Most of the Renaissance artist Claude Lorrain’s paintings included biblical or classical themes and their true subject was the light, atmosphere and poetic mood of the natural world. The painting done when the artist was eighty two years of age represents Apollo who is the god of poetry and music surrounded by the nine Muses who were the goddesses of the creative arts.
At the upper right is the winged horse Pegasus who has kicked a rock to release the spring that is a source of artistic inspiration. The colourful appearance of frescoes based on Parnassus which is a sacred mountain in Greece greatly contrasts with the sombre palace exterior.
Born in the Lorraine region of France the painter named Claude Lorrain or Gellée settled early in Italy and spent most of his life painting the countryside around Rome with its many associations to the ancient world. The nine Greek Muses were Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomeni, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania and Calliope. It was the role of the muses to protect the arts in Ancient Greece.
Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna who lived in the years between 1637 and 1689 in Rome made the original commission of the painting in 1680 which remained in his collection probably until 1789 by descent within the family when within the year of 1789 probably it was sold by the Colonna family in Rome. The tableau by Claude Lorrain was identified as the painting in the Filippo III Colonna inventory of 1783 and in a Colonna inventory of 1787 acquired in Rome by Robert Sloane after whose death in 1802 the artwork was imported in 1803 or 1804 to England by Sloane’s widow.
The Sloane sale is recorded in 1804 to Mister Bryan’s Picture Gallery in London and bought privately in the sale to William Buchanan who lived between the years of 1777 and 1864 in London. The painting was acquired on the twenty fourth of May in 1808 in the Buchanan sale at Oxenden Street in London.
Recorded as the owner in the inscription found on an aquatint of 1812 the dealer probably put up the painting at auction under the more famous name of Porter in 1815 and 1816. Curiously in discussing the history of the Colonna Parnassus imported by Sloane, Buchanan does not mention it among the paintings he sold in 1808 nor those owned by Porter or Carr who had been his business partner. A painting was bought in Bath and sold or passed by descent to Porter’s brother in law William Scrope of Castle Coombe in Wiltshire on the tenth of June in 1815 remaining with Scrope after it was withdrawn from sale by Christie, Watson and Woods to Bernard Pinney on the sixteenth of April in 1816 until after Scrope’s death in 1852. This would make its ownership by the Aynard collection in Paris by 1824 impossible.
The auction catalogue of 1816 includes it among the paintings that had belonged to Walsh Porter although unlike the others from his collection it did not appear in his posthumous sales on the fourteenth of April in 1810 or in 1811 on the twenty first of June. There can be no doubt that it is the MFA painting as its description in the Scrope sales of 1815 and 1816 matches that of the MFA work found in the information provided by the Getty Provenance Index. In The Treasures of Art of Great Britain published in London in 1854 the painting is mentioned in the second volume of the book. There was possibly an anonymous sale by George Stanley to Edward Gray in London by 1854 and was sold by Gray to Wynn Ellis in the Ellis estate sale in London on the seventeenth of June in 1876 then sold by Christie, Watson and Woods in London to Waters and was acquired probably from Waters in 1886 by William Graham of Oakden near Guildford in Surrey in the Graham estate sale. The painting passed to William Grindlay in London on the twenty third of April in 1887 and as a posthumous Grindlay sale by Christie, Watson and Woods in 1889 to Thomas Humphrey Ward and by them as an anonymous sale in London on the twenty eighth of June in 1890 to Sir William James Farrer.
In the posthumous Farrer sale in March of 1912 the partners sold to Agnew who in the same year made a sale of the painting to Trotti et Cie in April in Paris who sold it to the MFA in Boston for one hundred and eighty pounds in British sterling on the accession date in 1912 on the third of October.
The information on the sales first was provided in a letter to the MFA from Burton Fredericksen on the sixth of September in 1988 and can also be accessed online at the Getty Provenance Index. It is unclear whether it is the painting presently at the MFA. The sale catalogue does not describe the painting except to say that it is known as the Colonna Claude and it is too well known to need description. It can be assumed that this refers to the MFA composition although several paintings by Claude Lorrain were in the Colonna collection. The catalogue gives the provenance as Reverend Holwell Carr, Mister Walsh Porter and Lord Kinnaird. It has not been indicated elsewhere that the MFA painting was owned by Kinnaird who lent the painting in 1889 to an exhibition at Whitechapel in Saint Jude’s.
The subject owes much of its inspiration to seventeenth century classicism and to Raphael for both the poses of its figures and its general composition. In ancient Greece the most celebrated oracle was at the town of Delphi on the south slope of lofty Mount Parnassus. There a sacred stone marked what in ancient Greek religion was believed to be the exact centre of the Earth.
From reproductions of the statue of the Aphrodite of Cnidus by the Attic sculptor Praxiteles on Roman coins numerous copies have been recognized and the best known are in the Vatican Museum as well as in the Louvre. Another work that has been recognized in various Roman figures in marble is the Apollo Sauroctonus.
During the Renaissance artist Raphael in the Raphael Rooms named in Italian Stanze di Raffaello in the Palace of the Vatican in Rome painted the frescoes at the commission of Pope Julius II.
(http://piweb.getty.edu): Description of Sale Catalog Br-273; Description of Sale
The Entombment circa 1612 by Peter Paul Rubens in a Christie’s sale in 1992.
At that time the provenance of the painting could be traced only as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century. The number 146 located on the face of the painting appeared to be an inventory number in the search for a 1651 inventory preserved in the Archivo de la Casa de Alba at the Palacio de Liria in Madrid which lists this Rubens painting. Possibly its first owner was Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán Carpio living between 1629 and 1687. The Getty Provenance Index provides additional information about the collector, inventory and related documents.
Rubens was a classically educated humanist scholar and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the southern Netherlands. An avid collector who had one of the largest collections of art and books in Antwerp his works include altarpieces, portraits, landscapes and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects.
Peter Paul Rubens was the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens’ highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history. Unique and immensely popular the Baroque style emphasized movement, colour and sensuality. Born in Seigen in Germany the painter returned to Antwerp at about twelve years of age in addition to running a large workshop in the northern part of the country known as Flanders.
The catalogue of Sir Peter Paul Rubens works by Michael Jaffe lists one thousand four hundred and three pieces excluding numerous copies made in the workshops which produced cartoons for Flemish tapestries and frontispieces for publishers in Antwerp. Subjects which were favoured by the nobility of an age included King Philip of Spain and King Charles I of England as the collectors of Rubens art.
Sir Peter Paul Rubens created a remarkable painting titled “The Arrival of Marie de Medici at Marseilles.” The Baroque masterpiece executed between 1622 and 1625 was commissioned by Marie de Medici the Queen of France to commemorate her life and that of her late husband Henry IV of France when the Queen Consort served as regent in 1610 to 1614 for her son King Louis XIII. The painting is part of the larger Marie de Medici cycle by Rubens which consists of twenty four paintings.
A master of Flemish painting Rubens received a number of gold chains during his career including in 1609 one from the Archdukes Albert and Isabella of Austria and in 1623 from Christian IV of Denmark. The black hat worn at an acute angle while fashionable in the artist’s self portrait was around 1615 in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. The objects in the background of the portrait could be described as ‘…a rock and a reddening sky’ which in Latin would read Petrus et caelum rubens. Rubens blushing portrait is signed and dated with the inscription along the top right margin Petrus Paullus Rubens / se ipsum expressit / A.D. MDCXIII / Aetatis Suse XXXXV
In the specific work Rubens portrays the moment when Marie de Medici arrives by ship in Marseille on the third of November in 1600 and is greeted by symbolic figures representing France adorned with the symbol of the royal Fleur-de-lis. At the bottom of the painting Neptune and the daughters of Nereus salute the Queen. Fame flies overhead trumpeting her arrival. Rubens skilfully transforms this historical event into an allegory that reinforces Marie de Medici’s right to the throne.
Commissioned by Henry Danvers the Earl of Danby the self portrait of the artist was held in the Long Gallery at Whitehall in 1639 and was sold to Edward Bass and others for sixteenth pounds from Saint James Palace in 1651 on the nineteenth of December but recovered at the Restoration and listed in the passage at Whitehall in 1666 and again in 1688 returning by 1700 in the Staircase at Kensington Palace. In store there in 1710 it was installed in the Crimson Damask Cabinet at Saint James Palace in 1720 and in the Queen’s Dressing Room at Buckingham Palace in 1790 from where King George IV evidently borrowed it to hang in the Rose Satin Room at Carlton House where it is recorded in 1816 still appearing in Pyne’s Illustrated Royal Residences of 1819 and taken to Windsor Castle.
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