NePLeP · Netherlandish Paintings in Ledreborg Palace: A Multi-Disciplinary Research of circa 600 Paintings

Netherlandish Paintings in Ledreborg Palace: A Multi-Disciplinary Research of circa 600 Paintings

Ledreborg Palace is today one of Denmark’s finest examples of the 18th-century building and landscape architecture, and its main building contains a unique collection of original furniture and old master paintings. This undocumented collection of many hundreds of paintings is the subject of this project. It is surprising that almost all of these works are painted by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters, and not by well-known ones. Instead of master pieces, this collection contains a high number of mass-produced works and copies. The contents of the collection arouse questions about this strong interest in Netherlandish painting in Denmark, and the collector’s motives for buying large amounts of lower-quality paintings. Archival research demonstrated that the entire collection was brought together in several decades in the eighteenth-century by two generations of the same family. Most of the paintings that father and son gathered were by Netherlandish masters. Some of the paintings were at the time of purchase attributed to renowned masters such as Rubens and Rembrandt, although this did not reflect in the prices paid for them at auctions. After careful art historical research of all the paintings and art technological investigations on a selection of them, this project has been able to show that these attributions were far-fetched. The collections consists mainly of copies or altered versions of better-known paintings, works made in the manner of famous masters, and mass-produced paintings, a novel commodity of the seventeenth century. This is not the only collection in Denmark which displays a strong emphasis on Netherlandish paintings of mediocre quality: at least two similar eighteenth-century collections are known. This research has attempted to contribute to understanding this phenomenon by focusing on this one collection. The starting point of the provenance research was a surfaced inventory from 1790, which lists each painting with detailed descriptions and the prices paid for them by the son. Why did he buy large amounts of relatively cheap paintings by minor masters rather than for example, one painting by Rembrandt? Answers include the supply of paintings in eighteenth-century Denmark, decorating fashions among the nobility, eighteenth-century knowledge of art history, and the perception of the Dutch schools at the time.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз