Crown of the Alps: Masterworks from the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein

Marking the 90th anniversary of the founding of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Princely Collections are showing 118 major works in an exhibition entitled CROWN OF THE ALPS. The exhibition focuses on the subject of ‘fine painting’ and offers the Taiwanese general public the opportunity to examine these works, which are on display in Taiwan for the first time, at close hand.

The exhibition at the National Palace Museum in Taipei focuses on the refinement and elegance of ‘fine painting’, in a selection that concentrated on paintings, engravings and drawings from several centuries. Constrained by the spatial limitations of the museum’s exhibition rooms, the show of 118 masterpieces from the Princely Collections concentrates primarily on the subtle, small-scale format, focusing not on large works designed to make an impact from a distance but the intricate painterly framing of a motif in smaller dimensions. The viewer can trace subjects such as landscape painting, the portrait or still life from the Renaissance to the Viennese Biedermeier era, thus covering almost the whole spectrum of European art history.

Fine painting as a term

In the history of art the term fine painting is used (invariably in the original Dutch as ‘fijnschilderei’) to refer particularly to the Leiden school, which was noted for its meticulously detailed bravura pieces, including still lifes, portraits and genre scenes, often in the smallest of formats. In order to achieve the high degree of detail and the resulting illusionistic effects, these painters made almost exclusive use of panels of wood or copper as supports, which gave them a smooth surface that did not, like canvas and its grounding, affect the appearance of the painting with its structure.

Such supports accompany the history of painting throughout the epochs; wooden panels were used as supports in early Italian gold-ground painting as well as in the Renaissance, when many major works by Raphael, Leonardo or Titian were executed on this medium. They were also used by Flemish and Dutch painters: there are many examples of a precious first version being painted on a wooden or hammered copper panel followed by second versions executed on canvas.

The panels and canvases of Rubens or van Dyck, who developed their monumental painting on the basis of small-scale oil sketches on wooden panels, attest to the fact that even works of larger dimensions are more than capable of conveying sensuous details as well as the appeal of surface structures and material qualities in a whole range of different light conditions. When Rubens makes an oil sketch, the way he goes about it is quite different to the Leiden fijnschilder, but even here it is the quality of the wooden panel, the technique that subtly incorporates the grounding into the end result, that allows us to discuss this painting – sketch-like though it is – in the context of ‘fine painting’ in this exhibition. In his large-scale compositions Rubens retains the technique he develops in the sketch, aligning himself wholly with the traditions of Flemish painting despite all the breaks with tradition in the way he depicts his subjects. When comparing his painting with the works of the Brueghel dynasty or those of Frans Pourbus (1545–1581), we can see that his technique with its thin, transparent glazes of colour is very much in keeping with the tradition of the Flemish school.