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The Way to Calvary:
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Entry details

Full title
The Way to Calvary
Artist
Jacopo Bassano
Inventory number
NG6490
Author
Sir Nicholas Penny

Catalogue entry

Jacopo Bassano
NG 6490 
The Way to Calvary

, 2008

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume II: Venice 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2008).

© The National Gallery, London

c. 1544–5

Oil on canvas, 145.3 × 132.5 cm

Support

The dimensions given above are those of the stretcher. The ragged edges of the original canvas are largely concealed by putty. This canvas is a heavy herringbone twill, with the weave running horizontally. It is composed of two pieces joined by a horizontal seam that passes below the rope around Christ’s waist and through the elbow of the kneeling Saint Veronica. The upper piece is 98 cm wide. Cusping is evident along the upper and lower edges of the canvas but not at the sides, where the painting has probably been slightly trimmed.

The original canvas has been lined on to a fine tabby‐weave canvas, presumably by ‘W. Morrill liner’, whose stamp is visible on the upper bar of the stretcher (which is made of pine, with corner braces). Also on the stretcher are a fringed paper label inscribed ‘H.A.B./E204’ in ink, and a lozenge‐shaped paper label with an orange border inscribed in biro with the number 2890.

Materials and Technique

The canvas has been prepared with a gesso ground (calcium sulphate).1 Over this ground there is a layer of pale brownish‐grey priming of lead white with some black and fine brown pigment. Preliminary sketching in black, and grey paint for both the outline and the modelling, can be detected in the deeper folds of Christ’s robe, at the edges of the Virgin’s veil and around the clenched fist against the shield.

Christ’s pale pink garment is painted with lead white and a little red lake. The large dark green leaves in the lower left corner are painted with verdigris, mixed with a coarse black pigment, and a small amount of lead white.2 Orpiment and realgar are likely to have been employed for the tunic of the man pulling the rope, top left. The blue of the garment worn by Saint John (upper right, in front of the white horse) is probably azurite but has not been analysed.

X‐radiographs suggest that the figure of Christ was blocked in first. The last major compositional elements to be painted were probably Saint John, whose frightened face and raised hands are placed above the grieving Virgin, and the soldier in the centre of the canvas, seen from behind. It is clear that the bar of the cross was painted over Christ’s right forearm (which must, however, always have been intended to support it). There are numerous minor pentimenti, especially in the interstices of the figures, which suggests that the composition was somewhat improvised in these areas. Most of the folds of yellow drapery falling in front of the Veronica’s right knee were added later and are a notable example of this.

The paint has been worked in some places with the pointed end of a brush handle, for example in the horse’s mane, at the back of the Virgin’s veil, and in the profile head of a woman above Veronica. What appears to be an incised line can be discerned passing through John’s face and perhaps indicates some preliminary design for the horse’s head behind him.

Conservation

The history of the painting suggests that it is likely to have been cleaned at least once in the seventeenth century and at least once in the eighteenth, but no treatment is documented before 1834, when the painting was in the collection of the Earl of Bradford at Weston Park. All the paintings there were cleaned by George Barker of Leamington Spa and his daughter in that year. Six pounds was charged for work on this painting on 20 April, a sum higher than that paid for almost any other picture treated. ‘Many Figs. Much rep.’ is noted. The frame was ‘cleaned mended and regilt at the front edge’ for £14s. 6d. at the same time.3 It was probably not treated again until it was placed in the care of Horace Buttery in Bond Street in 1959 in preparation for the Royal Academy’s winter exhibition in 1960.4 Morrill’s lining (see above) is likely to be of the same date.5

In considering the remarkable condition of this picture we may note that it has probably only changed ownership five times in the five centuries it has survived, and has never passed through the hands of the art trade, unless the brothers Reynst are considered to have been dealers. It is also fair to add that several other paintings by Bassano from this period are in an even better state of preservation, perhaps especially the Flight into Egypt in the Norton Simon Museum.6

Condition

There is some abrasion, notably in the helmet of the figure about to cuff Christ and in the spear, top right; there is some flaking along the lower left edge; some of the paint in yellow areas has deteriorated (it may consist of orpiment and realgar); some of the lake glazes for the shadows on the soldier’s back have faded; the blues of John’s sleeve and the Virgin’s cloak have probably darkened, although the modelling is still apparent. Moreover, there is in the paint an overall crackle of a distinctly horizontal pattern which is especially visible in the paler areas, and minute losses may be detected on the edges of some of the cracks. However, the painting is remarkably well preserved and the impasto is largely intact. The surface has a dry appearance, partly from the roughness of the paint, partly as a result of the deterioration of the unusually thin modern varnish.

Subject and Original Purpose

The title used here is one that was long employed by the family which owned the painting and one that has been used in the National Gallery since the painting was acquired. It is not inaccurate.

The two men in the top right‐hand corner of the picture mounted on a grey horse and a mule may be intended to represent the priests and Pharisees presiding over the procession in which Christ carries his cross to Calvary. The artist has tried to suggest that they are part of a larger group by painting, more faintly, the other two faces beside them. The [page 7][page 8]destination of the procession is alluded to by the two crosses on the barren heights which are visible in the distance, on the left‐hand side of the painting.

Fig. 1

Detail of NG 6490. © The National Gallery, London.

Four executioners are depicted. The most prominent of them is shown from the back in the centre of the composition. Presumably he is intended for a Roman foot‐soldier, for he wears something like a cuirass and carries a shield. The shield (of yellow metal, so presumably of brass) is decorated in relief, apparently with a landscape – foliage and perhaps paling can just be discerned. On the right and left edges of the composition there are two bearded men, both wearing orange. They have identical features and are both seen in profile. One pulls the rope attached to Christ’s waist, the other carries a ladder. The fourth executioner emerges in the centre below the one holding a shield. He wears a helmet. His left hand is largely concealed but a lock of Christ’s hair appears to be between his finger and thumb. He raises his right fist to hit Christ. His mouth is open, so he may also be shouting at Christ or spitting upon him.

It was a well‐established convention for the executioners conducting Christ to Calvary to recall the cruel conduct of their colleagues at the Flagellation and Mocking. What is unusual is the way that the Marys are pressed together with the executioners. The Virgin Mary stands to the right, with her right hand raising her blue mantle to her tear‐soaked cheek. Two of the other Marys (neither is clearly meant for Mary Magdalene) press forward from behind her. Saint John is also part of this group, and the soldier with the shield pulls John’s cloak off his shoulder, an incident which is not mentioned in the Gospels and not commonly represented in paintings of the Passion.

Christ has stumbled under the weight of the cross and turns to look at the cloth that Veronica extends towards him and upon which his likeness (we know) is miraculously imprinted. Veronica seems to have knelt hastily, for her skirt is pulled up to reveal voluminous undergarments. These two figures, linked compositionally by the veil itself, are the two largest ones, and are the nearest to us. The chief subject of the painting is certainly their encounter. The size of this painting, and still more the format, make it almost certain that it was made as an altarpiece and perhaps for a chapel dedicated to Saint Veronica.

Altarpieces in which the principal theme was the Way to Calvary had been introduced relatively recently. Three were commissioned by the Antinori family in Florence between about 1500 and 1505 from Biagio d’Antonio and Antonio del Ceraiolo for S. Spirito (where the latter remains; the former is now in the Louvre)7 and from Ridolfo Ghirlandaio for S. Gallo [page 9][page 10](now in the National Gallery, London, NG 1143).8 All of these altarpieces include Saint Veronica, and veneration for her may have prompted their creation, but she plays an even more prominent role in Bassano’s painting. Another form of devotion which could encourage an altarpiece of this subject was that of the Virgin’s swoon. The swoon, the ‘Spasimo’, of the Virgin is the subject of Raphael’s altarpiece made in about 1514 for Palermo, for example, and certainly of Boccaccino’s of about 1501 for S. Domenico, Cremona (now in the National Gallery, London; NG 806).9 Devotion to the Spasimo was a controversial novelty,10 and the cult of Veronica was also relatively novel and probably controversial.

Fig. 2

Detail of NG 6490. © The National Gallery, London.

Apocryphal legends concerning the miraculous healing of the Emperor Tiberius by means of a portrait – a true likeness of Christ, in the possession of a holy woman named Veronica – were in circulation between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. The name Veronica is a variant of the Greek name Berenice but it was perhaps also suggested by the ‘vera icon’, the true likeness itself. The likeness was said to have appeared miraculously when Christ looked at the linen that Veronica was taking to a painter whom she hoped would make a portrait of him. By the end of the tenth century, the portrait had become a major relic, known as the ‘vernicle’, preserved in the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome. It apparently resembled the miraculous portrait of Christ known as the Holy Mandylion, which had been taken to Constantinople in 944 and is likely to have been modelled upon it. The belief that the image had appeared on the cloth when Veronica wiped the face of Christ, or held the cloth up before him as he carried the cross, became popular in the fourteenth century and, like the Spasimo, owed much to pilgrimages to the Holy Land, where devotion was focused on the ‘via dolorosa’, the way to Calvary, and on many incidents associated with this which had no canonical authority. It also must have owed something to the popularity of the Turin shroud, for that too was not merely a miraculous likeness of Christ but also a relic of the Passion.11

Fig. 3

Jacopo Bassano, Martyrdom of Saint Catharine, 1544. Oil on canvas, 151.2 × 134 cm. Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico. © Courtesy of the Direzione del Museo Biblioteca Archivio di Bassano del Grappa.

In the second half of the sixteenth century apocryphal legends were subjected to careful scrutiny by reformers of the Church. Although Veronica continued to be venerated, there were many doubts about her cult, and Carlo Borromeo suppressed the liturgical honours accorded to her.12 It may be that Bassano’s painting was removed from its original ecclesiastical setting during this period and on account of these doubts.

Attribution

As is clear from the painting’s early history (for which see the section on Provenance below), it was known to be by ‘Bassano’, meaning Jacopo Bassano, during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Thereafter it was recorded as a Veronese. A photograph of a copy of the painting was seen by Arslan, who published it as by Bassano in an article of 1929 and included it in his monograph of 1931.13 NG 6490 was also given a certain publicity by a Country Life photograph of 1945 showing it hanging in Weston Park,14 but no one seems to have paid it much attention until the opening in June 1957 of an exhibition devoted to Jacopo Bassano , to which the copy (since 1955 the property of York City Art Gallery) was lent and where, when seen in the company of the artist’s genuine early works, it declared itself to be a copy.15 It was then recalled that Denis Mahon had observed in a footnote that the Weston Park painting was likely to be the version which was once in the collection of King Charles II.16 Three years later, in 1960, NG 6490 was exhibited at the Royal Academy, having been cleaned in the previous year and published by Muraro in The Burlington Magazine in February.17 It has never since been disputed as an original work by Jacopo Bassano.

Date

During the period when NG 6490 was considered to be by Veronese there was no lack of knowledge in England of Bassano’s style of painting, but there was hardly any awareness of his earliest mature work, of which the present painting is representative. It is noteworthy that Jacopo Bassano’s Adoration of the Shepherds in the Royal Collection of the same period was similarly reattributed in the early eighteenth century. However, the latter painting was acknowledged as by Jacopo and correctly dated by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who, had they visited Weston Park, would surely have recognised NG 6490 as a related work.18

NG 6490 must date from close to 1545, as has been recognised at least since 1973.19 The palette is very close to Bassano’s altarpiece of the Martyrdom of Saint Catharine, now in the Museo Civico, Bassano (fig. 3), in which there is a very [page 11][page 12]similar – almost comic – congestion of figures in active and often violent poses. Saint Veronica has the same flushed profile and plaited hairstyle as Saint Catharine; both saints reveal their petticoats as they kneel, and wear the same colours (Veronica in a red dress with green sleeves, Catharine in a green dress with red sleeves).20 The Saint Catharine altarpiece can be dated from the artist’s account book, the Libro Secondo, to the summer months of 1544,21 and NG 6490 must have been completed soon afterwards. However, it is puzzling, especially since it was almost certainly painted as an altarpiece, that it is not included in that same Libro Secondo, in which all important commissions of this kind seem to have been recorded. Perhaps it was made for Bassano’s own family chapel or as a special favour. It is certainly a painting to which he gave great attention, whether we consider the taut complexity of the composition, the richness and variety of colour, or simply the density of form and intensity of expression.

Fig. 4

Detail of NG 6490 showing the head and hands of Saint John. © The National Gallery, London.

Fig. 5

Agostino Veneziano after Raphael, Christ carrying the Cross (‘Lo Spasimo di Sicilia’), 1517. Engraving, 41 × 28.5 cm. London, The British Museum. © Copyright The Trustees of The British Museum.

Fig. 6

Jacopo Bassano, The Way to Calvary, 1543–4. Oil on canvas, 81.9 × 118.7 cm. Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

Sources

Bassano’s composition owes much to Raphael’s Spasimo, which he would have known in Agostino Veneziano’s engraving of 1517 (fig. 5). As has often been observed, Bassano drew again and again upon this famous engraving for inspiration.22 About a decade earlier, in a painting perhaps executed with his father, he had copied four or five figures from it,23 and he did so again in the Way to Calvary in the Fitzwilliam Museum of about 1543 (fig. 6)24 and in another painting of the same subject in the Christie Collection at Glyndebourne, Sussex, which is documented as completed in 1549.25 In NG 6490 the derivation is less obvious. The executioner seen from the rear, for example, seems to be derived from the soldier in the left foreground of Raphael’s composition, but with his right arm in a different position.

For the weeping Virgin, Bassano may have turned to the prints of Dürer, and especially to the Virgin as she is depicted in the scene of Christ and Veronica in the Small Passion woodcuts of 1509 (fig. 7).26 It is striking that Bassano’s Christ is calmer in expression than Dürer’s or Raphael’s, but an expression of great distress is instead given to Saint John. The soldier’s scarf flying up and twisting and curling against the sky like egg white leaking into hot water resembles the drapery of the angel in Bassano’s Flight into Egypt in the Norton Simon Museum. It must also have been inspired by the restless flourishes of fabric which are typical of Dürer and of German Renaissance art in general (sculpture as well as painting and printmaking). This conflation of Raphael and Dürer is remarkably similar to that found in designs made by Bernaert van Orley (1488–1541) during the 1520s for tapestries of the Passion woven in Brussels, and indeed it is especially evident in the tapestries now in Madrid (Patrimonio Nacional) and Paris (Musée Jacquemart André) which show Christ carrying the cross.27

In addition, it seems likely that the flow of one figure into another and the spatial compression must owe something to the example of the ornamental style introduced into Venetian art by the Salviati and by Schiavone.28 The prominent tree stump in the lower left‐hand corner comes directly from the [page 13]paintings of Bonifazio de’ Pitati (see fig. 2, p. xv).29 Bassano had used this device earlier, in his Adoration of the Kings of about 1543 in the National Gallery of Scotland (fig. 1, p. 3).30 The mounted figures in NG 6490 come from the top right‐hand corner of that painting (where there are also echoes of Raphael’s Spasimo). So by the mid‐1540s it is already the case that Bassano reuses more figures from his own earlier paintings than he takes from other artists. The relationship between Veronica and his earlier Saint Catharine (mentioned in the previous section) is also significant in this respect.

Fig. 7

Albrecht Dürer, Scene from The Small Passion, 1509. Woodcut, 12.7 × 9.7 cm. London, The British Museum. © Copyright The Trustees of The British Museum.

The Way to Calvary in the Royal Collection

Bassano’s painting was first recorded in the great collection formed in Venice by Jan Reynst in the 1620s and 1630s, which was inherited by his brother Gerard (Gerrit) in 1648 and taken to Amsterdam. This collection, described here in an appendix (p. 470), formed the basis of a diplomatic gift made by the Dutch Republic to King Charles II of England in 1660, and NG 6490 was recorded, presumably very soon afterwards, in an undated ‘Inventory of all his Majestie’s pictures in Whitehall in Hampton Court and in Stoare’, as in the Palace of Whitehall, one of ten pictures in the ‘Square Table Room’ – no. 161: ‘Bastano. Our Saviour on his knees bearing his Cross & c. Tenn figures more. Dutch pr sent. 4/9 × 4/4.’31 There were other large Venetian pictures in the room: one by ‘Old Palma’ (now attributed to Bonifazio),32 a Veronese workshop painting of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catharine33 and Titian’s Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist – all three of them also from the ‘Dutch gift’ – and Van Dyck’s portrait of the ‘king when young laying a hand on a greate dogge with three princesses’.

At the time of this inventory there were few paintings recorded in the queen’s apartments at Hampton Court – those in her drawing room and in her bedchamber were probably fixed above the chimneypieces.34 The queen was Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705). The marriage, which at her insistence had been a private Catholic ceremony, had taken place on 21 May 1662. The king defended her when she became the victim of popular anti‐Catholic feeling and calculated libels, especially in the late 1670s. From the moment of her arrival in London her private rooms were of intense interest to Protestants. Samuel Pepys contrived to examine her closet and bedchamber in Whitehall on 24 June 1664: ‘She had nothing but some pretty pious pictures, and books of devotion; and her holy water at her head as she sleeps, with her clock by her bedside, wherein a lamp burns that tells her the time of the night at any time.’35 But it was in the chapel beside St James’s Palace, built by Inigo Jones, that her taste, or at least her faith, was most apparent, especially after the autumn of 1682 when Jacob Huysmans’s Holy Family was installed in an elaborate altar surround designed by Grinling Gibbons beneath a vault and behind an altar tabernacle also painted by Huysmans.36 In 1669 she acquired Somerset House (then also known as Denmark House) as her dower house and modifications were made for her there in 1671–2 and 1674–5, but chiefly in 1685, after her husband’s death, when it became her principal residence.37

In the manuscript inventory of His Majesty’s goods, the first folio of which is dated 15 February 1688/9, there is a list of fifty‐four ‘Pictures of the Kings in the Queene Dowager’s Custody’, of which no. 46 is ‘Christ carrying his Crosse with Eleaven figures in it one of the Dutch presents’, annotated as by Bassano. These pictures were predominantly religious in character; the only exceptions are two portraits, two flower pieces, a landscape, a ‘perspective’, and one drawing of an unspecified subject.38

Not many of the works cited are attributed but there was a picture of ‘Our Lady and Christ and a Priest’ by Raphael, an Ecce Homo by Titian, a ‘Mantua piece’ of Our Lady, Christ and Saint Catharine by ‘Parmegan’, a Saint Jerome by Metsys (‘Quinton’), another ‘Mantua piece’ by ‘Georgoone’ of ‘our lady, Christ and Joseph’, a Good Samaritan by ‘Phette’ (Fetti), a Magdalen by ‘Guedo’, and a Nativity by ‘Poolingberg’. There were also two other items from the ‘Dutch gift’: no. 33, ‘Our Lady and Christ with a lamb and Joseph’, probably a copy of the Holy Family with a Lamb, ‘Said to be Raphael’, and no. 48, ‘Our Saviour with his feet on a cushion, the B. Virgin St John and St Elizabeth’ attributed to Titian, both of them included among the works in the Reynst collection which were engraved (the latter had also been in the Square Table room, as noted above).

The queen intended to return to Portugal. The same inventory lists ‘goods that went to Portugal for the Queene’ in 1687, including a great ‘crimson velvet close stoole with gold and silver fringe’, a ‘looking glasse Table and stands of walnutt tree’,39 but she in fact remained in Somerset House [page 14]throughout the reign of James II, and William III permitted her to continue living there – although it did not please him to do so – until the end of 1692. She arrived in Lisbon early in 1693 and died there in 1705. None of the pictures listed as being in her custody has been traced in subsequent records of the royal collection. She had become possessive and difficult, as is clear from a protracted dispute with the Earl of Clarendon which delayed her departure from London. Furthermore, with the change of dynasty there was some general confusion concerning crown property.

Vertue alleged that when the queen dowager left Somerset House the lord chamberlain ‘put a stop’ to the pictures ‘but having one of them he much admired given to him he let them go’.40 Then, in a fuller account, he recorded that the queen sent some ‘few pictures’ to Portugal when she ‘intended first to go there to live the rest of her dayes – after ye. death of the king’ but that she continued to live in Somerset House ‘till she saw K Willm settled – and she unlikely to be much at Ease here … its reported the Ld Chamberlain then in Office objected then against carrying away any of those pictures but after Viewing them – he was prevailed to accept of one he liked best, & then let them pass.’41 This last entry is dated 1736, long after the events described (the earlier entry is likely to have been made in 1725), and Vertue is careful to add ‘its reported’, but the story is likely to have some foundation. If a painting was extracted from the group as a bribe then it must surely have been the Bassano, which is indeed the only painting among those in the queen’s ‘custody’ which is recorded in England after this date.

There is a copy of the engravings of the Reynst collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, annotated by Thomas Coke, who was lord chamberlain of Her Majesty’s household from 1706 until 1727. Under the print of Bassano’s painting, there erroneously entitled as by Veronese, he writes: ‘Ja: Bassano now att my Ld Torringtons of Twittenham.’ This is certainly a reference to Thomas Newport, created Baron Torrington in 1716, who died without issue in 1718.42 Lord Torrington’s father, the Earl of Bradford, was a keen collector, and although he was never lord chamberlain he was comptroller and treasurer of the household under both Charles II and William III. He was a man of unscrupulous character, at least as an art collector, and it is very likely that he was the recipient of the queen’s bribe. His collecting and the subsequent history of the paintings he owned are traced in an appendix here (pp. 443–8).

Provenance and Acquisition

See above. Jan Reynst, Venice, before 1648, when inherited by Gerard Reynst. Sold by the latter’s widow to the Dutch Republic and presented to Charles II of England in 1660. By February 1689 (modern calendar) in the apartments of Queen Catherine of Braganza in Somerset House, and apparently given by her as a bribe in the winter of 1692, presumably to the Earl of Bradford, in whose family it descended to the 7th Earl, who succeeded in 1981. The earl agreed in 1983 to settle the capital transfer tax to which his estate was subject by arranging a private treaty sale of the Bassano through Christie’s. The painting was studied in the National Gallery in October, then shown in the Royal Academy’s exhibition, The Genius of Venice, in November. Acquisition was agreed upon in February and announced on 20 March 1984, together with the £300,000 contribution towards its cost made by the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Print

The painting was engraved and etched in reverse in about 1655–7 by Jeremias Falck (b. Gdansk 1609/10, d. 1677), when it was still in the Reynst collection. The print was made for the volume Variarum imaginum a celeberrimis artificibus pictarum caelaturae, published in Amsterdam.43 Falck seems to have come to Amsterdam specifically to work on this project.44 There are no significant compositional differences, except that the tops of the heads at the top right, together with a strip of sky, are included in the print. The cusping of the canvas suggests that only a small amount of the picture at most has been lost on the upper edge, so Falck was either imitating an addition which had been made to the painting or changing the composition to make it appear more conventional.

Exhibitions

London 1960, Royal Academy, Italian Art and Britain ; London 1983–4, Royal Academy, The Genius of Venice ; Bassano del Grappa 1992, Museo Civico ; Fort Worth 1993, Kimbell Art Museum, Jacopo Bassano, 1510–1592 .

The painting arrived in the National Gallery in an English frame of a Carlo Maratta pattern such as we know to have been given to many of the paintings at Weston Park in the early nineteenth century.45 The decision to reframe it was made immediately upon acquisition, and on 20 March 1984 the press release announcing the acquisition observed that it would be ‘newly framed’ for exhibition in the galleries two days later. The frame was a Victorian imitation of a Renaissance tabernacle frame, altered in size and regilded. It must have originally been made for another painting. Although this choice of frame was intended as a reminder that the [page 15]painting had been made as an altarpiece, it made it hard to display with other pictures. A walnut frame based on Italian patterns of the late sixteenth century was carved for the painting by John England: it was completed at the end of 2002.46 The beads separating the gadroons on the outside of the inward‐curling outer moulding are gilded. So too are the tongues between the acanthus leaves curled over the ogee inside the outer moulding, and also the narrow hollow at the sight edge.

Copy

An old copy of the painting was presented by F.D. Lycett‐Green, through the National Art Collections Fund, to York City Art Gallery in 1955. Lycett‐Green, then of Constantia, South Africa, bought it in 1936 from W.E. Duits, who had acquired it at Sotheby’s in London on 6 November 1935 (lot 126A). The painting had been unsold at a Christie’s sale on 15 June 1923 (lot 108) but had in the meantime been published as an original by Arslan.

It seems likely to have been made in Holland shortly before the painting was sent to England. In it, the Virgin wears black, which suggests that the blue had already greatly darkened. The pink of Christ’s garment is warmer, no doubt because the lake pigment used by Bassano was not available. The painting is also cropped, very severely on the right side, less drastically on the left.

Notes

1. Verified by EDX. Report made by Marika Spring of the National Gallery’s Scientific Department, 21 October 1997. (Back to text.)

3. Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D1287/4/4 (R/271). (Back to text.)

4. Muraro 1960, p. 53. For Buttery see Penny 2004, pp. xiv–xv. (Back to text.)

5. For Morrill see ibid. , p. xiv. (Back to text.)

6. For which see Ballarin 1995–6, II, 3, pl. 147. (Back to text.)

7. Bartoli 1999, pp. 231–2, no. 125, and pp. 125–9 (which includes a discussion of the iconography). (Back to text.)

8. Gould 1975, p. 100. (Back to text.)

9. Penny 2004, pp. 18–29. (Back to text.)

10. Ibid. , pp. 25–8. (Back to text.)

11. For legends of the healing of Tiberius see James 1926 1928 , pp. 157–9, and Voragine 1969, pp. 214–15. For the portrait relics generally see Réau 1955–9, II, 1957, chapter 2, p. 19. For a succinct account of Veronica see P.K. Meagher in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, XIV, p. 625. (Back to text.)

12. Ibid. , p. 625. (Back to text.)

13. Arslan 1929, p. 17, and Arslan 1931, p. 90. (Back to text.)

14. Country Life, XCVIII, July–December 1945, p. 866. (Back to text.)

15. Zampetti 1957, p. 46, no. 18. Muraro 1957 recognised that it was a copy – an opinion expressed by The Burlington Magazine two years earlier ([Nicholson] 1955). (Back to text.)

16. Mahon 1950, p. 15, note 4, part 5. (Back to text.)

17. Muraro 1960, pp. 53–4. (Back to text.)

18. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1871, II, pp. 291, 486; Shearman 1983, pp. 21–3, no. 16. Even Waagen did not recognise that the Adoration of the Kings now in the National Gallery of Scotland was by Bassano (1857, p. 429), although he realised that it had been incorrectly attributed to Titian. (Back to text.)

19. Ballarin 1973, p. 108; Brown and Marini 1992, p. 40, no. 14 (entry by Maria Elisa Avagnina). (Back to text.)

20. Inv. 436. Brown and Marini 1992, p. 34, no. 13 (entry by Giuliana Ericani). (Back to text.)

21. Muraro 1992, p. 36, no. 148. (Back to text.)

22. On this topic see, above all, Ballarin 1967, pp. 94–6. (Back to text.)

23. Rearick in Brown and Marini 1992, p. LXV and fig.4. (Back to text.)

24. Brown and Marini 1992, pp. 32–3, no. 12 (entry by Giuliana Ericani). (Back to text.)

25. Ballarin 1967; Rearick in Brown and Marini 1992, pp. xcvi–xcvii, fig. 18. (Back to text.)

27. Campbell 2002, pp. 287–313, especially pp. 291–2 and 312–13; for illustrations see fig. 134 on p. 292 and no. 32, reproduced on p. 311. (Back to text.)

28. This is persuasively argued by Ballarin 1967 but I do not accept the source in a print by Schiavone that he proposes (p. 98). (Back to text.)

29. It is tempting to see the axed stump as having a symbolic meaning in NG 6490, but if so it is a meaning which must be appropriate to a wide range of religious subjects. (Back to text.)

30. National Gallery of Scotland, Inv. 100; Brigstocke 1993, pp. 26–7; Brown and Marini 1992, pp. 26–8, no. 10 (entry by Giuliana Ericani). (Back to text.)

31. A copy of this inventory is in the National Gallery Library (O.S.) NC 320 (60) Royalty; 2, fol. 10. (Back to text.)

32. Shearman 1983, p. 51, no. 46. (Back to text.)

33. Ibid. , p. 289, no. 317. (Back to text.)

34. MS cited in note 31, fols 105–17. (Back to text.)

35. Pepys 1894, IV, p. 168. Her lodgings had been prepared in July 1662 and were extended in 1664 and 1668 (Colvin et al. 1976, pp. 267, 269). (Back to text.)

36. Colvin et al. 1976, pp. 244–54. (Back to text.)

37. Ibid. , pp. 254–9. Many of the chapel’s fittings were then moved to the chapel in Somerset House. (Back to text.)

38. British Library, Harleian MSS, 1890, fols 69–71. (Back to text.)

39. Ibid. , fol. 15. (Back to text.)

40. Vertue, I, p. 161. (Back to text.)

41. Ibid. , IV, p. 100. (Back to text.)

42. Alastair Laing was the first person to realise this. Denis Mahon (1950, p. 15, no. 15) assumed that it was a reference to Admiral George Byng (1663–1733), who was raised to the peerage as Viscount Torrington in 1721. This was a compelling idea because Byng had many dealings with Portugal and his great‐granddaughter married the 2nd Earl of Bradford of the second creation, in whose collection the Bassano was later to be found. (Back to text.)

43. Block 1890, pp. 34–5, no. 18 (‘Christus das Kreuz tragend’, connected with Schiavone rather than Bassano); Pan 1992, p. 69, no. 54. (Back to text.)

44. Logan 1979, p. 38, note 2; Block 1890, pp. 10–11. (Back to text.)

45. The frame survives in the National Gallery’s store. It was number E165 in the inventory compiled by Paul Levi. (Back to text.)

46. John England retired as head of framing at the Gallery in February 2001. The work had been agreed upon before his retirement. (Back to text.)

Appendix of Collectors’ Biographies

The 1st Earl of Bradford (1619/20–1708)
and the Paintings at Weston Park

The Newports had been lords of Ercall and sheriffs of Shropshire since the early fifteenth century. Richard Newport, knighted in 1615, was created Baron Newport of High Ercall in 1642 in return for services to the Crown – services which eventually led to imprisonment, fines and exile. He died in 1650, declaring in his will that his family was ‘dissolved’, his ‘chief house … ruined’, and his ‘howsholdstuffe and stocke sold’.1 His son Francis, 2nd Lord Newport, who had also been imprisoned and fined during the Civil War, restored the family fortunes under Charles II, who made him Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire, granted him Shrewsbury Castle in 1666, appointed him Comptroller of the Household and Privy Councillor in 1668, gave him the office of Treasurer of the Household in 1672, and two years later created him Viscount Newport of Bradford (Shropshire). Dismissed from his royal offices by James II, he was restored as Treasurer (Cofferer) in 16892 and as Lord Lieutenant under William and Mary, and was created Earl of Bradford in 1694.

The earliest known record of Lord Newport as a collector of paintings comes in 1682, when he was more than sixty years of age. It was then that he purchased fifteen paintings for more than £300 at the sale by ‘publick outcry’ of Sir Peter Lely’s collection and the contents of his studio.3 His most costly acquisition on this occasion was Van Dyck’s portrait of Thomas Killigrew for £83, followed by the same artist’s Sir Walter Pye for £40. He also bought a self portrait by Van Dyck for £74. Most of his other purchases were apparently minor works by Lely himself – some of them specified as copies and none costing more than £10 – but he also bought a ‘landscape of Savary’ (Roelandt Savery) for £25 10s., ‘flowers of Van Heist’ for £35 10s., and ‘A Mort Christ’ for £36. This last was perhaps a crucifix (ivory crucifixes were commonly framed and hung as pictures).

On Christmas Eve 1685 John Evelyn noted that he ‘dined at Lord Newport’s, who has some excellent pictures, especially that of Sir Thomas Hanmer, by Vandyck, one of the best he ever painted; another of our English Dobson’s painting; but, above all, Christ in the Virgin’s lap by Poussin, an admirable piece; with something of most other famous hands.’4

There is a good reason to believe that a decade later Newport exploited his royal office to acquire Bassano’s Way to Calvary (NG 6490), more or less as a bribe from the Queen Dowager, Catherine of Braganza, shortly before she departed for Portugal (the circumstances are described on p. 14). Confirmation of his unscrupulous methods as a collector is found in the note by Jonathan Richardson the Younger, attached to a copy of Holbein’s portrait drawing then believed to be of Anne Boleyn:when he [the old earl] was Confin’d with the Gout, a little before his Death, He sent to request of my F. [that is, the great collector and writer, and mediocre painter, Jonathan Richardson the Elder] that he would lend him a Book of Drawings to Divert him, wich my F. comply’d with. The E. sent him back the Book in a few days, but without this Drawing. My F. went immediately to wait on him, & found the Drawing hanging by the Bed side in which he lay, in a Frame of Glass. There was other Company in the Room, so my F. could not claim it at that time; but look’d several times at ye Drawing, stedfastly, & look’d at my Ld. My Ld. stood it, discoursing with him, quite unconcern’d; & in two or three days fairly Sneak’d out of the World, & kept the Drawing. My F. could not claim it afterwards of his Heir … with out accusing Bradford of a most Infamous piece of villany, of which he had no witness.5 Something of the personality and the artistic interests of the 1st Earl – and much evidence of his immense wealth and uneasy relations with his family – emerges in the will he signed on 26 December 1699, to which he added more than thirty codicils in the remaining years of his life.6 He appointed his second son, ‘Thomas Newport of Inner Temple London Esq’ (born about 1655), sole executor and residuary legatee of all his personal estate, goods, chattels, debts and mortgages, and he clearly had no confidence in his elder son and heir, Richard (born 1644). Especially revealing is the fact that he itemised all his fine silver plate and placed it in the care of trustees as heirlooms, with instructions that his heir was not to ‘intermeddle with more than the use and possession thereof’.

Many of the codicils concern bequests to servants and relatives – some were to increase the dowries of his elder granddaughters7 or to secure annuities for other members of his family, especially his grandson Richard Newport.8 And there are complicated instructions to his trustees to complete negotiations to buy land in Shropshire to add to the family property. His chief residence in Shropshire was at Eyton‐on‐Severn (a house built in the first decades of the seventeenth century, of which a delightful summer house and barn survive). He wished to be buried in the church of St Andrew, Wroxeter, not far from Eyton, and set aside £200 for a tomb in the chancel ‘next to that of Sir Richard Newport knight my great grandfather’.9 His library was to follow his coffin back to Shropshire, and he asked that all his books be carried from London ‘to my old closet within the Dineing Room chamber in Eyton House in Shropshire to remain there’. Some paintings were to go there too, as he directed in a codicil dated 1 April 1701:My will is that the Picture of Sir Thomas Hanmer holding his Glove in his left hand, a picture of Sir Walter Pye, the picture of Sir [page 444]William Killigrew and the picture of Sir Thomas Killigrew (with a Dogs head) that hang in my Dining Roome at Whitehall (all drawne by Sir Anthony Van Dyke) together with my own picture that hangs in my Little Parlour at Twittenham (drawne by Sir Peter Lely) be all sent down carefully to Eyton House in Shropshire to be hung in the parlour there. The first on the south side of the said parlour and the other on the side opposite it above the chimney and there to remain as heirloomes to my ffamily forever. He revised this plan in another codicil of 6 January 1703 (our 1704): ‘Now my will and mind is that that picture of Sir William Killigrew be not sent; but instead thereof the picture of my Lord Chief Justice Lyttleton in his Robes (afterwards Lord Keeper of the Great Seale of England) drawne by Sir Anthony Vandyke.’

Fig. 2

Adam Elsheimer, The Martyrdom and Stoning of Saint Stephen, c. 1603. Oil on copper, 34.7 × 28.6 cm. Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland. Photo Antonia Reeve, Edinburgh © National Galleries of Scotland/Bridgeman Images

In his original will the earl had bequeathed ‘to my Lord George Howard his mother’s picture being a whole length drawne by Sir Peter Lely’, and in addition had given ‘to Col. Charles Godfrey his choice of any other picture I shall have at the time of my decease other than the pictures beforementioned’. Recognising that this latter request could conflict with his plans for the parlour at Eyton, he added a codicil on 26 December 1705 ‘excepting out of’ Godfrey’s choice those pictures destined for Eyton and also, what was perhaps a recently acquired treasure, ‘that whole length picture at my home in Twittenham of the Queene Mother [the late Queen Henrietta Maria] in a hat with Geofrey the Dwarf in it drawn by Anthony Van Dyke’. This is the great painting now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Obviously the earl held Van Dyck in very high esteem. And the idea of creating a Van Dyck gallery to be kept by his family in perpetuity is truly remarkable. But he may also have wished to commemorate in this room his youthful attachment to the Stuart court, and the group of paintings he hoped to keep together may have been portraits of friends and protectors. Little is known of Sir Walter Pye (1610–1659), father of the Baron Kilpeck who died in exile with James II. Van Dyck’s portrait of him has been identified at Arundel Castle, where it was long supposed to represent the 3rd Earl of Arundel.10 Sir William Killigrew (1606–1695) and his brother Thomas (1612–1683) were both courtiers, poets and playwrights, the latter noted as a wit dear to Charles II and a keen promoter of Restoration theatre. These men were near contemporaries of Sir Thomas Hanmer (b. 1612), who had been, like Thomas Killigrew, a page to Charles I. They were all a few years older than the earl. The Hanmers from Flint were neighbouring landowners to Lord Bradford, and both Sir Thomas Hanmer and his heir, William, feature in property transactions described in the codicils. By contrast Sir Edward Littleton (1589–1645) was a considerably older figure.11

It is clear from the Earl of Bradford’s will that he kept his paintings in Whitehall and Twickenham. With the exceptions of the group destined for Eyton, Colonel Godfrey’s choice, and Lely’s portrait of Lord George Howard’s mother, all passed to his second son, Thomas Newport, who was then well established in public life. We learn from the handsome ledger stone in the chancel of Wroxeter church that Thomas was Commissioner of Customs under King William and Queen Anne ‘upwards of 14 years’. In June 1715 he was made Lord of the Treasury and created Baron Torrington by George I and, soon after, Privy Councillor and Teller of the Exchequer.

The paintings in his father’s Whitehall house were moved to Thomas’s own residence in Surrey Street, where a ‘catalogue of the Pictures of Tho. Newport Esqre’ was compiled at some date between his father’s death in 1708 and his accession to the peerage in 1715.12 That the collection catalogued here was almost all inherited may [page 445]reasonably be deduced from the fact that the entry for a print (or drawing) of Coypel’s Susanna and the Elders is annotated ‘my own not my fathers’. There were 160 paintings, divided chiefly between the ‘new room’, the ‘gallery’, the parlour and the staircase. The remainder of the collection was housed at Twickenham. The earl had evidently felt a strong attachment to his house there, noting that he had spent as much on improving it as he had on purchasing it. He hoped it would provide Thomas with a ‘convenient country house for him to dwell in’ but made provision that if he failed to inhabit it ‘for the space of two months at least in every year’ it was to pass to the owner of the manor of High Ercall and be sold to enable improvements to be carried out to that house.13 It seems that Thomas did live at ‘Twittenham’ and his third wife, Ann, daughter of Robert Pierrepont, inherited it from him. A manuscript catalogue of the paintings is dated 9 November 1719, six months or so after her husband’s death.14 If we exclude some pictures listed as Lady Torrington’s own property, and 28 ‘India pictures in watercolours’ and 19 ‘fans made into pictures’, there remain some 140 paintings which may be assumed to have been collected by Lord Bradford. These were hung throughout the house, and 90 of them were portraits, including the great portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria already mentioned. Annotations to the Surrey Street catalogue record the transfer of some paintings from town to Twickenham, most of them portraits. There was a ‘beauty room’ hung with eight female portraits by Lely, Kneller and Van Dyck, no doubt created in imitation of the room at Hampton Court furnished with portraits by Kneller in 1692, and the earlier White Room at Windsor Castle, where Lely’s six maids of honour were hung in the 1660s (there were earlier rooms of this type on the Continent15).

A ‘catalogue’ also survives of the paintings in Lady Torrington’s town house, no longer in Surrey Street, but with much the same works, albeit differently arranged. In the Surrey Street house small and large pictures had been evenly mixed, which suggests that the former were hung beneath the latter throughout, but now more than twenty of the finest cabinet pictures wefare concentrated in the ‘closet’, although there were also larger pictures in that room and other small paintings elsewhere.16

Lord Bradford’s collection, as we can reconstruct it from the catalogues made for his son and daughter‐in‐law, included not only the great Van Dycks but a large portion of the paintings by Elsheimer known to us today, including the Martyrdom and Stoning of Saint Stephen (fig. 2), the two panels in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the series of the story of the True Cross now in the Städel Institut, Frankfurt. It was indeed especially rich in small cabinet pictures – intricate and exquisite works by Rottenhammer, Brill, ‘Velvet’ Brueghel, Jan Saftleven, Poelenburgh and Van Swanevelt, for example, as well as small scenes of low life by Brouwer and David Teniers, and two pictures by Dou. There were two self portraits by Rembrandt (one of these has been identified as the portrait now in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) and one by ‘Francis Holst’ (Frans Hals), as well as a seascape [page 446]by Jan Porcellis and landscapes by ‘Barcam’ (Berchem) and Claude.

Fig. 3

Family tree of the Earls of Bradford. © The National Gallery, London

Modern Italian paintings included a Noli me tangere attributed to ‘Carlo Morat’ (Maratta), who died in 1713 and was thus still living when it entered the collection, as well as works by Filippo Lauri (d. 1684), ‘Carlooch’ (Carlo Loth, d. 1698), Salvator Rosa, Guido Reni, Guercino, Mola and the Carracci. The sixteenth‐century paintings were mostly Venetian and believed to be by ‘Georgioni’, ‘Old Palma’, Titian, Tintoretto, the Bassani and Veronese.17

There was also Cupid shaving His Bow, given to Correggio but in fact a copy of the famous Parmigianino,18 and a ‘Monaliza’ by Leonardo. It is easy to smile at these, but the catalogues were clearly compiled by someone who was well informed, and they acknowledge copies, works merely in a master’s manner, and anonymous pieces. In general, if portraits are excepted, the better paintings were kept in town. A notable exception is ‘Our Saviour bearing the Cross by Bassan’, which hung with eight other, miscellaneous paintings in a room ‘within’ – that is, beyond – the ‘beauty room’. One would have expected it to hang with the Venetian paintings (before long, indeed, it would be attributed to Veronese) but it may perhaps have been thought more prudent to keep this picture in a relatively private setting.

Both of Lady Torrington’s inventories are annotated to the effect that the pictures had been ‘devised’ by the will of Lord Torrington to pass after his wife’s death to his elder brother, the 2nd Earl, for whom copies of the inventories were made in May 1720.19 The next inventory known to us records thirty‐one cases containing 325 ‘Pictures belonging to the Rt. Honble. the Countess of Bradford which were sent from London to Weston in Staffordshire’ in June 1735, among them ‘Our Saviour bearing the Cross’ with the attribution changed from Bassano to Veronese. Lady Torrington had died earlier in the same year, and by then not only had the 2nd Earl died (in 1723) but also – very recently – his son, the dissolute 3rd Earl, who left all unsettled family property to his illegitimate son. The earldom passed to the 3rd Earl’s brother, who was, however, ‘of unsound mind not sufficient for the government of himself’. The Countess of Bradford who had the pictures in 1735 was the widow of the 2nd Earl and herself quite old. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Wilbraham, Bt, and heiress of the fine seventeenth‐century house Weston Park, with all its lands. She must have known that she would not have long to enjoy the collection there but she wished to ensure that part of it at least would stay at Weston. She died in December 1737 and was buried there.

In accordance with the countess’s will, the collection was divided into equal parts, one of which she wished to be inseparable from the house. The 4th Earl’s share had of course to be entrusted to her two other heirs, her only surviving daughters, Anne, who had married Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Bt, of Castle Bromwich, and Diana, who had married the Earl of Mountrath. In the document recording this division some of the paintings are valued. The most highly valued among the 4th Earl’s share was the portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, at £150 – this painting seems to have passed to the Countess of Mountrath – while ‘Our Saviour bearing the Cross’ (in the Bridgeman share) was valued at £100, the second highest value given. Many paintings must have been sold either soon after this division or after the death of the 4th Earl (who never recovered his sanity) in 1762. It is at this point that we lose sight of the portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, the Elsheimers, the Veronese and many other major works. Moreover, it is not clear what happened to those paintings, which were intended to stay forever together at Eyton House. But more than half of the contents of the cases that came to Weston in 1735 remain there today.

Weston passed in 1762 to Sir Orlando’s son Sir Henry Bridgeman, the 5th Baronet, who became 1st Baron Bradford in 1794. He spent heavily on improvements to the house, going to Paris to acquire furnishings for it, commissioning the Gobelins tapestries after Boucher, dated 1786, and the marquetry commode stamped by François Gerrard in the same year. At the same date he commissioned ‘Capability’ Brown to improve the park, which was then graced by the Temple of Diana and the monumental bridge designed by James Paine in 1770. He is not known to have acquired old master paintings – he perhaps felt he had enough of them – but he must have commissioned the insipid group portrait of his family by R.E. Pyne and other individual portraits by this artist. The Stubbs (Two Horses) must also have been commissioned, or acquired, in this period.

The 2nd Lord Bradford, who inherited Weston in 1800 and was made 1st Earl (of the second creation) in 1815, had been a crony of the Prince of Wales but he settled down and dedicated himself to agricultural improvements. The letters written by his wife Lucy (née Byng) to her father, Lord Torrington, on their visit to France during the peace of 1802 reveal that neither she nor her husband had any great knowledge or curiosity concerning works of art (Napoleon’s Louvre is hardly mentioned).20 In that same year, on the death of Charles Coote, 7th Earl of Mountrath, Lord Bradford inherited Weeting Hall in Norfolk and with it came some paintings, including two grand sea pieces by Joseph Vernet, dated 1746, which had been commissioned by Mountrath on the Grand Tour.21 Weeting was sold to John Julius Angerstein but the paintings came to Weston.

The ‘house frame’ for the pictures at Weston Park, a slightly coarse Carlo Maratta pattern with broad shields between the acanthus in the ogee hollow, is likely to date from about 1810 and probably reflects a campaign of interior decoration. When he was more than sixty years of age, the earl travelled to Italy, perhaps for reasons of health. In Genoa in March 1822 he was persuaded to buy en bloc 27 paintings and 19 bronzes apparently part of a much larger palace collection (the paintings’ former numbers are given). This cost him 300 napoleons, and on 2 April, from the same source, he purchased seven more paintings for 60 napoleons.22 The most expensive item, attributed to Albani, was a mediocre painting of Hippomenes and Atalanta adapted from the famous picture by Guido Reni, which cost 50 napoleons.23

Under the 2nd Earl, and doubtless prompted by the architectural modifications and consequent redecoration of the house, the paintings at Weston were cleaned, lined, repaired and endorsed with the artists’ names. The frames too were repaired, regilded (often only in part), and in some cases replaced. This campaign was conducted, largely on site, in 1834 and 1835 by George Barker, described as a ‘painter’ (but evidently not very active as such and unrecorded in the dictionaries of art) of Leamington Spa, and later of Coventry, together with his daughter and a gilder, J. Johnson.24

Records of the arrangement of the pictures at Weston during the nineteenth century survive in the form of small, neat manuscript catalogues with numbered diagrams of the walls, which must have been kept in each room for reference by the family and their guests. From these it is clear how the paintings were hung in 1837 after the extensive campaign of cleaning in 1834 and 1835, and also how they were [page 447]rearranged in 1872 after architectural revisions made upon the 2nd Earl’s death in 1865.25 The arrangement of 1872 was somewhat modified in the 1880s, chiefly to create a gallery of sporting pictures in the Billiard Room (created in 1874 and at first hung with a dozen old masters) and in the adjacent Smoking Room, reflecting the 3rd Earl’s passion for hunting and racing and his position as Master of the Horse to Queen Victoria.

There were more than 200 paintings at Weston but the old masters were largely concentrated in two rooms: the Breakfast Room (42 hung there in 1837, 36 in 1872 – the earlier arrangement included a dense concentration of eleven small pictures clustered around the sea piece by Abraham Storck above the chimney) – and the Dining Room (more than 50 pictures hung there in 1837, 44 in 1872). The Dining Room had been converted into what is now the library in 1865 but the amount of space for pictures in the new Dining Room was much the same. Portraits were kept in the old and new library above the bookcases – a common arrangement.

It is easier to follow the arrangements of the paintings than it is to reconstruct the decorative schemes to which they belonged. Weston is a palimpsest of eighteenth‐century revivals. By 1865 a probate inventory reveals that Bedroom E was not only hung with the Gobelins tapestries but adorned with ‘Old Chelsea china figures’, ebony and buhl wardrobes, white and gilt furniture with striped silk upholstery and amber silk window curtains.26 This cannot have been simply a survival. The firm of Baldock was supplying buhl furniture for the house in the 1840s, and genuine antique French furniture was acquired at the same date. In 1868 the tapestries came downstairs, and later in the century, as the cigar smoke curled around the paintings of hunting and racing in the male rooms, delicate French furnishings arrived in the areas where ladies presided – also more imitation eighteenth‐century pieces and the pair of Beauvais tapestries. Much of what we see today, however, reflects the neo‐Georgian taste of the 1960s and in particular that of Mary, wife of the 6th Earl, whose redecoration involved new plasterwork, the exchanging and replacing of chimneypieces and the creation of new rooms out of the Billiard Room and the Smoking Room.27

The 3rd Earl of Bradford, whose sporting interests have been alluded to above, was not only a wealthy man, with more than 20,000 acres (worth over £40,000 per annum in 1883), but a man at the centre of British political life, perhaps less because he was Lord Chamberlain in Lord Derby’s government of 1866–8 than because his wife was an intimate friend of Disraeli. He certainly did not neglect the paintings at Weston.

A manuscript catalogue begun in the 1870s, with pencil notes dating from the 1880s, is written in his hand and shows that he even tried to relate what he owned to the early eighteenth‐century records. But the only modern authority to whom he referred was George Barker, the restorer employed by his father.28 He authorised the publication of Mary Boyle’s Portraits at Weston in 1888, which contains useful biographical information but is entirely without art‐historical knowledge, and then a catalogue, Pictures at Weston, belonging to the Earl of Bradford, privately printed in 1895 (very rare), compiled by George Griffiths of Weston‐under‐Lizard, which is a minimal and amateur affair. It includes photographic illustrations made in Wolverhampton ‘from photographs taken by Mr Bowler of Oakengates’. These include one of ‘Our Saviour bearing the Cross’, the Bassano (NG 6490) in the National Gallery here attributed to Paul Veronese.29

The importance as well as the size of this painting was acknowledged in the way it was hung. It was the centrepiece of the Dining Room in 1837, with three small pictures below it by Teniers, Brill and Molenaer and a dense symmetrical hang of Dutch, Flemish and Italian paintings to either side of it. In the new Dining Room in 1872 it retained its position at the centre of a somewhat less crowded but similarly miscellaneous arrangement. By 1915 it had been moved to the Breakfast Room, where it was again above the chimney, and it is recorded there by a Country Life photograph in 1945. On the death of the 4th Earl in 1915 it was valued at £700,30 more than any of the other old master paintings, although less than Gainsborough’s Viscountess Torrington (£900) or Hoppner’s Mrs Gunning (£2,000). There is nothing surprising in the failure to recognise that the painting was by Jacopo Bassano: indeed it is very different in style from the mature works by that artist represented in other paintings at Weston, but the persistence of the attribution to Veronese is remarkable, and a strong reminder of the isolation of English country house collections.

The first major solvent to be applied to erroneous old attributions given to pictures kept in rural obscurity in the nineteenth century was the curiosity of German scholars. But neither Passavant nor Waagen ever visited Weston. The second solvent was the London loan exhibition. The Bassano was one of six items requested by the Royal Academy for their Winter Exhibition in 1875 ,31 but Lord Bradford did not on this occasion agree to lend, and the painting’s true identity did not emerge until it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1960. The third and most effective solvent was an interest in selling, which at the end of the nineteenth century was sure to attract experts to a great house, however remote. This seems not to have been a temptation for the Bradfords until the second half of the twentieth century.

During the 1950s an absurd but spectacular Snyders was sold to an American collector.32 Other paintings were sent to auction in 1963. The Holbein drawing was sold to the British Museum in 1975. The Bassano was sold to the National Gallery in 1983. The Heritage Lottery Fund’s grant to the Weston Park Foundation in 1986 ensured that many of the remaining paintings would remain in the house, but some still belong to the family, and a group of characteristic small cabinet pictures were auctioned in 1992.33

Notes

1. Dictionary of National Biography, XIV, entry by ‘G.G.’ (Gordon Goodwin). (Back to text.)

2. Evelyn 1908, p. 403, notes that he was confirmed in this post on 21 February 1689. Other sources give the date as 1691. (Back to text.)

3. British Library, Add. MSS 16174, Executor’s Account Book 1679–91, fol. 39r (‘Lord Newport’). Not all of these purchases can be deduced from the annotated printed copies, for which see Anon. 1943. (Back to text.)

4. Evelyn 1908, p. 362. There is no subsequent record of the Poussin in the collection but it is tempting to speculate that it was the Pietà now in Dublin. (Back to text.)

5. Brown 1982, pp. 535–6, no. 1539. The purloined original is now in the British Museum, 1975–6‐21–22. Rowlands 1993, pp. 148–9, no. 324, follows Brown in assuming that the culprit was the 3rd Earl. (Back to text.)

6. MS in Family Record Centre, PROB. 11/504, Sig. 229. The will was proved on 7 October 1708. (Back to text.)

7. Mary was born in 1681/2 and died in 1711, unmarried. Elizabeth was born in 1688, married James Cocks in 1718 and died in 1732. (Back to text.)

8. He, however, seems to have predeceased the earl. (Back to text.)

9. The marble wall monument to him in St Andrews incorporates an urn but no effigy and is unsigned. Alastair Laing pointed out to me that it is very similar to that to Admiral Churchill in Westminster Abbey by Grinling Gibbons. (Back to text.)

[page 448]

11. Sir Henry Littleton, Bt, of Arley and Hagley married in 1665 Elizabeth Newport, daughter of Lord Bradford, who in a codicil of 4 February 1701 bequeathed £500 to her, provided that she not take Edward Harvey as her second husband. She did, and the bequest was cancelled. (Back to text.)

12. This catalogue is bound into a quarto volume kept at Weston, a copy of which was supplied to Alastair Laing by Keith Verrall. It occupies fols 1–21 of one end of the book. Lady Torrington’s two catalogues occupy fols 1–28 at the other end. (Back to text.)

13. MS cited in note 6. A codicil of 26 April places responsibility not with the owner of the manor but with his trustees. (Back to text.)

14. See note 12. (Back to text.)

15. For the Galleria delle Belle made by Ferdinando Voet for Palazzo Chigi, Ariccia, see Petrucci 2005, p. 10 and plate on p. 11, also pp. 61–8 for the repetitions elsewhere. (Back to text.)

16. See note 12. (Back to text.)

17. These attributions were probably optimistic, but Veronese’s Christ and the Centurion may be the fine workshop picture now in Toledo, Ohio (66.129). (Back to text.)

18. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, no. 62; Freedberg 1971, pp. 184–6, fig. 79. (Back to text.)

19. The will was proved 4 June 1719 (PROB 11/569 sig. 116 . ). Two pictures of Robert Long, Esq., and Frances, his wife, were bequeathed to Mrs Frances Long. All other pictures were ‘devised’, as stated here. I am grateful to Lome Campbell for this reference. (Back to text.)

20. Staffordshire County Record Office. D 1287/18/9 (P/1056). (Back to text.)

21. Commissioned through Dr John Clephane in January 1745, soon after the earl succeeded. For Clephane see also p. 341 and Ingamells 1997, pp. 214–16. (Back to text.)

22. Staffordshire County Record Office. D 1287/4/4 (R/741). (Back to text.)

23. The attributions to Genoese hands – Badaracco (for Giuseppe Badaracco) and Ratto (for Giovanni Agostino Ratti) – are likely to be reliable, however. (Back to text.)

24. Barker also worked on the pictures at Castle Bromwich in 1842. He also auctioned some old master paintings in that year (Lord Bradford bought a couple of lots). In 1843 he was working on the pictures at Burghley. Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/4 (R/271). (Back to text.)

25. Ibid. , D 1287/4/4 (R/170–183). (Back to text.)

26. Ibid. , D 1287/4/11 (R/751). Inventory compiled by E. and H. Forster. (Back to text.)

27. For the home and furniture see Hussey 1945 and Kwiatkowski n.d. (Back to text.)

28. Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/3 (R/175). (Back to text.)

29. Griffiths 1895, opposite p. 21; no. 121 in catalogue. (Back to text.)

30. Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/9 (R/295). (Back to text.)

31. Ibid. , D 1287/4/4 (R/295), letter of 12 November 1875. Lord Bradford did lend to the National Portrait Exhibition in 1869 and occasionally to other exhibitions. (Back to text.)

32. W.J. Pirig of Colorado Springs sold it at Sotheby’s on 28 November 1962, lot 81, where it was bought by the Banque de Paris et Pays Bas, Antwerp (Robels 1989, pp. 225–6, no. 66). (Back to text.)

33. Christie’s, 21 November 1980 (lots 38 and 39); 18 December 1980 (lots 68 and 69); 23 January 1981 (lots 156–60); 6 March 1981 (lot 110); Sotheby’s, 1 April 1982 (lots 1–5). (Back to text.)

The Reynst Brothers and the ‘Dutch Gift’

Gerard (Gerrit) Reynst, one of the most successful merchants in Amsterdam at the close of the sixteenth century, was founder and director of the Brabant Company. He became a leading figure in that company’s successor, the India Company, and was elected governor‐general of the Dutch East Indies in 1613. He arrived in Indonesia in the following year but died there at the end of 1615, not long after his eldest son, Pieter, who was lost at sea on the way to joining him. Two sons survived: Gerard and Jan, born in 1599 and 1601 respectively. They also prospered as merchants and formed one of the most important art collections in Holland in the mid‐seventeenth century.1 This has been investigated with exceptional scholarship by Anne Marie Logan, and what follows depends largely on her book.

It was a collection of Italian and Italianate paintings and thus, almost certainly, largely the creation of Jan, who by 1625 was living in Venice, where he was known as Giovanni Reinst. There was a notable picture gallery in his palace which was praised by Ridolfi.2 Jan maintained close contact with his elder brother in Holland, who was a partner in his trading ventures and perhaps also in his collecting. In 1634 they together purchased the grand house on the Keizersgracht known as De Hoop (still standing, but much changed), and by 1638 many works of art had been sent there from Venice. More followed after Jan died, in Venice, unmarried, on 26 July 1646.3

It is unlikely that Jan Reynst would have purchased as well as he did without advice. The dedication of the first part of Carlo Ridolfi’s Le Maraviglie dell’Arte to him (and in smaller type to Jan’s brother – ‘Gerardo senatore d’Amsterdamo’) suggests that Ridolfi may have had some association with him. Ridolfi noted that the artist Nicolò Renieri had been a friend of Jan, and since Renieri was recorded as owning half‐a‐dozen pictures attributed to Bonifazio, Schiavone, Sustris, Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese which had belonged to Jan, it is reasonable to infer that these were bequests, or possibly pictures of which Renieri, who was active as adviser, valuer, agent and dealer, had owned a share, or, indeed, perhaps pictures for which Jan had not paid at the time of his death.4

In the year before he died Jan Reynst emerged as a public figure, first representing the Levant merchants in their negotiations with the States General over the taxation of foreign freight on Dutch vessels, and then representing the States General itself in negotiations with the French, whose navy was harrying Dutch vessels suspected of trading with Spain.5 Gerard, by contrast, achieved only a certain prominence in Amsterdam, serving as one of the city’s thirty‐six councillors between 1646 and 1658, the year in which, on 29 June, he fell into the Keizersgracht and drowned.6

Our chief source of knowledge of the Reynst collection comes from sets of engravings of the finest paintings and sculptures in it, probably begun in 1655 but left incomplete on Gerard’s death three years later.7 The enterprise was perhaps inspired by the illustrations of sculptures in the possession of the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani in Rome, the Galleria Giustiniani, commenced by 1631 and published in about 1640.8 David Teniers’s reproductions of 244 of the finest paintings in the great collection of Archduke Leopold William in Brussels belongs to the same period, and Gerard must have been aware of this and also of Hollar’s etchings after works of art in the collection of the Earl of Arundel (a collection even closer to hand, since it was partly housed in Amsterdam between 1643 and 1654).9 But an even more important precedent may have been the seventeen richly illustrated catalogue volumes of Andrea Vendramin’s collections, compiled by 1627 under the title Musaeo Andreae Vendrameno – perhaps the first‐ever illustrated catalogue of a private museum, although as far as we know never intended for publication. Jan Reynst acquired this collection en bloc (and doubtless with it the seventeen volumes, of which six survive) probably shortly after Vendramin’s death in 1629.10

Quite why Gerard Reynst commissioned these engravings is not clear. They certainly broadcast the magnificence of his collection, but was he anxious to record it because he had intimations of its ephemerality? Did he [page 471]wish to enhance its value in anticipation of its sale? Was it indeed always primarily regarded as an investment? The mercantile families of Amsterdam had fewer aspirations to dynastic splendour than those of the noble houses of Venice: a confidential and ‘exclusive’ offer to sell the collection had, in fact, been made in January 1650 to Queen Christina of Sweden, apparently with Gerard’s consent, and it was hinted that the magistrates of the city of Amsterdam had made overtures to obtain the antiquities as embellishments for the new town hall11 (in emulation of the library in Venice and the Palace of the Conservators in Rome).

The Vendramin collection was a cabinet of curiosities. There were fossils, shells, plants, gems, inscriptions and urns (including what was claimed to be the tomb of Aristotle), as well as sculpture and pictures, and, indeed, the 140 or so paintings reproduced in the 150 pen drawings of the volume entitled De Picturis12 seem not to have been especially distinguished. Fewer than ten of them have been identified and none was included among the thirty‐three paintings selected for reproduction in the engravings commissioned by Gerard, although one, a nude woman in a landscape by Cariani, was later presented to the king of England and remains in the Royal Collection.13

When, at the Restoration, King Charles II left Scheveningen for England on 2 June 1660, the states of Holland and West Friesland, hoping to secure an alliance, prepared a valuable diplomatic gift. It was clear that paintings would be welcome from the fact that the king had in April reserved seventy‐two paintings in the possession of the dealer William Frizell.14 So the officials in charge approached Gerard’s widow, who agreed to part with twenty‐four paintings and twelve antique sculptures for 80,000 guilders. Four modern Dutch works were added (including Saenredam’s View of the Groote Kerk of 1648, now in the National Gallery of Scotland, and The Young Mother by Gerrit Dou of 1658, now in the Mauritshuis15). The ‘Dutch Gift’ was viewed with pleasure by the English court in November. The paintings selected from the Reynst collection were mostly from the sixteenth century, and the majority of these were Venetian. They were no doubt chosen with an eye to replacing the works of this character which had belonged to Charles I and had been sold by the Commonwealth. The chief attractions remaining in the Reynst collection were modern works, among them two masterpieces by Jan Liss,16 Bernardo Strozzi’s Old Courtesan, Feti’s untraced Vision of Saint Peter, Pieter van Laer’s Ambush, and a version of Guido Reni’s Susanna and the Elders (another version of which is NG 196).17

Fig. 10

Cornells Visscher, after Jacopo Bassano, The Departure of Abraham, c. 1655–7. Etching and engraving, 30.4 × 37.4 cm (image). Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico. © Courtesy of the Direzione del Museo Biblioteca Archivio di Bassano del Grappa Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-73.971

Jacopo Bassano’s Way to Calvary (NG 6490) was the largest painting in the gift. Slightly surprising omissions are the more characteristic paintings by Bassano, all four of which were engraved.18 The Departure of Abraham (see fig. 10) and the Annunciation to the Shepherds (similar in composition and perhaps pendants, the former being the Old Testament type of the latter) may have been overdoors and inconvenient to remove from the Reynst house, but the Entombment (an untraced variant of the 1574 altarpiece) and the Virgin and Child with Saint John (untraced but close to a composition known in a painting once at Chatsworth) would have been appreciated, especially when we recall how highly esteemed Bassano was among English collectors at that date. Perhaps it was known that the Royal Collection already had good examples of Bassano’s mature style.

The paintings sent to England also included Titian’s Sannazaro, Giorgione’s Concert, Parmigianino’s Athena, Lotto’s Andrea Odoni and Giulio Romano’s Isabella d’Este, as well as lesser works by Schiavone, Bonifazio and (as mentioned) Cariani.19 Standards of curatorship were not what they had been under Charles I, and the portraits by Lotto and Giulio, for example, were not properly annotated in the royal inventory as part of the Dutch gift. Moreover, the new king was not especially careful of crown property. Guercino’s Semiramis seems to have been given by him to his mistress Barbara Villiers (her descendant the Duke of Grafton sold it and it is today in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston20). Jacopo Bassano’s Way to Calvary and two other paintings from the Reynst collection were later recorded in the apartments of his queen.21 Worse was to follow. William III exported paintings to his palace of Het Loo in Holland, including Dou’s Young Mother, and senior officials at his court were either rewarded with pictures or not prevented from rewarding themselves with them. The Saenredam mentioned above turned up in the sale of William van Huls, Clerk of the Robes and Wardrobe,22 while the Royal Cofferer, Viscount Newport, soon to be created Earl of Bradford, seems to have obtained the Bassano as a bribe (see p. 14).

The residue of the Reynst collection was sold at the end of May 1670,23 a year before the death of Gerard’s widow. Gerard’s son Joan (b. 1636), a friend of the artist Karel Dujardin (with whom he travelled to Rome in 1675), was the last of the male line of this branch of the Reynst family.24

[page 472]
Notes

1. Logan 1979. For the family background see pp. 13–15. (Back to text.)

2. Logan 1979, pp. 10–11, 33. (Back to text.)

3. Ibid. , pp. 19–20. (Back to text.)

4. Ibid. , pp. 35, 67, notes 65 and 89. Logan’s hypothesis is that the pictures were a bequest. (Back to text.)

5. Ibid. , pp. 31, 33. (Back to text.)

6. Ibid. , p. 26. (Back to text.)

7. Ibid. , pp. 39–41. The publications are generally abbreviated as the Caelaturae and the Icones. The title‐page of the former reads Variorum Imaginum a celeberrimis artificibus pictarum caelaturae elegantissimis tabulis rapraesentae. (Back to text.)

8. Ibid. , p. 51. See also Gallottini 1998. (Back to text.)

9. For Teniers see Claerbergen 2006, and for Hollar see Pennington 1982, pp. XXII–XXIII, and Waterfield 2006. (Back to text.)

10. Logan 1979, pp. 67–75. The Dactylioteca recording the gems, coins and medals in the collection of Abraham Gorlaeus was an earlier illustrated catalogue and, moreover, published (in 1601), but its scope was narrower. (Back to text.)

11. Ibid. , p. 89. (Back to text.)

12. British Library, Sloane MS 4004, published as Borenius 1923. See also Borenius 1932. (Back to text.)

13. Logan 1979, pp. 113–18, no. 9; Shearman 1983, p. 72, no. 66. (Back to text.)

15. Logan 1979, pp. 75–86, for the gift in general (but see also Mahon 1949 and 1950). The Dou and the Saenredam are reproduced by Logan on pp. 73 and 80. (Back to text.)

16.Brothel Scene, Kunstsammlung, Cassel, Inv. 187, and Saint Paul in Ecstasy, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Inv. 1858 – see Logan 1979, pp. 126–9, nos 14 and 15. (Back to text.)

17. For the Strozzi, which is perhaps the painting in the Pushkin Museum, see Logan 1979, pp. 146–8, no. 30; for the Feti, ibid. , pp. 118–19, no. 10; for the Van Laer, ibid. , pp. 160–1, no. 40; for the Guido Reni, ibid. , pp. 139–41, no. 23. (Back to text.)

18. Ibid. , pp. 110–14, nos 2, 3, 5 and 6. (Back to text.)

19. Shearman 1983, pp. 118–21, no. 116 (Giulio); pp. 144–8, no. 143 (Lotto); pp. 183–4, no. 186 (Parmigianino); pp. 251–2, no. 270 (Titian). (Back to text.)

20. Logan 1979, pp. 124–8, no. 13. (Back to text.)

21. See p. 13. (Back to text.)

22. Last recorded in the Royal Collection in 1714. See White 1982, pp. xxxix–xl. (Back to text.)

23. Logan 1979, pp. 90–1. (Back to text.)

24. Ibid. , pp. 27–8. (Back to text.)


List of archive references cited

  • London, British Library, Add. MSS 16174: ‘Executor’s Account Book’ for the estate of Sir Peter Lely, 1679–91
  • London, British Library, MS Sloane 4004: De Picturis, description of Vendramin collection
  • London, Family Records Centre, PROB. 11/504, Sig. 229: will of Francis Newport, 1st Earl of Bradford, signed 26 December 1699 and proved 7 October 1708
  • London, Family Records Centre, PROB 11/569 sig. 116: will of Thomas Newport, Baron Torrington, proved 4 June 1719
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/3 (R/175): Orlando, 3rd Earl of Bradford, manuscript catalogue of the paintings at Weston Park, 1870s–80s
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/4 (R/170–183): catalogues of pictures at Weston Park, 1837–72
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/4 (R/271)
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/4 (R/295): Royal Academy, letter requesting loan of paintings from Weston Park, 12 November 1875
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/4 (R/741)
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/9 (R/295)
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/4/11 (R/751): E. and H. Forster, probate inventory of estate of George, 2nd Earl of Bradford, 1865
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D 1287/18/9 (P/1056): Lucy Bridgeman (née Byng), Lady Bradford, letters to her father, Lord Torrington, from France, 1802
  • Weston Park: ‘Catalogue of the Pictures of Tho. Newport Esqre’ at Surrey Street, compiled at some date between 1708 and 1715; catalogue of the paintings of Ann, Dowager Lady Torrington (née Pierrepont), at Twickenham, 9 November 1719; catalogue of the paintings of Ann, Dowager Lady Torrington (née Pierrepont), at her town house

List of references cited

Anon. 1943
Anon., ‘Editorial: Sir Peter Lely’s Collection’, Burlington Magazine, August 1943, LXXXIII185–91
Arslan 1929
ArslanWart, ‘Contributo a Jacopo Bassano’, Pinacotheca, 1929, I178–96
Arslan 1960
ArslanWartI Bassano (under the name Edoardo Arslan), 2nd edn, Milan 1960 (1st edn, Bologna 1931)
Avery‐Quash 2011b
Avery‐QuashSusanna, ed., ‘The Travel Notebooks of Sir Charles Lock Eastlake’, The Walpole Society2 vols, centenary edition, 2011, 73
Ballarin 1967
BallarinAlessandro, ‘Jacopo Bassano e lo studio di Raffaello e dei Salviati’, Arte Veneta, 1967, XXI77–101
Ballarin 1969–73
BallarinAlessandro, ‘Introduzione ad un catalogo dei disegni di Jacopo Bassano [part one]’, Arte Veneta1969XXIII; ‘[part two]’, Studi di Storia dell’Arte in onore di Antonio MorassiVenice 1971; ‘[part three]’, Arte Veneta1973XXVII
Ballarin 1995–6
BallarinAlessandroJacopo Bassano (the first volume, Scritti, 1964–1995, was published in 1995 in two parts; the second, comprising plates of Bassano’s paintings, was published in three parts in 1996; three other volumes were announced but have not yet been published – these include the catalogue which would accompany the plates and a volume devoted to the ‘figli di Jacopo Bassano a Venezia’), 2 volsCittadella 1995–6
Bartoli 1999
BartoliRobertaBiagio d’AntonioMilan 1999
Block 1890
J.C.BlockJeremias Falck, sein Leben und seine WerkeDanzigLeipzig and Vienna 1890
Borenius 1923
BoreniusTancred, ed., The Picture Gallery of Andrea VendraminLondon 1923
Borenius 1932
reference not found
Boyle 1888
BoyleMaryPortraits at Weston, 1888
Brigstocke 1993
BrigstockeHughItalian and Spanish Paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, 2nd edn, Edinburgh 1993
Brown 1982
BrownDavid BlayneyAshmolean Museum, Oxford: Catalogue of the collection of drawings, IV, The Earlier British DrawingsOxford 1982
Brown and Marini 1992
BrownBeverly Louise and Paolo Marini, eds, Jacopo Bassano (exh. cat. Bassano del Grappa and Forth Worth, 1992), Fort Worth 1992
Campbell et al. 2002
CampbellThomas P.et al.Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), New Haven and London 2002
Claerbergen 2006
ClaerbergenErnst Vegelin van, ed., David Teniers and the Theatre of Painting (exh. cat. Courtauld Gallery, 2006–7), London 2006
Colvin et al. 1976
ColvinHoward M.J. Mordaunt CrookKerry Downes and John NewmanThe History of the King’s Works, 1976, CV
Country Life 1945
Country Life, July–December 1945, XCVIII866
Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1871
CroweJoseph Archer and Giovanni Battista CavalcaselleA History of Painting in North Italy2 volsLondon 1871
Dunkerton, Foister and Penny 1999
DunkertonJillSusan Foister and Nicholas PennyDürer to Veronese: Sixteenth‐Century Paintings in the National GalleryNew Haven and London 1999
Evelyn 1908
EvelynJohnThe Diary, ed. Austin DobsonLondon 1908
Freedberg 1971
reference not found
Gallottini 1998
GallottiniAngela, ‘La “galleria Giustiniana”. Nascita e formazione’, Rendiconti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1998, IX233–70
Goodwin 1888
GoodwinGordon ‘G.G.’, in Dictionary of National Biography, 1888, XIV
Gould 1975
GouldCecilNational Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth‐Century Italian SchoolsLondon 1975 (repr., 1987)
Griffiths 1895
GriffithsGeorgePictures at Weston, belonging to the Earl of BradfordWeston–under–Lizard 1895
Hussey 1945
HusseyChristopher, ‘Weston Park, Staffordshire’, Country Life, 9, 16 and 23 November 1945, 910–13
Ingamells 1997
IngamellsJohnA Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800: Compiled from the Brinsley Ford ArchiveNew Haven and London 1997
James 1928
JamesMontague RhodesThe Apocryphal New Testament being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses (first published 1924), Oxford 1928
Joannides and Dunkerton 2007
JoannidesPaul and Jill Dunkerton, ‘“A Boy with a Bird” in the National Gallery: Two Responses to a Titian Question’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 2007, 2836–57
Kwiatkowski n.d.
KwiatkowskiA.et al.Weston Park: the Official Guidec.1990
Logan 1979
LoganAnne‐Marie S.The ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan ReynstAmsterdam and New York 1979
Mahon 1950
MahonDennis, ‘Notes on the “Dutch Gift” to Charles II: part I’, Burlington MagazineNovember 1949XCI303–5; ‘part II’, December 1949XCI349–50; ‘part III’, January 1950XCII12–18
Meagher 1967
MeagherP.K., in The New Catholic EncyclopediaNew York 1967–, XIV625
Muraro 1957
MuraroMichelangelo, ‘The Jacopo Bassano exhibition’, Burlington Magazine, September 1957, XCIX292
Muraro 1960
MuraroMichelangelo, ‘Bassano’s Way to Calvary’, Burlington Magazine, February 1960, CII53–4
Muraro 1992
MuraroMichelangeloIl libro secondo di Francesco e Jacopo dal PonteBassano 1992
Nicolson 1955
[NicolsonBenedict], ‘The Lycett Green gift to York’, Burlington Magazine, April 1955, XCVII99
Pan 1992
PanEnricaJacopo Bassano e l’incisione (exh. cat. Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa, 1992), Bassano 1992
Pennington 1982
PenningtonRichardA Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar, 1607–1677Cambridge 1982
Penny 1998
PennyNicholas, ‘Un’introduzione ai taccuini di Sir Charles Eastlake’, in Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle: Conoscitore e conservatore, ed. Anna Chiara Tommasi (papers from the Convegno held in 1997 at Legnago, Verona), Venice 1998, 277–89
Penny 2004
PennyNicholasNational Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth‐Century Italian Paintings, Volume I, Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and CremonaLondon 2004
Pepys 1894
PepysSamuelThe Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. H.B. WheatleyLondon 1894, IV
Petrucci 2005
PetrucciFrancescoFerdinand Voet: ritrattista di Corte tra Roma e l’Europa del Seicento (exh. cat. Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome), Rome 2005
Reade 1947
ReadeBrian, ‘William Frizell and the Royal Collection’, Burlington Magazine, March 1947, LXXXIX70–5
Réau 1955–9
RéauLouisIconographie de l’art chrétien3 vols (vol. 2 in 2 parts, vol. 3 in 3 parts)Paris 1955–9
Robels 1989
RobelsH.Frans SnydersMunich 1989
Rogers 1982
RogersMalcolm, ‘Two portraits by Van Dyck identified’, Burlington Magazine, April 1982, CXXIV235–8
Rowlands 1993
RowlandsJohnDrawings by German Artists … in the Department of Prints and Drawings2 volsLondon 1993
Shearman 1983
ShearmanJohnThe Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the QueenCambridge 1983
Simon 2007
SimonJacobBritish Picture Framemakers 1600–1950 (National Portrait Gallery online dictionary), https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/research/programmes/conservation/directory-of-british-framemakers/, accessed 21 May 2024, 1st edn, 2007
Vertue 1929–55
VertueGeorge, ‘Note Books: [vol. I]’, The Walpole SocietyOxford 1929–1930XVIII; ‘[vol. II]’, 1931–1932XX; ‘[vol. III]’, 1933–1934XXII; ‘[vol. IV]’, 1935–1936XXIV; ‘[vol. V]’, 1937–1938XXVI; ‘[index to vols I–V]’, 1940–1942 (published 1947)XXIX; ‘[vol. VI, including index]’, 1951–1952 (published 1955)XXX
Voragine 1969
VoragineJacobus DeThe Golden Legendtranslated and adapted from the Latin by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger1 vol.New York 1969
Waagen 1854–7
WaagenGustav FriedrichTreasures of Art in Great Britain: Being an Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss., &c. &c.ed. and trans. Lady E. Eastlake3 volsLondon 1854 (Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great BritainLondon 1857, supplement (vol. 4))
Waterfield 2006
WaterfieldGiles, ‘Teniers’ Theatrum Pictorium: its genesis and its influence’, in David Teniers and the Theatre of Painting, ed. Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen (exh. cat. Courtauld Gallery, 2006–7), London 2006, 40–57
White 1982
WhiteChristopherThe Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The QueenCambridge 1982
Zampetti 1957
ZampettiPietroJacopo Bassano (exh. cat. Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 1957), Venice 1957

List of exhibitions cited

Bassano del Grappa 1992
Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico, 1992
Fort Worth 1993
Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Jacopo Bassano, 1510–1592, 1993
London 1875
London, Royal Academy, Works by the Old Masters and by Deceased Artists of the British School, 1875
London 1960
London, Royal Academy, Italian Art and Britain, 1960
London 1983–4, Royal Academy
London, Royal Academy, The Genius of Venice, 1983–4
Venice 1957
Venice, Palazzo Ducale, Jacopo Bassano, 1957 (exh. cat.: Zampetti 1957)

The Organisation of the Catalogue

Artists are listed alphabetically and separate works by the same artists are ordered chronologically (rather than by date of accession). The division of an artist’s work between catalogues has been avoided in the past, but Titian presents a special problem. His work from before 1540 has been left for another volume and his later productions are presented here together with works by rivals, followers, pupils and imitators.

I have included one painting which seems to be a pastiche made soon after Titian’s death (A Concert, NG 3) and another which is a copy of one of his compositions, probably made later than 1600 (The Trinity, NG 4222), but not A Boy with a Bird (NG 933), which has often been taken for a seventeenth‐century imitation of Titian. The light cloud of drapery around the upper arm and the outlining of the fingers recall Titian’s Noli me tangere (NG 270) of c. 1515. It may be an excerpt from a painting of Venus and Adonis, a composition discussed in this catalogue (pp. 274–91), but if so must, as Paul Joannides has proposed, be an early version. Arguments in favour of the autograph status of this curious morsel are presented by Joannides and Jill Dunkerton in volume 28 of the National Gallery Technical Bulletin.

A good case could easily be made for including works by Rottenhammer, Elsheimer and El Greco, all of whom painted in Venice and were formed, or at least reformed, as artists by that experience. But readers will expect to find their work in other catalogues and it is unlikely that my colleagues would have consented to their appropriation. It may therefore seem inconsistent to have included The Conversion of Mary Magdalene (NG 1241) which is probably by Pedro Campaña, who was Netherlandish by birth and worked for many years in Spain. He was probably only briefly resident in Venice, but this painting was commissioned by a Venetian patrician both as a record of his family and as a record of a fresco in a Venetian church, so it seemed wrong to omit it.

As in the first volume of the sixteenth‐century Italian paintings, the entries, which are more discursive than was formerly the case in the Gallery’s catalogues, have been divided into sections with titles intended to help readers select the topic that interests them. Much material concerning previous owners is supplied and much on the circumstances of the work’s acquisition, but a succinct, factual summary of provenance is also supplied separately for ease of consultation.

The information on picture frames provided in the first volume attracted more comment in print than any other feature of that book. Here I have also drawn attention both to old frames of distinction and to frames made for the National Gallery. The reader should note that Jacob Simon at the National Portrait Gallery has created an online directory of framemakers which includes all the craftsmen mentioned here as employed by, or as suppliers to, the National Gallery.

An account of the conservators employed by the Gallery to varnish, line, clean, repair and retouch before the establishment of the Gallery’s own Conservation Department is incorporated in the introduction to the first volume (Penny 2004, pp. xiv–xv). A great deal of information about the conservation of the National Gallery’s paintings is provided and I have tried to relate the conservation history to the provenance, identifying not only nineteenth‐century restorers but also, sometimes, those from earlier centuries.

A question‐mark is used to indicate a doubt as to the authorship of a painting in preference to the formula of ‘Attributed to’ or ‘Ascribed to’. Comprehensive listing of references made in recent art‐historical literature has not been attempted. References in the notes are abbreviations of entries in the bibliography. I have tried to identify the actual authors of exhibition catalogues and of anonymous guides.

A Note on Manuscript Material Cited

References are made in the notes to manuscript material (chiefly letters) studied in British family papers – for example, those of the Earls of Carlisle and of the Dukes of Hamilton – and also to material studied in public and church archives in Venice – for example, confraternity manuscripts in the care of the parish of S. Trovaso, the parish records kept in S. Silvestro, and wills, inventories and financial records in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (here abbreviated to ASV). Most frequent reference, however, is made to the Archive of the National Gallery itself: the minutes of the meetings of the Board of Trustees, with the associated papers, the Gallery accounts, the diary and other papers of Ralph Nicholson Wornum, and above all the notebooks or travel diaries kept by Sir Charles Eastlake on his continental tours between 1852 and 1864 (there is also one for 1830). Since there is more than one notebook for each annual tour, the number of the notebook cited is given in parentheses – thus ‘MS notebook 1864 (2)’ for the second in 1864. I have published an account of Eastlake’s methods and motives for compiling these notebooks in ‘Un’introduzione ai taccuini di Sir Charles Eastlake’ in Anna Chiara Tommasi, ed., Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle: Conoscitore e conservatore (papers from the Convegno held in 1997 at Legnago, Verona), Venice 1998, pp. 277–89. They are currently being transcribed and edited by Susanna Avery‐Quash for publication by the Walpole Society.

About this version

Version 1, generated from files NP_2008__16.xml dated 06/03/2025 and database__16.xml dated 09/03/2025 using stylesheet 16_teiToHtml_externalDb.xsl dated 03/01/2025. Structural mark-up applied to skeleton document in full; entry for NG294 reintegrated into main document; entries for NG16, NG26, NG224, NG277, NG674, NG1318 & NG1324-NG1326, NG1883-NG1884, NG3948, NG4452, NG6376, NG6420 and NG6490 prepared for publication; entries for NG16, NG26, NG224, NG277, NG294, NG674, NG1318 & NG1324-NG1326, NG1883-NG1884, NG3948, NG4452, NG6376, NG6420 and NG6490 proofread and corrected.

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Penny, Nicholas. “NG 6490, The Way to Calvary”. 2008, online version 1, March 9, 2025. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EA1-000B-0000-0000.
Harvard style
Penny, Nicholas (2008) NG 6490, The Way to Calvary. Online version 1, London: National Gallery, 2025. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EA1-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 19 March 2025).
MHRA style
Penny, Nicholas, NG 6490, The Way to Calvary (National Gallery, 2008; online version 1, 2025) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EA1-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 19 March 2025]