Rare Painting Found Behind Door in French Home

We really want to find something in our own homes. What’s behind your door? While it sounds like the beginning of “Let’s Make a Deal,” one lucky family in the north of France has hit the jackpot with what has been sitting behind a door of their home since 1900. The family decided after 123 years (very patient collectors, we think) to get the family wall decoration examined. An auctioneer from Daguerre Val de Loire discovered the family owned a rare painting by the 17th-century artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

The “exceptional” 3 3/4-foot-high by 6-foot-wide painting will be sold in auction later this month. The painting is valued at up to $861,685. It is believed to have been painted between 1615 and 1617 and is a version of L’Avocat du village (the Village Lawyer), a common theme for Brueghel.

Described as “exceptional” and one of his largest known works, it will be sold by auction in Paris later this month.

Now we are all going to go home and take down all our family’s artwork to check if it is old.

 

Hanging in Plain Sight: 7-Year-Old Recognizes Family Heirloom as 17th-Century Masterpiece 

Seen from the eyes of babes: A woman in England loved a painting of a man she called “Charley” that had been owned by her grandparents. Her 7-year-old history buff son loved it, too. But he suspected something the grownups didn’t: that the painting was of one of his favorite historical kings, the 17th-century monarch Charles II.

Thanks to a popular British TV show on restoration called The Repair Shop, Dylan Maggs and his mother Elizabeth Vella discovered the portrait was not a 19th century work, as Elizabeth thought and had packed away, but a rare, highly detailed 1660 portrait of Charles II, painted during his reign.

Because Dylan loved the painting so much, Elizabeth had taken the portrait to the show’s restorers. It was covered in layers of grime and even soup splashes from being on the dining room wall. Painting conservator Lucia Scalisi painstakingly cleaned and restored the work, along with its gold-leaf covered frame, which also dated to the 17th century. Scalisi said the age of the painting became apparent when she studied the weave of the canvas.

The painting has not been valued. The portrait is by an unknown artist, but Scalisi thinks it is based on an engraving by the printmaker Sir Robert Peake. It was common in the 17th century for artists to copy engravings.

“It’s actually really cool, I can’t put it into words. I think I’m almost the luckiest person on the planet, to have a painting that’s that old,” said Dylan, who has turned 8 since the show was recorded.

 

Missing Painting “Found” in NYC Home 

A 30-panel series of paintings, “Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954–56)” by renowned Black artist Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), was put on display at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, from January 18 to April 26, 2020. Five paintings in the series were “lost” and represented on the wall with empty spaces. On August 29, the exhibition opened at the The Metropolitan Museum in New York City. An observant visitor remembered a painting she had seen in a neighbor’s living room and thought it could be one of the missing paintings. Turns out it was! The neighbors bought the painting in 1960 at a charity art auction benefitting a music school. The 1956 painting — Lawrence’s Panel 16 — depicts Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising which took place in Massachusetts from 1786 to 1787, a few years after the end of the Revolutionary War. It is now reunited with the rest of the known works for the remainder the exhibition, which will travel on loan to shows in Birmingham, Seattle and Washington, D.C., through next fall. In 2017, one of the panels sold for $413,000. Four of the 30 panels remain missing. 

 

 

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art