Contact Us | Press Office | Concocting a Masterpiece
29 October 2004 to 23 January 2005
What prompted a 17th-century
Dutch painter to abandon a lucrative career painting landscapes in favour
of attempting the highest genre of art, history painting? And why did Bartholomeus
Breenbergh paint not one, but three canvases of the same subject, Joseph
distributing corn in Egypt – with two of them almost identical?
A contemporary of Rembrandt’s teacher, Pieter Lastman, Breenbergh is a virtuoso painter of landscapes, portraits and history subjects, and broke all the rules of Dutch painting of the period by straddling and mixing all these genres. So why is he virtually unknown among art lovers and under-appreciated by art historians?
Breenbergh’s enigmatic masterpiece Joseph distributing corn in Egypt is the centrepiece of the latest in a series of Picture-in-Focus exhibitions at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, starting on October 29. The exhibition is curated by Barber Director Richard Verdi, curator of the blockbuster October 2003 show Saved!: 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund.
With loans from public and private collections in Britain and abroad, including the Bowes Museum, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, the exhibition will probe the many mysteries of this versatile and mesmerising painter.
The exhibition will also unite for the first time the Barber’s version of Joseph distributing corn in Egypt [1655] with an almost identical version painted a year earlier, now in a private collection. It will feature stunning landscape and history paintings from throughout Breenbergh’s career alongside works by related masters.
Richard Verdi said he chose the Breenbergh picture as the focus of this year’s major loan exhibition after becoming fascinated by its complexity and virtuosity while researching the picture for a forthcoming comprehensive catalogue of the Barber Institute’s paintings.
“Researching Breenbergh was an adventure in the dark, an exhibition waiting to happen,” said Professor Verdi. “He is so unusual – from being a prolific painter of commercial Italianate landscapes from the 1620s to the early 1640s, his output drops and he suddenly re-invents himself as a monumental history painter – why? Breenbergh is a consummate storyteller, and something of a chameleon. He’s all kinds of painter at once, and a very great artist that no-one knows.”
16 September 2004
| For further information, please contact Andrew Davies, Barber Press and Marketing Officer, on 0121 414 2946 or andrewdavies@barber.org.uk |