LES COLLECTIONS DU PRINCE DE LIECHTENSTEIN Cranach, Raphaël, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Vernet, Hubert Robert, Vigée-Lebrun

Tour of the exhibition

The exhibition at the Caumont Centre d’Art begins with treasures from the early Renaissance, a period in which the late medieval artistic forms of expression underwent a change, as demonstrated here by examples of major importance. The wonderful Venus (1531) of Lukas Cranach the Elder and his St Christopher already have a very natural physical presence, foreshadowing future developments in painting. The painters of that time increasingly turned their attention to the portrayal of human beings, putting the individual in the foreground, as attested by the Portrait of a Man (c. 1502–1504) by Raphael or the Tax Collectors by Quentin Massys. It is particularly in the genre of Renaissance portraiture that the Princely Collections possess superb recently acquired works, some of which have never been shown in public before, including examples by Jan Gossaert, Alonso Sanchez Coello, Rosso Fiorentino and Antonis Mor. The art of the sixteenth century concludes in this section with a Mannerist painting by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem (St Sebastian, 1591).

Peter Paul Rubens was one of the foremost painters of his time. The exhibition contains a number of his works including the masterly painting Mars and Rhea Silvia (c. 1616/17), which has been in the collections since 1710 and can be admired side by side with the oil sketch on which it is based, a work acquired in 1977. In addition, the unique Portrait of Clara Serena Rubens (1611–1623) (1616) gives a wholly personal insight into the way this great master of the Flemish Baroque worked.

During the seventeenth century, genres that had hitherto been disregarded were accorded new value or even became established for the first time, including landscape painting as a genre in its own right, genre scenes from daily life and the still life. The Princely Collections also possess treasures from these fields: an early work by Rembrandt, Cupid with the Soap Bubble, and still lifes in the best tradition of Flemish painting, displayed alongside some of the finest portraiture of the time by Frans Hals and Anthony van Dyck.

The penultimate section of the exhibition is devoted to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Giovanni Paolo Pannini (Capriccio with the Principal Monuments and Sculptures of Ancient Rome, 1735) and Hubert Robert (Capriccio with the Pantheon and the Porto di Ripetta, 1761) created monumental landscapes and urban vedutas into which they integrated historic edifices from classical times. By contrast, Joseph Vernet preferred to place his Bathers in a more exotic setting observed faithfully from nature.

The exhibition concludes with an evocation of the aristocratic milieu in Vienna during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with insights into the world of Neoclassicism and Biedermeier. Portraits by the French artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who was commissioned by Prince Alois I von Liechtenstein to paint a likeness of his wife as Iris, the messenger of the gods, together with a charming depiction of the future emperor Franz Joseph I as a miniature grenadier playing with his toy soldiers stand for the beginning of an epoch that was to be of decisive political and artistic importance.

The exhibition is divided into ten subject areas which among many other aspects also provide the visitor with insights into the history of the family and the collections of one of Europe’s foremost noble dynasties.