Lot 4. Sir Anthony van Dyck (Antwerp 1599 - 1641 London), Portrait of Lucas Van Uffel, oil on oak panel, en grisaille, 20.3 x 16.2 cm.; 8 x 6⅜in. Lot sold: 504,000 GBP (Estimate: 400,000 - 600,000 GBP). © 2022 Sotheby's.

Provenance: Rudolf Kann, Paris (1845–1905) (according to Held 1990);
Dr. Gottlieb Friedrich Reber (1880–1959), Lugano;
E.D. Reber, Munich, 1925;
With Julius Sperling, Munich, 1930;
With Hermann Abels, Cologne, 1931;
With A.S. Drey, Munich;
Drey Sale, Berlin, Graupe, 17-18 June 1936, lot 12 (involuntary liquidation of assets);
Mrs J. Patten, England;
By whom sold, London, Sotheby's, 4 April 1962, lot 35, for £4,000 to Agnew;
With Thomas Agnew & Sons, London;
N.N. Embiricos, London;
By whom offered, London, Christie's, 13 December 2000, lot 26, but withdrawn before sale;
With Thomas Gibson, London;
From whom acquired, 27 November 2001 (with the benefit of a settlement agreement with the heirs of A S Drey), by the late collector.

Literature: G. Glück, Van Dyck: des Meisters Gemälde (Klassiker der Kunst), Stuttgart and Berlin 1931, p. 533, under nos 126 and 127;
L. van Puyvelde, in Le Siècle de Rubens, exh. cat., Brussels 1965, pp. 62–63, under no. 61;
M. Jaffé, 'Van Dyck's sketches for his portraits of Duquesnoy and Van Uffel', in Bulletin des Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 1967, pp. 160–61, reproduced;
O. Millar, 'Van Dyck at Agnews', in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 110, 1968, p. 712 ('has the brilliance of the best of the Iconography sketches');
J.S. Held, The collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Flemish and German paintings of the 17th century, Detroit 1982, p. 30;
W.A. Liedke, Flemish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1984, p. 59 (as attributed to Van Dyck);
S.J. Barnes, Van Dyck in Italy, doctoral diss., New York University, 1986, pp. 257–8, no. 42;
E. Larsen, The Paintings of Van Dyck, Freren 1988, vol. II, p. 171, no. 149, reproduced;
J.S. Held, in Anthony van Dyck, exh. cat., Washington 1990, pp. 339–41, no. 92, reproduced;
H. Vey, in S.J. Barnes, N. de Porter. O. Millar and H. Vey, Van Dyck, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2004, pp. 208–09, no. II.69, reproduced in colour.

Exhibited: Kings Lynn, Fermoy Art Gallery, Exhibition of Pictures by Sir Anthony van Dyck, 27 July – 10 August 1963, no. 16;
London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Sir Anthony van Dyck, 7 November – 7 December 1968, no. 34;
Washington, National Gallery of Art, Anthony van Dyck, 11 November 1990 – 24 February 1991, no. 92.

Note: Though modest in size, this remarkably incisive and penetrating oil sketch is witness to Van Dyck’s compelling ability to convey character even on a small scale. The sitter has long been thought to be Lucas van Uffel (or Uffeln), a wealthy Flemish merchant and shipowner who was established in Venice by 1616 and amassed a fortune there, much of which he spent upon a major collection of Italian and Northern paintings. This sketch is closely related to two large scale portraits of Van Uffel painted by Van Dyck when in Italy in 1622, but its precise relationship with those works remains to be satisfactorily determined. It may have been painted when the two men first met in the summer of 1622 in Venice, but its intimate size would also suggest that it may have been one of the oil studies painted later in preparation for Van Dyck’s celebrated series of contemporary portraits of artists, friends and patron known as the Iconographie produced in the 1630s, but if so, no related engraving of it has survived. Despite this its virtuoso quality had made it for many scholars, the benchmark against which all Van Dyck’s sketches for that famous project may be judged.

The identity of the sitter as Lucas Van Uffel (d. 1637), though not completely certain, is now generally accepted by all scholars of Van Dyck. There can be no doubt that the sitter here is the same man portrayed in two canvases by Van Dyck from the 1620s, one now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig (fig. 1), and the other in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (fig. 2) which are so identified.¹ As Walter Liedtke was remarked, there is a ‘a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence which suggests that Van Uffel is the sitter’. The identification of the sitter in the latter (and by implication that in Braunschweig) rests upon an inscription upon a mezzotint by the Fleming Wallerand Vaillant (1623–1677) which describes the sitter as ‘De Heer van Uffel’. Similarly, a letter addressed in 1738 to the then owner of the New York picture, Wilhelm VIII Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, refers to it as ‘le Van Uffelen de Van Dijk’.²

 fig. 1. Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait of Lucas Van Uffel, circa 1622, oil on canvas, 108.5 x 90.5 cm. Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum.

fig. 2. Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait of Lucas Van Uffel, circa 1622, oil on canvas, 124.5 X 100.6 cm. New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There can be little doubt of the connections between artist and sitter. Van Uffel was on close terms with the brothers Cornelis (1592–1667) and Lucas de Wael (1591–1661) with whom Van Dyck stayed when in Genoa, and was in all probability Van Dyck’s host when he came to Venice in the later summer of 1622. Both the Braunschweig and New York portraits were probably painted there at that time. When Van Dyck returned to Antwerp five years later, he dedicated his etching of Titian and his mistress to Van Uffel ‘in segno d’affectione et inclination amorevole’ (‘As a sign of affection and loving inclination’). Van Uffel himself was later obliged by Venetian financial extortion to return to the Netherlands in the mid-1630s, together with his famous collection. He died in Amsterdam in 1638 and his renowned group of paintings, which boasted among its masterpieces no less a portrait than Raphael’s likeness of Baldassare Castiglione (fig. 3), was sold at auction that same year.³

fig. 3. Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514-15, oil on canvas, 82 x 67 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. This was undoubtedly the most famous painting in Van Uffel’s collection. Rembrandt’s sketch of the painting, made at the time of the auction of Van Uffel’s paintings in Amsterdam in 1639, is preserved in the Albertina in Vienna. 

Of Van Dyck’s two portraits painted in Venice in 1622, the present sketch is clearly more related to that in Braunschweig (fig. 1). Here Van Uffel is portrayed as a merchant prince, his hand in the canvas resting on a stick and beyond him ships play their trade along an Italianate coast.⁴ For reasons of space and design, in the oil sketch his hand is brought to rest upon his chest instead. The relationship between the three pictures remains unclear; the present oil sketch seems most unlikely to have served as a preliminary study for either canvas, and if such existed then perhaps this was in the form of a drawing. The purpose and date of the present grisaille – executed in delicate shades of grey, white and dark brown - cannot therefore be easily determined, and scholarly opinion has consequently remained undecided. Michael Jaffé, the compiler of the Agnews 1968 catalogue, and Oliver Millar all considered the grisaille to have dated from Van Dyck’s second Antwerp period between 1627–32. This is suggested by the evident relationship between the sketch to those grisailles that were actually used for Van Dyck’s Iconographie, a collection of images of the most prominent contemporary men in the world of the arts and letters first published between 1636 and 1641. Gustav Glück assumed that the present panel was always intended to be engraved for the Iconographie but offered no possible date for its actual execution. Julius Held endorsed this hypothesis, alone proposing an earlier dating for the panel to around 1622–25, but the use of the oak panel here would make that most unlikely. Jaffé was more cautious about a direct association with the great undertaking, content simply to favourably compare the quality of the present sketch to ‘the best of those [sketches] which he [Van Dyck] was to paint in connection with the Iconographie’.

The size and format of the present grisaille clearly echoes those which were probably used for the actual series, in which they performed the crucial role of translating the painter’s likenesses (nearly all (with only one exception) drawn from the life in chalk) into detailed sketches for the use of the engravers themselves. In Hind’s words: ‘The oil grisaille panels appear to have supplied the engraver with Van Dyck’s completed idea’.⁵ The largest surviving group of oil sketches which can be connected with the Iconography are the thirty-seven panels today preserved in the collections of the Dukes of Buccleuch at Boughton in Northamptonshire. Of these Horst Vey lists twenty-four that he considers display the ‘vivacity of handling and refinement of perception and technique’ worthy of Van Dyck, and critical opinion has long been divided over the relative merits and degree of the painter’s own participation.⁶

Certainly, the quality of the present panel would match many of those at Boughton, such as that of the painter Gaspar de Crayer (fig. 4). In its less finished character, however, notably in the area of the sitter’s torso which is indicated by only thinnish black and grey paint which was later painted over (fig. 5), it differs from the other grisailles, whose design were worked up right to the edges of the panel, as the engravers would have expected.⁷ If, as Vey notes, the present sketch was made after Van Dyck’s return from Italy, it is unlikely that it could have been derived from either of the canvas portraits, which presumably remained in the Van Uffel’s possession until his return to Amsterdam in 1632. The two men did not meet again after Van Uffel’s sittings in Venice, and Vey suggests that if this sketch was to have formed the basis for an engraving that Van Dyck might have had recourse to an original drawing, now lost. This would have been in keeping with the modus operandi of the production of the Iconographie, and might also then account for the heavier and older facial features of the sitter remarked upon by Jaffé: ‘A man of heavier jowl and more advanced years.’ But why the sketch then seems to have remained unfinished is still unknown. The reason for this will probably never now be understood, but the simple fact that it was may have been enough to prevent any intended use for the engravers of the Iconography.

fig. 4. Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait of Gaspar de Crayer, ca. 1627–35. Oil on panel, 24.8 X 18.7 cm. Collection of The Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry KBE, Boughton House, Northamptonshire.

Left: Fig. 5 The present panel before restoration. 
Right: Fig. 6 Infra-Red reflectogram of the present lot.

What remains unclear, however, is that, even if all these assumptions are correct – and Van Dyck’s evident friendship and admiration for the sitter taken into account – why was Van Uffel’s likeness ultimately excluded for any edition of the printed Iconographie itself? He would certainly have fitted alongside other distinguished contemporary collectors in the series such as Nicolaes Rockox and Cornelis van der Geest. The earliest history of the panel is unknown, and it may perhaps have been lost at an early date. But as Julius Held pertinently remarked:

‘No matter whether it was made as a study for the Braunschweig canvas or, more likely, was painted afterward, it [the present panel] has been done with so much freedom and judicious economy that its attribution to Van Dyck should be beyond question…. The significance of the Van Uffel panel lies in the standard of quality that it offers, and against which all other pretenders to a Van Dyck attribution will have to be measured’.

¹ S. Barnes, N. de Poorter, H. Vey and O. Millar, Van Dyck. A complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Have and London 2004, pp. 208–10, cat. nos II.68 and II.70, reproduced.
² Cited by Liedtke 1984, p. 57. Vaillant himself, however, made no note of the name of his model. Another possible identity for the sitter, the Flemish merchant Daniel de Nys (b. 1572) also resident in Venice and also a patron of the arts, is, as Held suggests, ruled out by his age, for he would have been fifty at the time of the commission, and older than the man depicted. Vaillant never travelled to Italy, so he must have based his mezzotint upon the original, which probably remained in Van Uffel’s collection when he was obliged to return to Amsterdam in the 1630s.
³ Van Uffel also owned paintings by or attributed to Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Ribera, Reni, Guercino, Claude and Poussin. For a good account of his life see E. Duverger and D. Maufort in C. Depauw and G. Luijyen (eds), Anthony van Dyck as a printmaker, exh. cat., Antwerp and Amsterdam 1999–2000, pp. 385–86.
⁴ By contrast, in the New York portrait he is portrayed as a man of learning, surrounded by an antique head, musical instruments, a celestial globe and various drawings.
⁵ A.M Hind, Catalogue of drawings by Dutch and Flemish artists preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, London 1923, 2:62, under no. 35.
⁶ Vey in Barnes, de Poorter, Millar and Vey 2004, pp. 365–73, cat. nos. III.145–67, all reproduced. The group were bought by Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu from the sale of the painter Sir Peter Lely’s collection in London beginning on the 18 April 1682.
⁷ Recent examination of the present panel with Infra-red reflectography by Tager, Stonor Richardson (report no. 20220712 dated 15 July 2022) shows the directional brushed imprimatura used by Van Dyck, with some areas of priming left exposed to act as mid-tones, a technique fully in keeping with that used for the small-scale panels used for the Iconographie series (see fig. 6).

Sotheby's. HOTUNG | 何東 The Personal Collection of the late Sir Joseph Hotung | Part II: Evening. London, 8 December 2022