The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Paston Treasure’ spotlights British collector family
Yale exhibit runs through May
NEW HAVEN — All art museum exhibitions have a theme, but the striking new exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art, impressively curated and smartly arranged, starts and ends with an odd masterpiece painting that serves as a road map to a family’s story of English class, possessions and wanderlust.
It’s a still life, yes, but with elements of other genres and two young human figures amid the many objets d’art and music. Years of scholarship have solved (or informed) its mysteries.
The wall-sized title painting of “The Paston Treasure: Microcosm of the Known World,” greeting visitors as they step off the elevator on the third floor, depicts not only a collage of things that adorned one wealthy family’s life but also serves as an opening scene to a British historical story that plays out chronologically in the gallery’s rooms.
A preview of the exhibit Tuesday featured YCBA officials and curators/conservators (Nathan Fils, Edward Town, Jessica David) and counterparts from the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery in England, which is partnering with the Yale museum and will get the exhibit weeks after its run here ends May 27.
The impressive layout begins with the placement of a handful of the most valuable objects from the painting in glass cases in front of the painting. It’s the first time in three centuries these objects have been together in one place — a pair of silver-gilt flagons (pitchers), a Strombus shell cup, two unique nautilus cups and a perfume flask with a mother-ofpearl body.
The Pastons were collectors and travelers, so the painting represents geographical distances as well as those of time. A darkskinned boy holds one fine object and presents another. Likely a slave or servant, he would be the object of curiosity for the white medieval Europeans. The girl in the painting may be the oldest daughter of well-traveled collector Sir William Paston, who died in the 1660s.
The Paston Treasure painting was commissioned around 1663 by either Sir William or his son Robert Paston, first Earl of Yarmouth (1631-83). The identity of the painter, a Dutch artist working out of a makeshift studio at Oxnead Hall (in eastern England near The Netherlands), remains murky.
The first display room to the right of the Paston Treasure features a short film explaining how the painting went under X-ray examination in 2006, and a series of painted-over images (pentimenti) were discovered in the top-right portion of the painting, now topped by the image of a clock.
It may be that the Paston Treasure was part of trying to fortify this land-owning family’s legitimacy in the moment (where, said Moore, “Europeans demonstrate that previous objects from the previous century ... survived in your care”), but it seems it also involved Sir William’s impending death and his plan to split up his prized possessions among his survivors. A sampling of items found in his “best closet” at Oxnead are displayed in one room of the exhibit.
Sir Robert developed an obsession with alchemy, particularly the colorful imitation of natural substances leading to the production of painters’ pigments (explaining a couple of odd existing colors in the painting) and the search for the mythical “red elixir” capable of transmuting base metals into gold, according to curator Francesca Vanke.
That alchemy is also represented in the exhibit, along with a large tapestry, religious triptych and stunning pietre dure tabletop of inlaid cut stones.
Sadly, the Pastons went broke partly due to the costs of acquiring these artistic collectibles. Norwich curator Andrew Moore said there is so much more to the Pastons’ collection than what’s in the painting — hundreds of objects are listed in found inventory documents. And yet the great family collection went the way of all flesh.
“As early as 1709, the whole thing was dispersed,” said Moore. “The house itself became a ruin. ... The family was reduced, at the same time really, to bankruptcy.”
But the objects — and their famous artistic tribute painting — remain today, for now in a Chapel Street museum dedicated to British treasures.