Paintings auctions at Sotheby’s

13/6/23 - Art market - London and Paris - Several 17th century masterpieces will be auctioned by Sotheby’s in Paris on 13 and 14 June, but the most important paintings from different periods will be sold in London in July. Some of them are currently on display at Sotheby’s Paris offices. Painted around 1490 by a Bruges artist, Pentecost is attributed to the Baroncelli Master of Portraits (ill. 1). The work was acquired by Pieter Rapaert at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries and remained in the same family for more than three hundred years, earning it the nickname "Pentecost Rapaert". Its commissioner and destination remain unknown, however, and its size is relatively unusual. It is all the more difficult to identify the two donors kneeling on either side of the scene, as the escutcheons above the mantelpiece have been erased.

1. Master of the Baroncelli Portraits (active in Bruges c. 1490)
Whitsuntide
Oil on panel - 106 x 122 cm
Sotheby’s London, 5 July 2023
Photo: Sotheby’s

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The Virgin and the Apostles stand in a fifteenth-century Dutch interior animated by multiple details, which opens onto a landscape in the background, in a formula reminiscent of the works of Van Eyck and Petrus Christus.
Before its loan to the Groeningmuseum in Bruges, this painting had rarely been exhibited to the public. Its attribution has fluctuated over the years, first being presented as a work by Hans Memling, then by Justus of Ghent or Jan Mostaert. Finally, art historians have suggested that it is the work of a painter active in Bruges in the last decade of the 16th century, influenced by Memling and Petrus Christus: the Master of the Baroncelli Portraits, active in Bruges at the end of the 16th century, who owes his name to the portraits of Pierantonio Bandini Baroncelli and his wife Maria Bonciani, both exhibited at the Uffizi.

2. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Saint Sebastian
Oil on canvas - 124 x 97.8 cm