{"id":1959,"date":"2023-10-16T13:23:21","date_gmt":"2023-10-16T05:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=1959"},"modified":"2023-10-16T13:23:21","modified_gmt":"2023-10-16T05:23:21","slug":"the-princeton-university-art-museum-has-newly-reattributed-a-painting-to-rubens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/the-princeton-university-art-museum-has-newly-reattributed-a-painting-to-rubens\/","title":{"rendered":"The Princeton University Art Museum Has Newly Reattributed a Painting to Rubens"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Princeton University Art Museum<\/a>\u00a0is preparing to announce that a work in its collection has been re-attributed to Flemish artist\u00a0Peter Paul Rubens<\/a>,\u00a0ARTnews<\/em>\u00a0has learned. The work in question appears to be\u00a0The Death of Adonis<\/em>, an oil sketch on a wood panel depicting the hunter laid flat as a boar attacks.<\/p>\n

In a statement to\u00a0ARTnews<\/em>, Ronni Baer, distinguished curator and lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum since 2019, said the museum\u2019s curatorial and conservation team were \u201cthrilled\u201d to have made the discovery. She noted that the preparatory work was particularly important given that the actual painting\u2014commissioned by King Philip IV of Spain\u2014had not survived the intervening centuries.<\/p>\n

An email sent to\u00a0ARTnews\u00a0<\/em>via a press relation firm in April announced a \u201cmajor conservation discovery\u201d at the museum. However, the museum decided this summer to explore another direction for the story, ending communications. While the email did not name the painting, it described a \u201conce-overlooked painting\u201d that was now confirmed to be an \u201cauthentic\u201d work by Rubens. There was also attached to the email three images of the same artwork in various stages of conservation; each depicted a man felled by an enraged boar. The email further established that, when Princeton acquired the painting in the 1930s, it was believed to be a Rubens, but in the 1990s it was relabeled \u201cformerly attributed to Peter Paul Rubens.\u201d Then, in 2019, Baer, and Bart Devolder, its chief conservator, gave the discarded canvas a second look. It was pulled from the collection for restoration and reevaluated by experts.<\/p>\n

The Princeton University Art Museum\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0was updated to attribute the work solely to Rubens, making it one of only four works in the collection to carry that distinction. Further, an image of\u00a0The Death of Adonis\u00a0<\/em>published on the museum\u2019s online catalogue matches the image of the recently restored work sent to\u00a0ARTnews<\/em>.<\/p>\n

While the museum is closed until 2025, when a sprawling new museum building is set to open, the newly-attributed Rubens is a major win for an institution recently ensnared in controversy. Its new building was designed by David Adjaye, who was\u00a0accused in July of sexual misconduct<\/a>. At the time, museum director James Steward told\u00a0The Daily Princetonian<\/em>, \u201cWith construction so far advanced, most of our work with Adjaye is behind us. We have a responsibility to all the people involved in this project and all those who will benefit from it to see it to completion\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The painting\u2019s history, meanwhile, touches on the complexities\u2014and shortcomings\u2014of the process of art attribution.<\/p>\n

An\u00a0online bibliography<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0The Death of Adonis<\/em>\u00a0provided by Princeton begins with the Sackville collection at Knole Castle in England, which sold the painting\u00a0<\/em>directly to the university in October 1930, according to\u00a0a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0at the time. The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reported then that the painting had been mentioned in the inventory of Rubens\u2019s \u201cchief assistant\u201d and \u201ccertified as genuine by Dr. Hermann Gluck of the National Museum at Vienna.\u201d Frank Jewett Mather Jr., a Princeton professor and an art critic, facilitated the sale.<\/p>\n

\u201cRubens is perhaps the most essential artist for any educational museum,\u201d Mather Jr. wrote in a\u00a0bulletin for the Department of Art and Archaeology\u00a0<\/a>that year. \u201cFortunately he was prolific. The problem is to get him autobiographically, eliminating those thousands of canvases made on his designs by assistants.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baldwin Smith, Princeton\u2019s then-supervisor of undergraduate curriculum, stressed the authenticity of the new acquisition in his address to a visiting committee in 1931: \u201cThe student can be made to see, in this picture the free, swinging movement and the dynamic rush of the hunt swept over the canvas without studied deliberation, as if Rubens, enthusiastically, sensuously and decoratively, had felt the play of it in his whole body and so had spontaneously painted his sensations almost as intuitive gestures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Princeton listed the painting as a genuine Rubens until at least 1966, per the\u00a0Record of the Art Museum.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard\u00a0<\/em>(subtitled, \u201can illustrated catalogue raisonn\u00e9 of the work of Peter Paul Rubens based on the material assembled by the late Dr. Ludwig Burchard in twenty-six parts\u201d) more than 1,000 artworks are attributed to Rubens. But, since\u00a0Corpus<\/em>\u2019s publication, the number of accepted genuine Rubens has risen and fallen as experts variously grant and withhold attribution. Complicating matters, after his death in 1960, Burchard was accused of misattributing at least 60 works for personal financial gain.\u00a0Corpus<\/em>\u00a0was only published posthumously in 1968 after significant review by other Rubens scholars, but remains a respected repository of information on the artist.<\/p>\n

Rubens famously did not sign all his works and sometimes modified or finished works produced by studio assistants. All of this has made attribution complex. Take\u00a0Samson and Delilah\u00a0<\/em>(1609\u201310), which has been in the collection of the National Gallery of London since 1980 and was once authenticated by Burchard. The institution has dismissed for decades a long line of critics and a slew of scientific tests using AI that determined there was a 91 percent probability that the artwork was not authentic.<\/p>\n

\u201cPronounced similarities of subject matter or motif \u2026 are no guarantors of authenticity,\u201d Michael Daley of\u00a0ArtWatch UK, an organization which keeps a critical eye on attributions, wrote in a post on its website related to\u00a0Samson and Delilah<\/em>. \u201cWhat is most distinctive to a master and impossible to replicate \u2013 even by close associates within his own studio \u2013 is what is termed his touch, his individual, characteristic manner and speed of execution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Rembrandt, his near contemporary and a commonly misattributed Dutch master who had a prolific studio practice, Rubens doesn\u2019t have a centralized body for granting certificates. In the 1960s, a group of scholars formed the Rembrandt Research Project to help set a standard by which to differentiate genuine Rembrandts from merely Rembrandt-esque paintings. While not a faultless system, and one that has since disbanded, it keeps a database of technical information, inventories, and noted issues in the history of Rembrandt attribution. For his part, Rubens has individuals, whose judgments are determined by science, comparison, their own subjective gaze, and varying life experiences.<\/p>\n

Doubts about\u00a0The Death of Adonis<\/em>\u00a0seem to have emerged with the respected compendium\u00a0Rubens in<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>America<\/em>\u00a0(1947), by Julius S. Held and Jan-Albert Goris. \u201cThe sketch is hardly more than a copy of an original by Rubens. Yet even the design lacks the rhythmic force of the master,\u201d Held and Goris wrote.<\/p>\n

Corpus<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Rubenianum<\/em>\u00a0includes\u00a0The Death of Adonis<\/em>, and offers some context for its flip-flopping attribution history. The work is \u201cnot in the best condition,\u201d Burchard wrote, adding, \u201cI believe that [Julius] Held\u2019s recent acknowledgement of the panel at Princeton as the original by Rubens can be accepted\u2026\u201d So, if Burchard is to be trusted, sometime between 1947 and 1968, Held changed his opinion.<\/p>\n

Held returned to the controversy some years later following his off-screen epiphany. In the 1980 Princeton-published catalogue\u00a0The oil sketches of Peter Paul Rubens<\/em>,\u00a0Held wrote, \u201cContrary to my previously published opinion, I am now convinced that the Princeton sketch is the original one.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Princeton University Art Museum\u00a0is preparing to announce that a work in its collection has been re-attributed to Flemish artist\u00a0Peter Paul Rubens,\u00a0ARTnews\u00a0has learned. The work in question appears to be\u00a0The Death of Adonis, an oil sketch on a wood panel depicting the hunter laid flat as a boar attacks. In a statement to\u00a0ARTnews, Ronni Baer, distinguished […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news"},"yoast_head":"\nThe Princeton University Art Museum Has Newly Reattributed a Painting to Rubens - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The\u00a0Princeton University Art Museum\u00a0is preparing to announce that a work in its collection has been re-attributed to Flemish artist\u00a0Peter Paul Rubens,\u00a0ARTnews\u00a0has learned.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/the-princeton-university-art-museum-has-newly-reattributed-a-painting-to-rubens\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Princeton University Art Museum Has Newly Reattributed a Painting to Rubens - 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