Tuesday, 21 May 2019

Workshop(?) copy after Rubens

Maison Jules, from Belgium, sells on 1 June 2019 an "attributed to Jan Thomas van Ieperen, school of Rubens" Finding of Moses, estimated at 4,000 to 6,000 Euro.

It is a rather monochrome, dark copy after Rubens: a much better version was sold at Lempertz in 2017 for 148,800 Euro. The version for sale has about the same dimensions, if one takes into account the missing borders on all sides. Jan Thomas van Ieperen (1618-1673) was probably active in the workshop of Rubens before hje moved to Austria and worked as a court painter.

If the work for sale would clean up to reveal something resembling the Lempertz version, then it is obviously way too cheap now. But that is for me hard to judge from the picture, although it seems unlikely that someone would deliberately have painted a night version of this work.

It wouldn't surprise me if this went for 20,000 Euro instead.

UPDATE: not sold apprantly, I guess it looked worse in reality.

1 comment:

  1. The light tones (flesh/white clothes) seem to be squeaking clean on this, so I would imagine the same to be true for the background as well - which has obviously suffered from some over-cleaning (has someone else already tried a bit too hard to remove dirt that wasn't there?). Therefore, without seeing the real thing and perhaps doing a few tests on it, I would not get my hopes up that there is a much more attractive work waiting to be discovered under a layer of dirt.

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