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ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT (Gorinchem 1566 – 1651 Utrecht)

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ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT (Gorinchem 1566 – 1651 Utrecht) ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT (Gorinchem 1566 – 1651 Utrecht) Moses striking the Rock Signed and dated, lower right: ABloemaert fe/1611 On panel, 33½ x 47¼ ins. (85 x 120 cm) Provenance: Prof. Dr. Johann Friedrich Weitsch (1723-1803), Salzdahlum, Nr. Brunswick, 1804 Branconi Collection, Schloss zu Langenstein Rimpau Collection, Halberstadt, Germany (seen and described in 1929 by Hofstede de Groot Confiscated in 1945 and assigned to the Staatliche Galerie, Halle, DDR, inv. no. 78,I/1802 Restituted in 2005 to the heirs of Schloss zu Langenstein Literature: Verzeichnis einer Sammlung Originalgemälde Professors und Galerie Inspektors Weitsch in Salzdahlum, Salzdahlum bei Braunschweig, 1804, no. 2, pp. 3-4. Marcel Roethlisberger, Abraham Bloemaert and his Sons, 1993, p. 93 (Other paintings of this theme, no. 1 & 2) Marcel Roethlisberger, ‘Abraham Bloemaert: Recent additions to his Paintings’ in Artibus et Historiae, 41 (2000), pp. 160-61, illustrated p. 162, fig. 13. L. Helmus, G. Seelig, et. al., The Bloemaert Effect. Colour and Composition in the Golden Age, Centraal Museum Utrecht and Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 2011, cat. no. 26 (illustrated) Exhibited: The Bloemaert Effect. Colour and Composition in the Golden Age, Centraal Museum Utrecht and Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 2011, cat. no. 26 (illustrated) CS223 In 1611, when Abraham Bloemaert painted this picture, he was in his forty-fifth year. By now a widely recognised master, influential teacher and pillar of the artistic community in Utrecht, he played an active role in that same year in founding the Utrecht Guild of St. Luke, which recognised painters and sculptors as a separate professional group. A portrait of Bloemaert painted two years earlier by his friend and colleague Paulus Moreelse portrays him as a distinguished and successful man. In 1604, Karel van Mander, who evidently knew him, characterised him as a “man of a quiet and agreeable personality”i. Moses striking the rock illustrates an episode from the Old Testament story of Exodus (Exodus 17:8-13; Numbers 20:1-13) that relates how the Israelites fled from Egypt and journeyed to the Promised Land. After crossing the Red Sea, Moses led them through the wilderness towards Mount Sinai. After weeks in the desert, they arrived at a place where no water could be found and they turned in anger on Moses, saying, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and cattle with thirst?” But Moses asked the Lord for help and was instructed to smite the rock of Horeb with his staff. When he did so, clean water gushed forth and the people’s thirst was assuaged. Bloemaert treated the subject more than once during the course of his long career. As early as 1591, his friend and exact contemporary, the humanist scholar Arnoldus Buchelius (1565- 1641) reported seeing a now-lost painting of Moses striking the rock, “of very large format”, (maxima forma)ii. In 1596, at the height of his mannerist phase, Bloemaert produced a smaller version of the biblical story, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New Yorkiii. (Fig. 1). An early masterpiece, the painting displays a mass of elegant figures in wilfully complex poses. Fifteen years were to elapse before he returned to the subject in this impressive panel, by which time his highly charged style of the 1590s had given way to something more measured and subdued. Bloemaert finally addressed the Moses theme decades later, when he was in his eighties, in a small grisaille panel of 1647iv, whose general design still contains distant echoes of his earlier compositions. In this complex and richly coloured work, Bloemaert followed the taste of the period for large paintings of mythological or biblical subjects, in which the gestures and movements of the figures elucidate the narrative. A semi-clad woman seated in the foreground holds centre stage, while Moses is banished to the background, where he stands, illuminated by a shaft of brilliant light, his rod raised on high, having struck the rock. Miraculously, a torrent of water gushes forth and flying putti appear overhead, a sign of divine intervention. Everywhere little groups of men, women and children register their varying reactions to the extraordinary turn of events: some fill drinking vessels, or drink thirstily from the God-given spring, while others raise their eyes to heaven and clasp their grateful hands in prayer, or express their sense of wonder. The unnatural light emanating from a sunburst in the heavily overcast sky enhances the drama of the scene. This panel from the beginning of the second decade of the seventeenth century reflects a transitional phase in Bloemaert’s art. The painting retains strong mannerist traits in the relegation of the principal scene to the background, the restless light effects and the sheer number of figures packed into the confines of the panel, but the overall impression is less agitated and the poses of the normally proportioned figures are less contorted than in the 1596 version of the subject. Here, the picture is given stability by means of a design composed of interlocking triangles: the pyramid of figures on the right - formed at the base from the seated woman, with outstretched arms, and her two infants, and culminating at the apex in the graceful figures of a young woman and a water-carrier - is counterbalanced on the left by the diagonal mass of rock and cascading water. The background scene, comprising an inverted triangle, is likewise filled with a crowd of gesticulating figures. Also characteristic of Bloemaert’s style of the early 1610s is the palette of strong primary and secondary colours: red, yellow, blue, orange and green. An exceptionally large preparatory drawing for the present composition exists in the Schlossmuseum in Weimarv. Once thought to be a study for the Metropolitan Museum’s Moses striking the Rock, Roethlisberger considered the drawing, which only came to light in 2000 after a long period in obscurity, to be “an advanced preparation”vi for the present painting, but Bolten in his 2007 monograph on Bloemaert’s drawings was of the view that the drawing is “probably not autograph or at least heavily worked up by a later hand”vii.. Apart from the nude man in the foreground, taken over in reverse from the painting of 1596, the drawing represents a largely new conception of the theme. There is also the fragment of a drawing – approximately half the original drawing which takes in the right-hand side of the composition – in the Universitetsbiblioteket, in Uppsalaviii. Although the Weimar drawing is carefully executed and finished, the composition was substantially reworked by Bloemaert at a relatively late stage in the painting’s execution. Infrared images attest that the original composition was altered and that a kneeling foreground figure seen from behind was replaced by the half-clad woman shown frontally. A second infant was added in the immediate right foreground and a pair of reclining boys replace the goats and sheep on the left. Abraham Bloemaert was born in Gorinchem in 1566, but shortly after his birth he moved with his family to s’Hertogenbosch and then to Utrecht. His earliest instruction came from his father, Cornelis, a painter, sculptor, architect and engineer. Abraham was apprenticed to several Utrecht masters, none of whom by his own admission taught him very much. In 1581 or 1582, he travelled to Paris, where he worked with “Iehan Bassot” and “Maistre Herry”, before completing his studies with Hieronymus Franck. He worked briefly in Amsterdam, where his father was appointed municipal architect, before returning to Utrecht. In 1592, he married Judith van Schonenburch, a wealthy Catholic, twenty years his senior: she bore him no children and died from the Plague in 1599. The following year he married Gerarda de Roij, the daughter of a wealthy brewer: the couple had many children, of whom four sons, Hendrick, Cornelis, Adriaen and Frederick became artists and pupils of their father. In 1611, Bloemaert was among the founder members of the Guild of Saint Luke in Utrecht, of which he became dean in 1618. In 1612, he was also a founder of an art academy in Utrecht and, according to Karel van Mander, was a dedicated teacher who wanted to provide young artists with a better training than he had received himself. In 1617, Bloemaert bought a large and expensive house on the prestigious Mariakerkhof, a square in the heart of the Catholic community. A devout Catholic, he received a number of commissions from the Jesuits and other religious patrons in the Southern Netherlands. The visits made to his studio by Peter Paul Rubens and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia attest to his renown. Bloemaert died in Utrecht on 27 January 1651 and was buried in the Catharijnekerk. During the course of his long career, Bloemart had many pupils and, together with Paulus Moreelse, trained the generation of artists that made Utrecht an artistic centre of international importance. Among his pupils were Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Cornelis van Poelenburch, Jan van Bijlert, Jan Both and Nicolaus Knupfer. His Konstryck tekenboek (Artistic drawing book), a pattern book for art students was used in art schools until the nineteenth century. P.M. i Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, Haarlem, 1604, folio 298r:25-26. ii Given the context in which he made this remark, it can be inferred that the picture was larger than Bloemaert’s Niobids of 1591 (Copenahagen), measuring 203 x 249 cm. iii Abraham Bloemaert, Moses striking the Rock, 1596, on canvas, 79.7 x 107.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Gift of Mary V. T. Eberstadt, by exchange, 1972 (1972.171). iv Abraham Bloemaert, Moses striking the Rock, signed and dated 1647, black chalk, pen and brown ink and oil on panel, 16.2 x 23 cm, with Johnny Van Haeften Limited, London, 2011.
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