Peruse This Season’s Sales in the “Oeuvres Choisies” Exhibition Online

The Old Masters The influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525?-1569) on 16th-century Flemish painters is particularly evident in two offerings. A pair of gouache miniatures by Hans Bol (1534-1593?) from 1583 nods to his origins as a watercolorist as well as his importance to the development of the Northern landscape tradition. Bol depicts the biblical stories of The Good Samaritan and Donkey of Balaam; subjects probably chosen for the opportunity to paint a road winding through the hills of the Low Country dotted with typical farms and cities. Bol, who launched his career by assuming engraving projects unfinished at Bruegel’s death, here demonstrates his debt to the master’s allegorical scenes set in vast vistas rooted in the direct observation of nature. Based on Bruegel’s 1566 treatment of the same subject, Marten van Cleve’s (1527-1581) ‘Peasant Wedding Dance’ is a theme he returned to innumerable times. Van Cleve’s focus on one of the master’s less explicitly moralizing works reflects his, as well as his epoch’s, growing interest in descriptive genre painting, a response to the Protestant Reformation’s suppression of religious imagery and the rise of a mercantilist collector class. Rounding out the exhibition’s Northern Renaissance selections is a fine ‘Saint Catherine of Alexandria’ in the style of Lucas Cranach (1472-1573), with the saint depicted as an elegant young woman in court dress wielding her attributes of the broken wheel and sword. The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence and Crowning of Thorns by Jacques de l’Ange (c. 1621-1650?), offered for sale as a pair, speak to the influence of 17th-century Italian developments on northern painters.  Identified only in the mid-1990s, de l’Ange’s work had been previously misattributed to other Flemish and Dutch followers of Caravaggio. The…