(Nivå) Now only inches separate them: separated by a cut for two centuries, a family featured in a 17th-century painting has been reunited by a Danish museum after the missing mother was found after a thorough investigation was found.
Posted at 12:33pm
Everything in the Portrait of a Father and His Son by the Flemish painter Cornelis de Vos (1584-1651), displayed for more than a century in the collections of Nivaagaard, north of Copenhagen, indicated that a female presence had disappeared.
On the right, an unknown shape indicated that a piece of the “puzzle” was missing.
“It’s a dress and a knee underneath and part of a chair,” museum director Andrea Rygg Karberg told AFP.
After a meticulous investigation, researchers found the missing woman dressed in rich black clothing with her neck encircled by an imposing strawberry, like her husband.
It was Portrait of a Lady, another work by Cornelius de Vos, also from 1626.
The work of this close friend of Peter Paul Rubens was acquired at auction in 2014 by a Dutch gallerist, Salomon Lilian, who undertook restoration work that revealed a rural background.
A Danish researcher, Jørgen Wadum, found a photo of this work after cleaning in an article and suddenly realized that it was about the missing mother.
“Finding the missing woman in a family portrait is extraordinary, that happens once in a lifetime,” says Ms. Rygg Karberg happily
“Like a jigsaw puzzle, it fits perfectly with our work with the poplars and the sky in the background,” enthuses the art historian
Thanks to a grant from the New Carlsberg Foundation, his museum acquired the missing piece, which he now exhibits with his family.
“It gives a good idea of what it looked like in the beginning […] I wonder why she was cut out of the big painting. What could she have done? laughs an 80-year-old visitor, Ole Juul.
For the director of collections, the explanation is certainly very prosaic, the artwork was undoubtedly cropped due to damage to the canvas.
“In my opinion, the lower corner of the painting is damaged. Then it was cut into two works that function separately.”
The researchers’ work made it possible to establish that the painting was completed by 1830.
The first mention of the only portrait of a father and his son is from 1859, suggesting that it was cut around that time.