Flemish Old Master paintings at Sotheby's
LONDON - Sotheby’s London will present an exquisite group of Flemish Old Master paintings from the Coppée Collection, this summer.
Assembled by the Belgian industrialist Evence Coppée III (1882-1945) in the 1920s, this mesmerizing collection contains 16th and 17th century works of Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1637/8) and the Brueghel family.
Three of the best works by Pieter Brueghel will be featured in the sale, including an imposing landscape with the Crucifixion.
The selection also embodies impressive paintings from a collaboration between Jan Brueghel the Younger and Frans Francken the Younger and Hendrik van Balen the Elder.
Talking about the forthcoming sale, George Gordon, Sotheby’s Co-Chairman, Old Master Paintings, Worldwide commented: “The Coppée collection was one of the first and finest collections of paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Younger and his family. Three paintings by the artist spearhead the group of Flemish paintings in our July sale, and each one is outstanding. The Bird Trap was one of Brueghel's most popular compositions in his own day and remains so now. It is a beautifully preserved crystalline evocation of a Flemish village on a freezing cold day, painted at a time when winter was just starting to be appreciated for its beauty and not merely feared. The Outdoor Wedding Dance, presents an entirely different facet of Brueghel's art: an intense composition of swirling inebriated peasant wedding guests dancing to the raucous Flemish bagpipes, the bride looking bemused in the centre of it all. The greatest of the three Brueghels however is the moving, monumental depiction of Calvary from 1615, a rare work that is in the spirit of his father's paintings of fifty years before, but reveals an unambiguously stark view of a cruel world, its vegetation parched, its massed rocky outcrops overbearingly threatening”.
The three compositions to be sold in July, are illustrative of the artist’s powerful depictions of the tragedy of the human condition and are among the rarest and most popular works in the Flemish painter’s oeuvre.
