Magdelene, measuring only 16,5 x 13,4cm has long, intriguing stories to tell.

Let’s start with. the verso which indicates a hectic life:

The provenance traces back to (late) 19th century and this work once had the same owner as the Simon de Vlieger painting I reviewed previously: George V, the last King of Hannover. Similar to the de Vlieger work this painting was listed in 1905 in the “Fideikommiss des Gesamthauses Braunschweig-Lüneburg”, basically the art collection of the city of Hannover awaiting ownership issues. in 1926 it was auctioned on behalf of George Vs heirs at Cassirer & Helbing Auction House. The grandfather of the current owner acquired the work and held it safely in his (eastern-) Germany home.

The turmoil of the Second World War left the precious object completely unscathed in eastern Germany. However, just a few months after the end of the war, the authorities in the Soviet occupation zone began systematically expropriating private property. Initially, such measures focused primarily on industrial production facilities and land ownership. From the early 1950s onward, however, the young socialist state also targeted long-unopened safe deposit boxes in banks. Later, under the pretext of potential art trade with the West and the imposition of immense tax sums, art collectors were specifically expropriated. As part of this ‘second wave of expropriations,’ the present small-format painting came into state ownership and became part of the Gera Art Collections in 1952. In 2003, the painting was restituted to the descendants of its former owner.

In 2006 we see the work appearing at Hampel Fine art auctions, not reaching its €7,200-8,600 reserve. A funny side-note: in 2020 the same auction house listed this Trompe-l’œil-painting by van der Neer, showing what appears to be our lady together with two other works.

Scheublein Auction house positions this charming work as one of the highlights of their December sale, and that is what its deserves. A smaller work from a lesser-known Old Masters, but with a lot of charm and interesting stories to tell. It is certainly worth the €3,000 to €4,000 estimate to someone.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) does not need any introduction, and his Magnum Opus in the Sistine Chapel is one of the best-known expressions of Art in human history. In preparation for this giant work of 530 square meters, painted between 1508 and 1512, Michelangelo produced countless drawings as studies for the grand work. It is assumed that he must have produced 1000’s of drawings, and roughly 600 still exist today. However, study drawings directly related to the Sistine Chapel are extremely rare and mostly in the hands of public institutions. Only about 10 sheets are known to be in private hands, and the drawing shown here is one of those. It will be offered by Christie’s on February 6, 2026 at an estimate of $1,500,000 to 2,000,000.

The study is in red chalk on paper, measures 13,5 by 11,5 cm and shows a right foot. It is related to The Libyan Sibyl, one of the prominent ceiling paintings in the chapel.

The drawing has never appeared to the market before and therefore unpublished. Imagine having this historical work in your private possession all the time..Its significance is beyond great. Christie’s quotes art historian and curator Carmen Bambach, who mentions the drawings of this artist ‘afford the most direct glimpse over the shoulders of the genius, instantly melting away five hundred years to reveal a profoundly intimate creative process.’

I am looking forward to February 6, to see how the market will value this masterpiece. I am sure many collectors will line up, as a preparatory study for the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This double-sided drawing work is offered at auction on December 1 by Bernaerts in Belgium. Measuring 46x31 cm, the front of this black and white chalk on grey paper shows an eminent male person posing, while the back displays a study of hands. It is offered as “after Anthony van Dijck” by the auction house. A safe attribution, weaker than I would expect when I read further.

The provenance of the work provided by Bernaerts is ok but not overwhelming. It appeared at R.W.P. de Vries auctions in Amsterdam and ended up in the collection Polak in 1939, at the same time when it appeared in a publication by G. Glück ‘Van Dyck’s Burnt Painting of the Brussels City-council’ in Old Master Drawings.

It is remarkable that the publication history of this work since adds more to the provenance than its previous ownership chain. What followed were mentions in A. J. J. Tekeningen van Vlaamsche meesters’, Antwerp and other cities, 1943, p. 137, fig. 13;
H. Vey, ‘Die Zeichnungen Anton van Dycks’, Brussels, 1962, cat. no. 197 S. Barnes et al., ‘Van Dyck. A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings’, 2004, onder/ sous/ under cat. no. III. 169; and finally: S. Alsteens & A. Eaker, ‘Van Dyck. The anatomy of portraiture’, exh. cat. Yale University Press in association with The Frick Collection, New York, 2016, p. 132, fig. 81.

The latter publication mentions the study being related to a lost group portrait commissioned by the aldermen of Brussels in 1634. “A drawing that seems to be a faithful copy of a lost sketch by Van Dyck for the man depicted in fig. 81.18 indicates that Van Dyck worked out the pose and costume of the figures in greater detail in sketches in black and white chalk on blue paper, as was his practice from at least about 1628”, according to Alsteens and Eaker. They also indicate that the location of the work is unknown in 2016. They also indicate that “In addition, there are two sheets at the British Museum, London, that correspond in reverse to the composition of the Paris sketch: one is an offset that repeats the entire composition on blue paper.”

The hands on the verso show a typical study set-up and the upper hand is remarkably well preserved.

When we look at the watermark we see an eagle with two heads with initial R underneath, positioned horizontally. It seems to be close to Heawood nr. 1297, which dates the paper in the 1630-1640 region. It adds to a conclusion that at least this is a period copy after an original van Dijck study.

An interesting and well-documented work that can provide the buyer a lot of joy. Bernaerts is offering the work on December 1 and indicates an estimate of €1500-2000, which seems like a tempting buy to me.

Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) was one of the most influential Dutch landscape painters of the Golden Age and a pioneer of the so-called “tonal phase” (c. 1630–1650s). By the 1650s he had fully refined a monochromatic palette dominated by subtle shades of brown, gray, ocher, and muted blues/greens. He used thin, fluid paint layers and broad, economical brushwork to capture atmosphere and light rather than precise detail.

The work on display today is a great example. It depicts a winter landscape with figures skating, sledging, and cottages along a frozen waterway, measures 28,5 x43cm and is monogramed and dated 1653. It represents a classic late-career winter scene by Jan van Goyen, painted when he was 57 and at the height of his mature “tonal” style.

Van Goyen was incredibly prolific in his career, and over 1,200 paintings survive. This example, to be sold by Venduehuis der Notarissen in The Hague, The Netherlands and comes with a well-established provenance and both publication and exhibition history. The provenance is clear for the post-war period and involves known collectors such as F.H. Fentener van Vlissingen and H. Lepow in New York. Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have included the work in a previous sale, and the 2005 sale at Sotheby’s in New York resulted in a $ 150,000 price, far north of the current €35-45,000 estimate. It is exemplary of the current market for mid-level old masters compared to 20 years ago.

Anyway, It is worth noting that “Frozen river with horse-drawn sleds on a bank, cottages beyond” was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York between 1969-1974, a great additional seal of approval for the potential buyer.

To summarize, this is a beautifully preserved fully authenticated late masterpiece by one of the greatest Dutch landscape painters — quiet, atmospheric, and full of subtle life. Its impeccable provenance, scholarly documentation, and museum exhibition history make it a highly desirable example of van Goyen’s mature winter imagery.

I just browsed the catalogue of the upcoming Old Master & 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction at Sotheby’s in London on December 3, 2025. One standout lot is Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ Portrait study of an old man (c. 1610–15), a captivating Baroque gem estimated at £1,000,000–1,500,000. This oil on panel work, measuring 64.7 x 50.2 cm, showcases Rubens’ mastery in capturing human depth and vitality.

Rubens, the Flemish virtuoso known for his dynamic compositions and diplomatic prowess, paints an elderly bearded figure emerging from a dark background. The subject’s furrowed brow, piercing gaze, and flowing white beard convey a sense of introspection and resilience—perhaps evoking the legendary English centenarian Thomas Parr, as early labels suggest. The loose, energetic brushwork on Baltic oak planks highlights Rubens’ innovative technique, blending realism with emotional intensity. It’s a study that feels alive, demonstrating his skill in rendering texture, from fur-trimmed robes to weathered skin, all while exploring themes of age and wisdom during his early career in Antwerp.

The provenance is impeccable, tracing back to Sir Uvedale Price in 1793, through notable collectors like Hugh Andrew Johnston Munro and Maurice Kann, to its deaccession from the Nelson-Atkins Museum in 1993. Exhibited widely—from London’s British Institution in the 19th century to U.S. museums in the 1940s and ‘60s—it’s referenced in key art histories by scholars like Max Rooses and Katlijne van der Stighelen, affirming its authenticity and significance.

“Portrait study of an old man” by Sir Peter Paul Rubens will be offered on December 3 at Sotheby’s in London.

This biblical scene, to be offered at auction on November 21, clearly shows the hand of Adriaen Pieterszn. van de Venne (1589-1662). Van de Venne was a prolific Dutch painter, poet, and illustrator active during the Dutch Golden Age. Born in Delft and later based in Middelburg and The Hague, he was known for his versatility, producing allegorical scenes, peasant genre paintings, portraits, and book illustrations. He often worked in grisaille, resulting in the monochromatic grey or brown tones mimicking drawings or engravings. It provides a print-like quality and much emphasis on the detailing.

The painting of today is called “Adoration of the Kings” and is an 64x83cm oil on wood work, dating to 1640-1650. It depicts a biblical scene from the New Testament (Matthew 2:1–12), where the three Magi (or Wise Men/Kings) visit the infant Jesus to offer gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, symbolizing his kingship, divinity, and future sacrifice. The composition is crowded and dynamic, typical for a baroque-style religious work. The kings arrive from the left, while the holy family occupies the central-right foreground: the Virgin Mary is seated modestly, cradling the infant Jesus, while Joseph stands nearby with a staff, overseeing the event.

Van Ham auction house, who is selling the work on November 21, provides a modest provenance by indicating that the current owner acquired the work in 1982 at Kunsthandel Josef Braun in Eupen, Belgium. At study of the verso gives a bit more clue:

Two hand-written labels look like late 20th century additions to the work. The right label seems to read “Identifie par mr. Marcus de Paris- Gallerie Marcus”. If true and interpreted correctly, this could relate to Gallerie Marcus, run by Paul Marcus (1903-1993) in Paris, and this appraisal would most likely have been taken place before 1982.

The attribution to van de Venne is very recent: in 2025 Edwin Buijsen from RKD confirmed the attribution and describes describes the painting as “a masterpiece from Adriaen van der Venne’s late creative period around 1640-1650”. It is listed under no. 344537 in the RKD database. A fantastic work, and van Ham is estimating a result of € 6,000 to €10,000.