Feature: Exhibition - Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele - Royal Academy of Arts
Published: 23 September 2010
by JOHN EVANS
LIKE a walk through the history of art is how one expert described Treasures From Budapest ahead of its opening.
She might have added “through history itself” and an “A-Z hall of fame” for the artworks from the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest and Hungarian National Gallery.
At every turn there are unexpected and disparate gems among more than 200 drawings, paintings and sculptures from the Renaissance to the 20th century.
Take the small 1814 oil sketch by John Constable of East Bergholt, which not only depicts a huge gold standard at the heart of a massive peace celebration in the village but also an effigy of a beaten Bonaparte in his tricorn, hanging from a gibbet.
If that seems close to home, there is also a portrait by the RA’s first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, depicting Admiral Sir Edward Hughes in about 1787.
A more touching and personal image is the last portrait of composer Franz Liszt, whose bicentenary will be celebrated in 2011, painted in about a fortnight by another famous Hungarian, Mihály Munkácsy. Both were in Paris in March 1886 when the work was carried out but by August Liszt was dead.
Yet these are but snapshots. At the heart of the exhibition is the Esterházy collection of Old Master paintings and more than 80 drawings, begun in the 17th century and expanded by Prince Nikolaus II (1765-1833). A highlight is Raphael’s unfinished Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist, 1508, “the Esterházy Madonna”.
The show opens with an imposing 1512
St Andrew Altarpiece, standing over four metres, from Liptószentandrás, Upper Hungary (now Slovakia), being shown abroad for the first time.
The drawings alone include works by Leonardo, Tiepolo, Raphael, Carracci, Crespi, Veronese, and a host of others. There are intimate studies by Rembrandt of his wife Saskia, and by Rubens of his son Albert. Dürer’s Lancer on Horseback of 1502 examines the animal’s movement but also shows he used a pair of compasses for the lines of its rear.
There are bronzes, from Renaissance works attributed to Leonardo and Andrea Riccio to Rodin’s Sirens of 1888.
Among other artists to feature are Rubens, Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Hals, Lievens, Renoir, van Dyck, Claude, Schiele and Chagall as well as Hungary’s own Philip de László and József Rippl-Rónai.
Sections are devoted to religious works, portraits, landscapes and mythological subjects.
Star exhibits include El Greco’s idiosyncratic but breathtaking St Mary Magdalene of about 1580, shortly after his arrival in Spain, and
St James the Less of two decades later.
A pair of canvases by Goya, Knife-grinder and Water-carrier, date from 1812. Show co-curator, the RA’s Joanna Norman, said it’s “quite plausible” that these private works were Goya’s comment on Spain’s resistance against Napoleonic siege.
Curator Professor David Ekserdjian warned against viewing just the star artists and said: “If you only look on the label for a Raphael or a Rembrandt you could really miss out.”
He then cited a “tour de force” in Moses Striking Water from the Rock by the Neapolitan Antonio de Bellis from 1640-1645. “He’s not a very famous painter but this is an absolutely stunning picture,” he said.
The professor would also like to know the identity of the early 17th-century painter responsible for Sleeping Girl, a work first noted in the Esterházy collection in 1812 but which has defied the art historians.
• Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, from September 25-12. Admission £12, concessions available. www.royalacademy.org.uk
IMAGES- Top:Raffaelo Santini, called Raphael: Esterházy Madonna, c1507-08. Tempera and oil on poplar panel, 28.5 x 21.5cm
Bottom: John Constable, The celebration of the General Peace of 1814 in East Bergholt, 1814.
Oil on canvas, 23 x 33.5 cm