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Alexandre-François Desportes’ Still Life with Dressed
Game, Meat, and Fruit, 1734, was acquired through the
Chester Dale Fund. The eighteenth-century still life constitutes
a striking example of the “buffet” picture, combining
exquisite examples of cutlery, kitchenware, and silver service
with an abundance of food implying the setting of a noble
household. Desportes turns unusual attention to aspects
such as the individual encasings of sculpted lard enveloping
each dressed fowl and the bare, pimpled skin, webbed feet,
and curving claws of the pheasants. The artist transforms
the rack of lamb and entrails hanging on hooks to dry into
an interplay between the translucence of flesh and solidity
of white bone. The bulbous pears at the front of the picture,
which seem to firmly situate the image within a Northern
aesthetic, and the luminous oranges in the background
complete the ensemble. The artist’s careful delineation of
contrasting (potentially distasteful) subject matter forces
the spectator to acknowledge the sheer artistic prowess with
which this virtuoso negotiates the relationship between
beautiful and bizarre.
Desportes’ career immediately precedes that of Jean
Siméon Chardin, whose still-life paintings and genre scenes
are great strengths of the Gallery’s collection. Desportes’
still-life painting also complements the Gallery’s portrait
of the Chevalier de Behringen by Jean-Baptiste Oudry.
In addition to displaying these painters’ skill in rendering
texture and color, these works also announce their nobility
in referring to the traditional leisure pursuit of the landed
gentry, the hunt.
Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s Sunset at Scheveningen: A
Fleet of Fishing Vessels at Anchor, 1894, is a spectacular
example of the artist’s oeuvre, acquired through support of
funds given by Paul Mellon and Frank Anderson Trapp.
Influenced by the dramatic marine paintings of Gustave
Courbet in particular, Mesdag devoted most of his career
to depicting the sea, which brought him recognition and
provided an inexhaustible source of inspiration. The painting
of a fleet of thirteen bomschuiten, or flat-bottomed fishing
boats, is unlined, with Mesdag’s expressive brushwork
and rich, atmospheric colors perfectly preserved. The artist
most likely worked from sketches made outdoors to create
this luminous painting, as he did for many of his other
works in oil and watercolor.
Known as the painter of the North Sea, Mesdag
serves as a significant link between the Hague School
and the French landscape painters of the nineteenth
century. Building on the achievements in landscape
painting of Dutch seventeenth-century masters, Hague
School painters were inspired by the Barbizon school in
France, a movement that reoriented the focus of landscape
painting away from the Roman campagna to the
richness and variety of their native land. Mesdag was
himself a major collector of French Barbizon paintings,
building one of the great private collections of work by
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
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Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, and
Camille Corot. Sunset at Scheveningen joins Jacob Maris’
View of the Mill and Bridge on the Noordwest Buitensingel
in The Hague, 1873, as a second major Hague School
painting, helping to expand the Gallery’s nineteenthcentury
collection beyond its French confines.
Two large panel paintings by the father of art history,
Giorgio Vasari, were given to the Gallery by New York
collector Damon Mezzacappa. Saint Mark and Saint Luke
are the first paintings by Vasari to enter the collection,
joining a page from his Libro de’ Disegni and first editions
of the Lives. Part of a dismantled chapel complex for the
Vatican that was commissioned by Pope Pius V in 1570,
the panels will receive conservation treatment and new
frames before they go on view.
This year brought several important acquisitions in the
area of modern art. At its annual meeting, the Collectors
Committee acquired Étude, 1969, an oil painting by
French-Hungarian artist Simon Hantaï made with his
signature method of pliage (folding) that adds great
strength to the Gallery’s nascent collection of postwar
European art.
Other significant acquisitions include William Bailey’s
painting Piano Scuro, 2003, purchased through the
Charina Endowment Fund; Constellation, Milky Way,
1970, a double-tondo work by Leon Polk Smith, given by
the artist’s foundation; and Coherence, 1966, by Paul Reed,
the gift of Bill McGillicuddy.
Simon Hantaï, Étude, Gift of the Collectors Committee