Getty announces acquisition of a celebrated Watteau painting

PanARMENIAN.Net - The J. Paul Getty Museum announced the most important acquisition in the history of the Museum’s Department of Drawings. Acquired as a group from a British private collection, the 16 drawings are by many of the greatest artists of western art history, including Michelangelo, Lorenzo di Credi, Andrea del Sarto, Parmigianino, Rubens, Barocci, Goya, Degas, and others. From the same collection, the Museum has acquired a celebrated painting by the great eighteenth-century French artist Jean Antoine Watteau, Art Daily said.

La Surprise is a fête galante, a popular genre depicting outdoor revelry that Watteau invented and which epitomizes the light-hearted spirit of French painting in the early eighteenth century. The scene features a young woman and man in passionate embrace seemingly oblivious to the musician seated next to them. He is Mezzetin, the trouble maker, a stock comic character from the commedia dell’arte. Throughout Watteau’s short but illustrious career – he died when he was only 27 years old – the characters of the commedia dell’arte figured prominently in his paintings, often mingling with elegant contemporary figures in a park or landscape.

Highly admired in the eighteenth century, the painting was thought lost and for centuries was known to art historians only from a 1731 engraving and a copy in the British Royal Collection. In 2007 it was found in an English private collection, becoming the most important work by Watteau to be rediscovered in recent times.

The painting and all of the 16 drawings were purchased as a group from a British private collection. The drawings are mostly Italian but there are also exceptional works by British, Dutch, Flemish, French, and Spanish artists. A nucleus of Italian Renaissance works anchors the group, including a rare and beautiful “cartoon” (full-sized direct transfer drawing for a painting) by Lorenzo di Credi; one of Andrea del Sarto’s finest drawings (from the collection of artist-writer Giorgio Vasari); and Michelangelo’s powerful pen and ink study of a mourning woman, a famous discovery made at Castle Howard, England in 2000.

Other highlights include Parmigianino’s exquisite ink drawing of the head of a young man; Savoldo’s Study for Saint Peter; Beccafumi’s Head of a Youth; and Sebastiano del Piombo’s Study for the Figure of Christ Carrying the Cross. From the post-Renaissance period, the collection also features a masterful head study of Saint Joseph by Barocci; Rubens’s powerful oil-on-paper study of an African man wearing a turban; Cuyp’s panoramic View of Dordrecht, one of the great landscape drawings of the Dutch Golden Age; and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s drawing Punchinello Riding a Camel at the Head of a Caravan, a brilliant example of the narrative mastery for which Tiepolo was admired.

Goya’s The Eagle Hunter, a darkly satirical brush and ink drawing depicts a hunter wearing a metal cooking pot for a helmet while precariously suspending himself over a cliff to try to snatch young eagles from a nest.

Degas, arguably the greatest draftsman of the nineteenth century, is represented by two drawings, a sheet with two chalk studies of ballet dancers, used by the artist for no fewer than three paintings, and a large and startlingly bold pastel showing his unrivalled innovation in that medium.

While the majority of works are currently at the Getty Museum, some are still pending export licenses from the U.K. Research on further drawings from the same collection, with a view to possible acquisition, is currently underway. Plans are also proceeding to display the group together at the Getty Museum in a special installation in the near future.