Thursday 22 August 2019

"Follower of Brueghel" in 2018, "attributed to Jakob Grimmer" now, but still a copy after Hans Bol

Hargesheimer, from Germany, sells on 14 September 2019 an "attributed to Jakob Grimmer" "Parable of the Sower", estimated at 30,000 Euro.

The same work was for sale last year at Saarbrûcken, as a "follower of Brueghel", for 900 Euro. I then wrote a blog post about it, explaining that it is not the Parable of the Sower but the Parable of the Tares (the Sower is about indiscriminately sowing and includes no devil or sleeping men, the Tares is about "But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.", and the "enemy" is later explained to be the Devil).

More importantly, I showed that the work is a copy after an engraving by Hans Bol from 1574. It seems unlikely that Jakob Grimmer would have copied this engraving, and the work is not good enough to be by him either (e.g. the cloudscapes by Grimmer are one of the best parts of his work in many cases, but here the sky is rather boring). While Grimmer sometimes has rather simplistic work, they still show a lot more skill than this copy. The estimate here seems way too high.

This isn't the only seriously overestimated work in this auction though.

This "Workshop or School of Rubens" Magdalene was already overpriced at Hampel in 2017 (15,000 Euro, no sale), and is still overpriced here at 12,000 Euro. It looks good on their website at first glance (with the rather small default image Hargesheimer provides), but when seen more closely, it becomes obvious that it is a poor later copy, as indicated by the Lartsite as well (scroll down to number 11). Worth 3,000 to 5,000 Euro perhaps?

They also have a "Frans Hals (workshop?)" boy with a flute, estimated at 5,000 Euro. It is a very poor copy after Hals (or at least after a follower of Hals, much better example thanks to the RKD). Worth 500 Euro instead? The same applies to another similar "Hals" estimated at 4,000 Euro.

I also seriously doubt that Rembrandt made this rather poor drawing in 1636 for his 1654 etching of "Jesus between his parents returning from the Temple" (and not a "flight into Egypt"), but if it was by Rembrandt, 3,500 Euro would be cheap.

I haven't looked in detail at all the works yet: there are many paintings with a very affordable estimate, and it may well be that there are some bargains among these. But there were very few works among the more expensive ones which seemed to be worth their estimate.

1 comment:

  1. The 'Frans Hals (workshop)' boy with flute is on again this month for 3200.

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