JAIME HUGUET and his workshop (Valls around 1415-Barcelona... Lot 2

JAIME HUGUET and his workshop (Valls around 1415-Barcelona 1492) MEETING OF ANNE AND JOACHIM AT THE GOLDEN DOOR Poplar panel, two boards, frame included Height : 67 cm Width : 51.3 cm Altarpiece panel Mixed painting and gold background on wooden panel, gilded and carved wooden frame Pictorial surface : H.49,4 cm ; L.42cm CONDITION Panel made up of two boards with a horizontal thread, whose assembly, slightly visible on the surface, has played, resulting in cracks reinforced on the reverse by pieces of white canvas Presence of a label with n°16 written in ink Pictorial surface: wear in the faces, and restorations a trattegio, visible along the median crack, in the black coat of Joachim, the green coat of the following one, and in the golden door. The frame is original but restored and repainted with silver paint. Anne and Joachim, the Virgin's parents, were a barren couple for many years. When Joachim went to the temple to make an offering to become a father, he was chased away by the high priest who reproached him for his sterility. Ashamed, he did not return to his wife and took refuge in the desert among the shepherds. It was there that he received a visit from the angel announcing his impending fatherhood. The angel also brought the good news to St. Anne, and the two spouses celebrated the event with joy, meeting at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. The artist follows the account of the apocryphal Gospels of the first centuries, taken up by the Golden Legend of James of Voragine in the 13th century. The meeting takes place according to the traditional iconography used in 15th century Spain. Anne and Joachim, accompanied by a shepherd and a maid, embrace in the foreground, in front of the walls of the holy city, dominated by two imposing towers near which the Golden Gate opens. This representation is set in Catalonia, in the workshop of Jaime Huguet (Jaume in Catalan) in the second half of the 15th century. In Barcelona, where he settled in 1448, Huguet followed the generation of great painters who worked mainly in that city in the early 15th century: Bernardo Martorell (known from 1427 to 1452) and Luis Dalmau, to whom we owe the Virgin of the Councillors for the chapel of Barcelona's city hall in 1445, the latter so strongly impregnated by Flemish influences. Jaime Huguet enjoyed a strong reputation in a workshop that trained many assistants, enabling him to satisfy the demand for altarpieces from an important civil as well as religious clientele (cf. J. Gudiol, S. Alcolea y Blanch "Pintura gotica catalana" Barcelona 1986, p. 160-175). This is how he produced our panel, which has not yet been published, probably with the help of an apprentice, whose intervention in the composition, with its chaotic perspective and proportions, is suspected. However, the softness of the expressions, the exchange of glances translating the deep attachment of the two spouses and the tender effusion without frenzy that they show towards each other, remain the innovative mark of Master Huguet. The execution of this panel, whose engraved gold background is an archaism undoubtedly intended by the commissioner, could have taken place around 1465-1470. The architecture of the frame of the painting, whose design of the poly-lobed arcade decorated with fleurons is surmounted by a gallery of blind arcades, is exactly the same as that of the crown of the old altarpiece dedicated to St. Anne, St. Bartholomew and St. Magdalene, for the church of St. Martin de Pertegas in San Celoni, an altarpiece whose carpentry was carried out in 1465, although the work was not completed until the end of the 19th century.This work was completed in 1465, although it was not finished until 1480 (Barcelona, Museo Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, inv. 24365; cf. P. Becera y Ramon in "Jaume Huguet 500 anys", exhibition Barcelona 1993, no. 8, pp. 182-184, repr). This period of production is corroborated by the Burgundian fashion of the time, worn by the characters, in particular the heavy fur-trimmed coat and chaperone of Joachim, as well as the maid's headdress consisting of a bonnet topped by a "tortilla" crown, a detail which can be found in one of the panels of the altarpiece dedicated to St. Sebastian for the Brotherhood of the Bridle, painted by Huguet in 1462-1465 in Barcelona cathedral (cf. Gudiol, Alcolea, op.cit. fig.832) It is possible that another panel, executed by Huguet and his workshop around 1465- 1470, which could be interpreted as the Birth of the Virgin, is the companion to this Encounter at the Golden Door and could have belonged to the same altarpiece dedicated to the Virgin Mary, since its Gothic frame and measurements are exactly the same. The style of this second panel, although weaker than that of the "Encounter" and of which we note the absence of Saint Zaccharia inscribing the name of his son John the Baptist, which denies this subject, shows a Virgin Mary with the same features as Saint Anne, proof of a workshop work using cardboard. We do not know