Pick of the year
The thrilling discovery of an Old Master drawing forms the centrepiece of London Art Week
THE National Gallery’s exhibition ‘Dürer’s Journeys’ (until February 27, 2022) finally opened last month. I have yet to see it, but some early visitors suggested it has been a little overstuffed. Anyone attracted by the principle that less is more, however, can put it to the test at a second Dürer show that opened on the same day.
‘Dürer and his Time’ (until December 12) is Agnews’ contribution to London Art Week (LAW; December 3–10) and it centres on the most important Old Master drawing to be discovered for decades. The 6½in by 6½in penand-ink The Virgin and Child with a Flower on a Grassy Bench (Fig 1) was bought unframed in an American ‘yard’ or contents sale for $30 about five years ago by a Massachusetts couple, who then spotted and secured its frame.
No one was willing to give it much credence, assuming it to be fake or perhaps an engraving, until, led by a series of coincidences, Cliff Schorer, the entrepreneur and collector who is now a shareholder in Agnews, visited the couple. He has a welldeserved reputation for spotting sleepers, but was bowled over by this: ‘I have spent my life disbelieving things. Now, here I was out on the thinnest of limbs. But I was sure it was right.’
After long and often discouraging researches, his eye has been vindicated; the drawing has been declared ‘magnificent’ by the current Dürer authority, Christof
Metzger, and will be included in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné, dated to about 1503. The clincher was the watermark in the fine linen paper: a trident and ring, found by Jane Mcausland, the conservator, showing it was made by the Fugger family. The Fuggers were not only Europe’s greatest bankers, but industrialists and Dürer’s patrons, supplying him with paper and other art materials, such as special copper for his engraving plates.
Thanks to backing papers in the old frame, it has been possible to take the provenance back through the Carlhian family, Parisian decorator-dealers who worked with the great dealer Joseph Duveen. A descendant, Jean Paul Carlhian, died in Concord, Massachusetts, in 2012. Earlier, the drawing is likely to have been in Italy before being taken to France during the Napoleonic period. One of the backing papers suggests that it was in Modena in the early 17th century, possibly in the collection of Duke Francesco I d’este.
The auction record for a Dürer drawing is £640,000 for a watercolour in the 1978 Von Hirsch sale
—that might now be equivalent to £1.75 million. Agnews, and Mr Schorer, are understandably coy about their hopes for this sublime example of penmanship, but it will be an eight-figure sum. The drawing is displayed with a small group of linked works by Dürer and contemporaries, including an impression of his engraving of Philipp Melancthon, next to its Fuggermade plate—the only known Dürer copperplate in existence.
With the notable exception of Richard Green, most galleries have moved from Bond Street, to settle in St James’s, south of Piccadilly or west of Berkeley Square. When I first became aware of Mason’s Yard, off Duke Street, in about 1970, it was a battered shortcut and car park. In the middle was an electricity substation with a louche pissoir attached to its backside. In time, that centrepiece was replaced by Jay Jopling’s White Cube Gallery and Jean-luc Baroni arrived with Old Master drawings.
The pioneer of Mason’s Yard, the counter-cultural Indica Gallery, was only at No 6 for two years, but it made its mark beyond the art world, for it was at an Indica preview that John Lennon first met Yoko Ono. The Beatles and Stones had their own tables at The Scotch of St James nightclub in the Yard. Later, No 6 was the first space taken by the Italian Old Master dealer Patrick Matthiesen (now at Nos 7–8) who arrived in 1978, as did the silver dealer John Bourdon-smith at No 24. They are joint doyens, as Julian Hartnoll, at No 14 from 1968, left years ago. His peeling sign is still on the wall.
For some years, No 6 has housed Guy Peppiatt and Stephen Ongpin, respectively with British watercolours and Continental drawings. Newer arrivals have been Harry Moore-gwynn joining them at No 6 and the rare-book dealer Benjamin Spademan at No 14. Mr Peppiatt and Mr Moore-gwynn, a Modern British specialist, stay at No 6, now joined by Nicholas Shaw the print dealer, but Mr Ongpin has left, moving across
Mayfair to a sixstorey townhouse, 82, Park Street, W1, where his LAW exhibition, ‘From Giorgione to Picasso’ (Fig 2), opens on Friday (until December 20, www.stephenong pinfineart.com). Elliott Fine Art, a new dealer for LAW, will exhibit there, too, and I look forward to seeing a remarkable 17½in by 13in charcoal bearded head (Fig 3) by Osmar Schindler (1867–1927).
London-based galleries among the 40 participating in LAW, including Peppiatt (www.london artweek.co.uk), all have actual exhibitions, whereas overseas dealers, such as Galerie Chenel of Paris and Padovani of Milan, offer online presentations of highlights—12 items each.
As usual, the range is from antiquity to modern, with few contemporaries, except for a couple of sculptors, notably Emily Young, whose supremely elegant 18inhigh onyx Wood Flame Torso (Fig 4), is with Bowman Sculpture. Earlier sculpture is offered by
Tomasso and by Sam Fogg, who has gathered together an army of medieval saints, including a 32¼in-high St Martin in limewood (Fig 6), carved by Christoph Scheller and painted by Ivo Strigel between 1511 and 1516.
A new artist to me is the Breton Ernest Pierre Marie Guérin (1887– 1953), whose powerful watercolour of the Sphinx Rock, Belle Isle, in a storm (Fig 5) is with James
Mackinnon. Perhaps the most remarkable—and, at 134in by 175½in, biggest—work of art is an 18th-century Neapolitan Presepe, or crèche (Fig 7) at Colnaghi. The detail is superb. I particularly like the stalking cat.
Next week Toys and tables