Art history sleuths reunite mother with husband and son in 17th-century Flemish portrait

Two different parts of a 17th-century relatives portrait break up in 50 % have been reunited by scholars just after pretty much 200 years. Double Portrait of a Father and Son—painted in 1626 by the Antwerp-primarily based portrait painter Cornelis de Vos—depicts a family members of three, but the portray was missing a piece, indicated by the glimpse of a gown in the reduced suitable-hand corner.

Double Portrait of a Father and Son belongs to the private Nivaagaard Selection centered in Niva, Denmark. Jørgen Wadum, a distinctive marketing consultant at the Nivaagaard Selection and Angela Jager, a curator at the RKD-Netherlands Institute for Artwork Background in The Hague, joined forces to attempt and observe down the lacking operate past year.

Originally they uncovered images in a 1966 conservation report by the National Gallery of Denmark which revealed further information, uncovering section of the arm of the missing woman. The images offered new clues, exhibiting the woman’s elaborate cuff and her hand holding a pair of embroidered gloves lined with purple velvet.

“To their terrific enjoyment, this led them to determine a portrait of an tasteful woman with a significant millstone collar like that of the father in the double portrait. It was De Vos’s Portrait of a Woman from 1626 which was auctioned for sale at Christie’s in London in 2014,” a statement from the Nivaagaard Collection states.

The get the job done was acquired in London by the Amsterdam-centered supplier Salomon Lilian, who cleaned the painting. Pursuing restoration, the landscape in the track record of the double portrait was unveiled, showing a dyke and a row of poplar trees at the rear of the boy’s still left shoulder, which continues in the portrait of the woman. Crucially, her facial characteristics and brown eyes match those people of the boy, the assertion provides.

Recently, a grant from the New Carlsberg Basis in Copenhagen allowed the Nivaagaard Assortment to receive the portrait of the mother. The height of the painting of the mom is much less than half that of the painting of the father and son, suggesting that the authentic work was likely separated cautiously into two standalone paintings immediately after sustaining injury, most possible involving 1830 and 1859, the collection says.

Andrea Rygg Karberg, the director of the Nivaagaard Selection museum, said in a statement: “It is a huge scoop for Dutch baroque artwork record and for our selection that exploration has led us to the discovery of this unbelievable feminine portrait. The mom now appears out at us with each other with her son, whose gaze is so comparable to hers. All a few of the subjects take on an completely new dimension, depth and glow when they are contemplated jointly as originally supposed, relatively than in isolation from each individual other.”