The Lost Caravaggio: II

Photo Credit: National Gallery of Ireland

THE leading expert in Baroque paintings and specialist in Caravaggio was Sir Denis Mahon, an art historian and collector of Baroque paintings, who had twice been a Trustee of the National Gallery London.

At this time he was 82-years old and had spent his entire adult life studying Baroque paintings.

When the restoration was complete he was invited to visit Dublin, was led to the Restoration Studio, shown the painting on an easel, studied it closely, ‘nose to canvas’, and was asked who was the painter?

In a matter of minutes he said ‘Caravaggio’.

He later explained that he was persuaded by the ‘masterly’ painting of the hands in the picture, objects which many artists find particularly difficult to portray. 

WITH an attribution by Sir Denis Mahon of the ‘Honthorst’ painting as a genuine Caravaggio its estimated market value in 1993 was as much as £50 million.

The Jesuit community decided that, having received it as a gift from Dr. Lea-Wilson, now dead, they held it on a charitable trust and were not free to sell it.

They retain ownership but placed it on permanent loan to the National Gallery of Ireland.

BUT is it really the original of The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio or a variation on the original by Caravaggio himself or even a very good copy of the original by another artist such as Honthorst? 

The original painting had been commissioned in Rome in 1602 by its richest citizen, Ciriaco Mattei.

Caravaggio was then living in his palace and painted at least three paintings for him.

Ciriaco was a meticulous book-keeper and his account books, in his own hand, show four payments to Caravaggio, seemingly based on the size of the paintings, including a payment in 1603 of 125 scudi (enough to rent a house in Rome for three years) ‘for a painting with its frame of Christ taken in the Garden’.

This refers to St. Mark’s Gospel description of Judas betraying Christ to soldiers with a kiss.

THE Mattei family’s wealth diminished in the following two centuries.

Family inventories of possessions became less specific.

The painting of ‘The Taking of Christ’ was attributed to Caravaggio until 1753 when a new inventory described a painting as ‘The Betrayal by Judas’.

A 1786 guidebook called ‘An Instructive Inventory of Rome’ by one Guiseppe Vasi was replete with errors and attributed the ‘Taking’ picture to Gherardo della Notte.

Whoever prepared the 1793 Mattei inventory appears to have drawn on Vasi as his source, rather than previous family inventories.

The painting in the Mattei family’s possession was attributed for the first time in the 1793 inventory to Gherardo delle Notti.

Was this the Caravaggio? 

IN 1798, when Napoleon invaded Northern Italy, he imposed heavy taxes on landowners to pay for his army.

The Mattei family had to sell assets to pay these taxes.

In 1802 they sold six paintings to a very wealthy Scotsman called William Hamilton Nisbet, including one which had been labelled as ‘The Taking of Christ’ by Honthorst.

An export licence was obtained for the six paintings which again refers to the painting being by Honthorst.

The six paintings purchased from the Mattei Palace in Rome in 1802 remained in the Hamilton Nisbet family’s possession until 1921.

IN that year, the last direct descendant of William Hamilton Nisbet was his great-granddaughter Constance Ogilvy.

She offered 31 of her family’s paintings to the National Gallery of Scotland which took all but three of them.

The rejected three included the Honthorst.

Together with other family paintings from ‘the Mansion-House of Biel, East Lothian’ it went to auction at Dowell’s in Edinburgh on 16 April 1921.

An annotated catalogue for that sale shows £8-8-0 beside the entry for ‘The Betrayal of Christ’ by Gerard Honthorst.

THE paper trail for Caravaggio’s painting from the Mattei Palace in Rome in 1603 to Dowell’s auction house in Edinburgh in 1921 is not perfect but is convincing.

It is supplemented by the oral history of Dr Lea-Wilson acquiring the painting in Edinburgh in the 1920s, giving it to the Jesuits in the 1930s and the painting going to the NGI in 1990.

THERE are at least twelve known versions of Caravaggio’s painting.

Two of them are claimed to be the original of ‘The Taking of Christ’, one in Odessa in the Ukraine and another which was bought from the Sannini family in Florence, Italy, by a Roman art dealer in 2003.

The Odessa painting is probably a copy of the Caravaggio made for Ciriaco Mattei’s brother Asdurabale by an artist called Giovanni di Attile for which he was paid 12 scudi.

Sir Denis Mahon described the fingers in the Odessa painting as being like ‘sausages’, not typical of Caravaggio’s best work.

Although Sir Denis thought that the Sannini painting was one of a series of the same subject painted by Caravaggio, its claim became doubtful in 2008 when analysis of its pigments showed traces of ‘Naples Yellow’, a paint not known to have been used until 1615, five years after Caravaggio’s death.

ON balance, the paper trail from Rome to Edinburgh, the oral history in Dublin and Sir Denis Mahon’s attribution to Caravaggio, indicate that ‘The Taking of Christ’ painting in the NGI is the original painting commissioned by Ciriaco Mattei in Rome in 1602.

The Lost Caravaggio: I

Photo Credit: National Gallery of Ireland

THE "LOST CARAVAGGIO" FOUND IN DUBLIN

IN 1993 the National Gallery of Ireland announced that it had found in Dublin and authenticated a missing Caravaggio painting known as ‘The Taking of Christ’.

How did it come to be in Dublin?

And is it really the missing Caravaggio painting of that subject? 

THE story of how the painting came to be in Dublin is both simple and tragic.

Percival Lea-Wilson was born into a middle-class family in Brompton, London, in April, 1887.

His grandfather Samuel Wilson had been Lord Mayor of the City of London in 1838, his father was a stockbroker.

Percival was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford.

He joined the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1909.

In 1914 he married Marie Ryan, daughter of a Cork solicitor, enlisted in the Royal Irish Rifles on the outbreak of war with Germany, and served on the Western Front where he was severely wounded.

He had re-joined the RIC by March 1916 and was stationed in Dublin during the Easter Rising.

HE was placed in charge of a group of Irish Republican prisoners who had surrendered and who were being kept at the Rotunda Hospital.

It is easy to imagine that a British officer who had himself been wounded and who had seen countless men killed in the war would not have had much sympathy for his prisoners who had rebelled against the Crown at a time when Britain was engaged in all-out war on land and sea, particularly as the Proclamation of the rebels had recited the support of their ‘gallant allies abroad’ i.e. the Germans who had supplied them with arms.

Republicans claimed that he mistreated his prisoners, particularly Thomas Clarke, at 59 the oldest man to have taken part in the Rising and first of the seven signatories to the Proclamation of Independence.

They alleged that Clark was stripped naked on the steps of the Rotunda Hospital, in front of the other prisoners (who included Michael Collins) and female nursing staff, and that Lea-Wilson had said ‘That old bastard is Commander-in-Chief. He keeps a tobacco shop across the street. Nice general for your f*****g army’. 

FOUR years later, on the morning of 15 June 1920, Lea-Wilson was a District Inspector of the RIC based in a quiet town, Gorey, County Wexford.

Dressed in civilian clothes, he walked home from the railway station where he had bought a newspaper and was shot dead by an IRA gang of five gunmen, including Liam Tobin, one of his Rotunda prisoners.

That evening, in the Wicklow Hotel in Dublin, Michael Collins met another Rotunda prisoner, Joe Sweeney, who had been elected as a Sinn Fein MP in 1918, asked if he remembered Lea-Wilson and said that ‘We got him today in Gorey’. 

HIS childless widow, Marie, was, of course, distraught at his murder.

The following year, 1921, aged 34, she started a course in medicine at Trinity College Dublin.

She graduated in 1928 and pursued a career as a paediatrician in the Children’s Hospital, Dublin which continued until her death in 1971 aged 84.

In 1921 she went on holiday to Edinburgh and while there bought a 16th century painting labelled as ‘The Betrayal of Christ’ by Gerard Honthorst. 

GERRIT VAN HONTHORST was a Dutchman, a painter of the Utrecht school, who had studied in Rome where he had been influenced by Caravaggio and used the same technique of chiaroscuro, a ‘dramatic mingling of light and dark’.

He is a respected Baroque artist who is said to have influenced Rembrandt and whose paintings are now held in the National Gallery and Hampton Court Palace in London, in the Getty museum and in the Museum of Art, both in Los Angeles, and three of his paintings hang in the National Gallery of Ireland. 

AN auction catalogue shows that this painting sold for 8 guineas (£8.40p) in Edinburgh in 1921.

It was large, 4 feet 4 inches by 5 feet 7 inches, and dark.

It then hung in the drawing room of Dr Lea-Wilson’s house in Fitzwilliam Place for the next ten years. 

Because of her distress at the murder of her husband, Marie had taken advice from a Father Thomas Finlay, a member of the Society of Jesus living in their community at 35 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin, and a Professor of Political Economy at University College Dublin.

He became ‘her friend, philosopher and guide’.

Sometime in the 1930’s she presented him with the Honthorst painting as thanks for his spiritual guidance and it hung for some years above the fireplace in the Jesuits’ dining room and later in their parlour until 1990.

IN that year, a new Superior of the community, Noel Barber, who had been commissioned to renovate the Leeson Street property, asked Dr Brian Kennedy, Assistant Director of the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI), to inspect the community’s collection of paintings.

Dr Kennedy agreed that the NGI would restore the Honthorst in return for the Jesuits making it available for exhibitions when required.

DR KENNEDY had brought with him to the Jesuits’ house the Gallery’s Assistant Restorer, an Italian named Sergio Benedetti.

On seeing the painting for the first time Mr. Benedetti, an enthusiast for Caravaggio, thought that it was either a very good copy of a Caravaggio painting, ‘The Taking of Christ’, which had been missing for several hundred years or, almost impossible to believe, the missing original itself.

He shared that thought with Dr. Kennedy, the Director of the Gallery and the Chief Restorer in strict confidence.

THE painting was brought to the Restoration Studio at the NGI and over the next two years was cleaned and relined.

It had been obscured by a mixture of yellowed varnish, smoke-tar and dust which had to be removed with the most painstaking care, using the least abrasive solvent possible, starting with pure water and adding acetone and alcohol until an effective mix had been obtained.

As the ‘windows’ to the canvas were opened inch-by-inch, the full, rich colours of the painting were revealed with details such as rust on a soldier’s helmet within its dramatic mixture of light and shade.

THE hemp canvas appeared to have the same thread count as a known Caravaggio in Rome.

There were traces of an earlier cleaning when too much paint had been removed showing changes of detail.

These ‘pentimenti’, changes of design by the artist which had been overpainted, are unlikely to be present in a copy of an original.

There were score marks in the paint, made with the wooden end of the paintbrush, a known Caravaggio technique.

Sergio Benedetti worried about the portrayal of an arm, which he thought too short, but that was a problem of perspective.

It had the craquelure to be expected of a 400-year-old painting and some sagging within its frame but was otherwise in relatively good physical condition.

To be continued...