2007 Catalogue - Colnaghi

Provenance: Sir Francis Cook, 1st Bt., Viscount
de Monserrate (1817-1901), Doughty House,
Richmond, Surrey (hung in the Long Gallery); by
descent to Sir Francis Cook, 4th Bt. (1907-1978), the
late husband of Lady Brenda Cook.
Exhibited: Included in a touring exhibition of English
museums organised by the Art Exhibitions Bureau as
part of the Cook Collection Group, Old Master
portraits from the Cook collection: Brighton Art Gallery;
Dudley Art Gallery; Mansfield Museum and Art
Gallery; Doncaster Art Gallery and Museum;
Northampton Art Gallery; Southampton Art Gallery;
the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield; Darlington Public
Library, January 1947 - January 1948; To be included
in the forthcoming exhibition Masterpieces of
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portrait Painting, National
Gallery, London, 27th June – 16th October 2007 and
Royal Picture Gallery Mauristshuis, Den Haag, 13th
October 2007 – 13th January 2008.
Literature: M. Brockwell, H. Cook and F. Cook,
An Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at Doughty House,
Richmond, belonging to Sir Frederick Cook Bart.,
Visconde de Monserrate, 1914, p. 22, no. 102, in the
Long Gallery; J.O. Kronig, A Catalogue of the Paintings
at Doughty House, Richmond, and Elsewhere in the
Collection of Sir Frederick Cook Bt., vol. II, Dutch and
Flemish Schools, London 1914, p. 53, no. 278,
illustrated; C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue
Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch
Painters of the Seventeenth Century, London 1916
(English edn.), vol. VI, p. 597, no. 556 (size wrongly
given as 211 /
2 x 27 in.); M.W. Brockwell, ‘The Cook
Collection Part II – The Flemish and Dutch Schools’,
Connoisseur, vol. XLVIII, May 1917, p. 28; [M.W.
Brockwell], Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at
Doughty House, Richmond, Surrey, in the Collection of
Sir Herbert Cook Bt., London 1932, p.41, no. 278;
F.W. Robinson, Dutch Life in the Golden Century,
New York 1975, p. 47, no. 32; W. Sumowski, Gemälde
der Rembrandt-Schüler, vol. III, London 1983, p. 2037,
no. 1444.
05
Nicolaes Maes
(Dordrecht 1623 – 1693 Amsterdam)
Group Portrait of a Family in an Italianate Garden with a Fountain
Oil on canvas
60 7 /8 x 67 in. (153.1 x 170.2 cm.)
26
This family portrait provides us with an impressive
example of Nicolaes Maes’s artistic skill. He was for a
time the most sought-after portraitist in Holland and
is regarded today as one of the most gifted of
Rembrandt’s pupils. From the nineteenth century until
recently the Colnaghi picture formed part of the Cook
Collection originally displayed in Doughty House,
Richmond, from which have come such famous works
as van Eyck’s Three Maries at the Open Sepulchre in the
Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam. A
black-and-white illustration in Werner Sumowski’s
Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler gave only an
inadequate impression of the colourful composition,
especially as the wrong dimensions were constantly
handed down in error in the catalogues. 1 The
imposing painting is in fact one of the largest known
canvases by Maes.
The six family members are depicted against the
backdrop of a picturesque park containing the
fragment of an antique relief, a dolphin fountain, vases
and trees with dense foliage. The costumes of the two
sons are suggestive of mythological figures such as
Meleager. At the beginning of the 1660s Maes had
already created a series of historicizing portraits of
young ‘huntsmen’, still at that time closely imitating
pictures by Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp and Jan Mijtens. 2 By
comparison with these early, schematic examples which
had a stiff effect, the pose of both boys, especially that
of the elder, is more relaxed, almost bordering on a
dance. The pose of the latter is only echoed in Maes’
work on one other occasion, namely in the Portrait of
a Young Man in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 3 The
source is to be found neither in portraits by his
contemporaries nor in the sculpture of antiquity but
in the graphic works of Hubert Goltzius. 4 The
agreement of the pose with the (mirror-inverted)
engraving The Standard Swinger, 1587 is too striking
to have occurred by chance. 5