Rubens, van Dyck and the Flemish School of Painting: Masterpieces from the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein
Special Exhibitions in Beijing 2013/14
The Princely Collections
The Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein are among the world’s most important private holdings of art. Their origins go back to the seventeenth century and are rooted in the Baroque ideal of the princely patronage of the arts. For generations, the Liechtenstein dynasty has maintained and added to the collections, pursuing a planned acquisitions policy which continues to this day and enhances their enduring attraction.
The Princely Collections presently contain major works of art spanning five centuries, from the Renaissance to the Biedermeier era. The paintings collection alone boasts around 1,700 pieces, as well as more than 500 sculptures and large collections of engravings, porcelain, furniture, tapestries, Kunstkammer objects and hunting firearms.
Among the collections’ numerous treasures from the Baroque era, the holdings of Flemish painting, as exemplified by the major artists Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, are of particular importance. The Collections also contain large numbers of works by famous contemporaries and predecessors, from artists including Quentin Massys, members of the Brueg(h)el family and Paul de Vos to Jacob Jordaens, Frans Snyders and Jan Davidsz. de Heem - to mention only a few leading names.
Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and the heyday of Flemish painting
During the sixteenth century, painting was experiencing a boom in the southern Low Countries, with Antwerp becoming the leading centre of art north of the Alps. By 1560, there were more than 300 master painters engaged in painting and engraving in Antwerp alone. Antwerp was also a major centre of international trade, which was of great significance for Flemish painting. Over the next hundred years, other towns and cities in the southern Netherlands also developed into centres of Flemish art, and a well-organized art trade ensured that paintings were sold throughout Europe and even further afield. The development of new genres and the invention of new pictorial subjects, in particular still life, give today’s onlooker insights into the daily life of ordinary citizens of this region and period.
From the early sixteenth century onwards, a growing number of Flemish painters had made their way to Italy or other artistic centres in Europe in order to study and learn from the art being produced in these places, while also achieving great popularity there with their own painting. This contributed to the flourishing and spread of Flemish art. The young Peter Paul Rubens followed in this tradition, travelling to Italy. The art he encountered there had a major influence on his style and the works he painted in successive phases of his oeuvre.
Peter Paul Rubens and his pupil and successor Anthony van Dyck represent a landmark in Flemish painting. Hardly any other painter has had such an enduring influence on his own time as Rubens, and there is almost no area of Netherlandish painting that escaped his all-pervading influence. Rubens was both a universal artist and a cosmopolitan individual, preconditions for his subsequent glittering career. His large and flourishing studio, in which the young van Dyck worked, had a European reputation and earned him general admiration as an artist-entrepreneur, even during his own lifetime.
Rubens, van Dyck and Flemish painting in the Princely Collections
The Princely Collections have some of the most important holdings of Flemish painting in the world, not only in terms of quantity, but above all of quality, as attested by the fact that they hold one of the largest bodies of works by Rubens, including 30 paintings and oil sketches by his own hand. The collections also hold more than 20 paintings by van Dyck, together with numerous major works by other Flemish masters.
Since the first half of the seventeenth century, various members of the Princely House of Liechtenstein have had a special predilection for Flemish painting and, in particular, for the work of Rubens and van Dyck. It was Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein who purchased the first Rubens painting for the princely gallery. This was the Assumption, acquired in 1637, only a few years after it was painted. Following Rubens’s death in 1640, a large number of his works came onto the market, making them easier to acquire than in the previous generation. However, while the times were favourable for acquiring Flemish masterpieces, their attribution was a more problematic matter. Thus, in 1692, during the regency of Karl Eusebius’s successor, Prince Johann Adam Andreas I von Liechtenstein, a group of paintings depicting the life and death of the Roman general Decius Mus was acquired as a cycle by van Dyck. Comprising a total of eight monumental paintings, this series today forms the centrepiece of the Princely Collections and has been identified as the earliest of four pictorial cycles of its kind in Rubens’s oeuvre.
It is thought that during the regency of Prince Johann Adam Andreas I thirteen other paintings by Rubens joined those already in the collections. However, the contribution made by succeeding generations was far smaller, and at the end of the nineteenth century and after the Second World War a number of paintings by Rubens were sold off from the Princely Collections.
The present ruler, Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein, has happily been in a position over the past few years to continue the family tradition of collecting and substantially increase the holdings of works by Rubens. Today it may justifiably be claimed that hardly any other collection in the world would be able to mount an exhibition of Flemish painting in comparable numbers and quality exclusively with works from its own holdings, without recourse to loans from other institutions.
The Princely Collections on display for the first time in Beijing
Following the spectacular exhibitions in Japan and Singapore in 2012 and 2013, the Princely Collections continue to make their mark in Eastern Asia. Scheduled to open in Beijing, this wide-ranging exhibition devoted to the most important schools of Flemish painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth century will once again emphasize the quality and importance of this collection that has been assembled over the course of centuries, offering the general public in China a bravura display of Renaissance and Baroque painting. This will be the first time that the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein have visited China.
100 masterpieces, including paintings, engravings and tapestries, presented according to thematic aspects, will cover the entire spectrum of Flemish painting from the forerunners and first flowering of Flemish art, as represented by the works of Quentin Massys and Jan de Cock, together with the Brueg(h)el dynasty, the two major figures of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck and their successors. This gives a coherent and comprehensible overview of the development of painting in the southern Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Many of the works selected for the exhibition in Beijing have been painstakingly restored and have never been shown in public before.
Curated by Dr Johann Kräftner, director of the Princely Collections, the exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue in Chinese and English.