In Maastricht in the Netherlands, the exhibition hall bursts with art treasures and connoisseurs, checkbooks in hand.
“If you’re ever in a jam, here I am,” as Cole Porter wrote of forever friends. Emma Soyer, The Two Inseparables, 1837, oil on canvas. (Photo courtesy of Colnaghi)
For a couple of days, I’m at the European Fine Arts Fair, or TEFAF, in Maastricht in the Netherlands. It’s the grandest and greatest art fair in the world, held every year and this year attracting around 270 dealers, all connoisseurs, all showing their very best, each work museum-worthy. I’ve looked at thousands of works of art here, antiquities to contemporary art. I’m smitten by an old nun, a plump Dutch beer baron, and a donkey. “The road is long,” I’ve heard, “with many a winding turn.” Welcome to TEFAF, where quality and character take many shapes. Prepared to be staggered, heartened, and seduced. It’s a unique art experience.
The Nun Jerónima de la Fuente, from 1620 by Diego Velázquez, Philip IV’s court painter and curator, is a picture I know well. It’s owned by the Prado. Austere and reserved, Jerónima is a Seville-period Velázquez, based on the palette of southern Spain’s landscape, like lots of painting in Seville. Velázquez was only 19 when he painted the Prado picture and a near-identical replica that I’d never seen but knew to be in a private collection. Jerónima? She was then a 66-year-old nun and missionary slated to sail from Spain to Mexico and then to the Philippines. There, she’d establish its first convent, in Manila, which she led until her death in 1630. Stuart Lochhead Sculpture, an important London dealer, is selling it for the collector.
Both the Prado nun and her twin, Portrait of Mother Jerónima de la Fuente, now in Maastricht and displayed in a dark, partitioned space in Lockhead’s booth, have the same intense, scrutinizing look from the subject and, it seems, Velázquez. He plumbed every irregularity, every wrinkle. She’s tough. He’s relentless. Lockhead’s picture differs from the Prado’s in the position of the crucifix. In the Prado’s, the Crucifix faces Jerónima, so we don’t fully see Jesus. In the Maastricht picture, Jerónima tilts it toward the viewer as if she’s deploying a weapon of mass conversion and devotion.
We don’t know the asking price. It’s not the Velázquez of royal sparkle. That comes later, in fancy-dress, courtly Madrid. It’s a portrait, as are the artist’s pictures of kings and queens, but it’s also a religious picture. Jerónima is a marquee-style looker but no sexpot, unless you’re into say-your-prayers, 50-push-ups amore. Either a museum that sees art as serious and not entertainment or a collector deeply moved by singularity and passion would want it. It’s life-size, too, and lifelike. It’ll seem as if she’s moving in. Prepare to keep your feet off the furniture.
Jerónima isn’t pretty, but she’s burning with love of Jesus’s message. Lockhead is also selling a crucifix very much like the one Jerónima carries and whose cast bronze figure of Jesus is said to have been modeled by Michelangelo. When and under what circumstances? We don’t know. The question’s a connoisseurship one as well as one of degrees of separation. In the 1560s, Lockhead thinks, Michelangelo would have made a model from terra-cotta or wax, though none has been found. Then, it would have been cast, likely in multiples, with one transported to Toledo, where Jerónima’s Franciscan order of nuns was headquartered. The crucifix is €1.8 million ($2 million). I suspect that Jerómina’s asking price is around €20 million ($21.8 million). It’s Velázquez, a very big name, and he painted only about 250 works.
Jerónima wasn’t one to have a bestie. The Two Inseparables is entirely a donkey of a different color. It’s by the British painter Emma Soyer (1813–1842) and offered by Colnaghi for €800,000 ($874,000). In its price’s favor are today’s intense interest in women artists, its appearance in the marketplace after more than a hundred years in a private collection, its wall power, very good technique, and undeniable warm fuzzies. It’s the most winsome thing I saw at the fair. It also descends from Murillo’s “beggar boy” pictures, so beloved in England, and 18th-century “fancy pictures” by Gainsborough and Reynolds, so she’s got lineage.
Soyer is known and completely unsung, but in the 1830s, the start of the Victorian era, she was an accomplished painter of scenes of everyday life and a virtuosa in anecdote and charm. She exhibited often at the Royal Academy, though women weren’t allowed to be full academicians, and specialized in figures far removed from highbrow London haunts, mostly street urchins, country bumpkins, and animals, often dogs, but she also had a donkey model.
Once a donkey trusts, and knows he’s among friends, he’s patient, humble, dependable, and loyal. Sancho Panza and Jesus make supporting stars of their donkeys. Sancho’s is loyalty and steadiness incarnate. Jesus’s carries Him into Jerusalem. Soyer needed help to coax this donkey up a flight of steps to her studio in Margate, the seaside vacation town in England where she summered. He didn’t like the indoors, didn’t understand steps, and wasn’t much for posing, but he did as demanded, eventually. To the boy, he seems a treasured companion. His mother, we learned from Story’s husband, hated the ragged clothes he wore. She had prepared dressier duds. The artist’s vision prevailed. It’s an unusual beauty. Depicting animals is a challenge. They can’t fake sincerity, or happiness, or contentment.
The Dutch painter Frans Hals (1582–1666) is a favorite. I reviewed the Rijksmuseum’s Hals retrospective last year, and love the spontaneous and animated look of his portraits. You’d need a heart of stone and the character of Scrooge not to smile at The Laughing Cavalier, his most famous painting, and his many portraits of plump Dutch burghers and their plump wives, dressed in brown, with frilly collars and sleeves, explicitly dour but implicitly always up for a good time. Hals’s portrait of Johan Claesz Loo from 1650 is late for the artist, abstract and loose in his handling of paint, which is characteristic of the period and right for his beer-baron subject.
Loo was a patrician and very rich, socially engaged, and front and center in two of Hals’s great group portraits of a militia company. Like Rembrandt in Amsterdam, whose Night Watch is the shining star of such portraits, Hals handled elite groups in nearby Haarlem. The Loo portrait has been on the market two or three times over the past 30 years. It’s €6 million ($6.5 million) at Adam Williams, the New York Old Master dealer.
Over the years, I’ve written plenty about English silver but never about French silver. On the one hand, many of the transcendent English silversmiths like Paul de Lamerie were originally French. Like tens of thousands of Protestants, he was expelled from France during religious wars and moved to London. He was trained by Huguenot silver masters who’d also resettled but who tracked Paris styles in the 1730s into the 1750s. So English silver is an amalgam of new French and old English style. On the other hand, French silver-making was much degraded by the Revolution’s upsetment in the 1790s. As a class, it never managed to overtake English silver.
Revolution, economic collapse, war, and the guillotine couldn’t keep the crème de la crème from rising to the occasion now and then. Koopman Rare Art’s oblong inkstand from the French maker Jean-Baptiste Claude Odiot, made for Napoleon’s mother in 1812, is 237 gilded ounces of majesty. Napoleon’s bug of choice was the bee, always busy and a natural team player, so there’s plenty of bee symbolism as well as winged eagles, olive and oak branches for peace and victory, and two cast goddesses, one holding an inkwell, the other a powder pot to dry a quill pen. Between them is a plinth with a door that opens to reveal a miniature portrait of Madame Mère.
She gave the Koopman inkstand to her son Joseph, king of Spain, before his ouster and move to Bordentown in New Jersey, and another inkstand to her son Lucien, Napoleon’s hatchet man, not too long before the dumped emperor’s yearlong Elba holiday. “Don’t forget to write to your mother,” the inkstands suggest.
I suspect that Madame Mère thought every day ought to be Mother’s Day, but so might have Joséphine, Napoleon’s empress from 1804, when he notoriously crowned himself in Notre-Dame Cathedral and then crowned her, until he dumped her in 1810. Joséphine had two children from her first marriage to a French general who was guillotined in 1794. Many of Europe’s kings and queens today descend from her through them, as did Napoleon III, France’s last emperor.
Galerie Camille Leprince, a Paris dealer specializing in fine European ceramics, is offering a six-piece Sèvres porcelain tea set from 1813 decorated with Raphael’s “Madonna and Child” scenes. Putting religion aside, Raphael set the standard for tender, loving motherhood. Not even the Gerber Baby can match his bambini. Sèvres set the standard for French porcelain. It’s peak Empire style, with lots of applied gold and enough rosettes, scarabs, griffin heads, urns, and winged disks to choke a donkey. How quickly Jacobin restraint went out the window and into the Seine.
Joséphine eventually gave the tea set to the Duchess of Montebello, a lady-in-waiting to Napoleon’s second wife, Empress Marie-Louise, as a gift recognizing the duchess’s service to her as a spy. It stayed in her family, was eventually dispersed, and then reunited in 2021. It could be packed, wrapped, and delivered to a special mother somewhere in time for May 11. I couldn’t pry the price from the dealer, who told me he’s in negotiations with a museum that wants to buy it.
The 100th anniversary of the Paris Art Deco Exposition is this year. It’s the pivotal moment that gave Art Deco its name, so the Chrysler building, Fred and Ginger films, and Electrolux vacuum cleaners are among the many icons bowing to the exposition for the style’s aesthetic and intellectual cohesion. The great London jeweler Wartski put me in a state of awe with its Chinese mask, first designed by Louis Fertey for the Paris jewelry firm Fouquet and shown at the Paris fair and, thus, a player in Art Deco’s history. I’d add “doubly so,” since the mask we see today is a version from 1931 reimagined by Jean Fouquet in a sleek, futurist, 1930s style.
The Fouquet firm was an Art Nouveau pioneer. The piece shown in 1925 was a rock-crystal mask with a pointed, diamond-studded cap. Rusticated emeralds dangled from the mask’s ears and chin. It’s Art Deco in its angularity. It’s exotic and sensual, primitive and sleekly modern. The 1925 mask was exhibited, never sold, and returned to the Fouquet firm. In 1931, Jean Fouquet, young and part of a new Fouquet generation, substituted a rounded ebony cap for the pointed, diamond-studded, 1925 version. The cap is framed in a white-gold, diamond-studded band. The emeralds are gone, replaced by single cascades of tiny diamonds from the mask’s ears and chin. It’s more elemental but also more monochromatic. Since the mid-’20s, Art Deco design focused on a limited number of colors, in this case black and white. So the object, in its lifetime, expresses two incarnations of Art Deco. I love that history. Wartski’s insurance company won’t let it quote prices. That’s smart. TEFAF experienced a jewelry robbery in 2022.
Wartski’s 160th anniversary is this year. It has served kings, queens, and aristocrats and has a long history with jewelry made by Fabergé. Jewelry is, of course, art, and Wartski’s played a big part in building museum collections. The Chinese mask belongs in a museum but, in a pinch, can be worn as a necklace.
Part of Art Deco’s philosophy is unified design in a space, whether it’s a single room or the public spaces of a skyscraper like Rockefeller Center. Galerie Marcilhac, a Paris firm, is celebrating the 1925 Art Deco Exposition with elements from Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann’s “Hôtel du Collectionneur” pavilion, an ideal Art Deco interior blending architecture and furniture. Marcilhac’s booth displays a carpet, armchairs, doors, a coffee table, a piano, and a bed, and suggests a modern music room, though the bed’s an elegant outlier unless you’re one to socialize, listen to music, and sleep in one Art Deco space. It’s Paris between the wars, so who knows?
The draw for me was a Pleyel grand piano in Macassar ebony veneer and walnut, and a case ornamented with gilded wood and bronze. Soon after the 1925 Art Deco Exposition, Ruhlmann designed interiors for François Ducharne, a Paris silk entrepreneur. The Pleyel piano was one of the centerpieces. I couldn’t get the price because it sold minutes after the preview opened.
TEFAF runs for a week. Maastricht is a small Dutch university and business city dating from Roman times. Near Liege in Belgium and Aachen in Germany and with the Meuse River running through it, Maastricht seems prosperous, but TEFAF is here mostly for the city’s centrality. French, English, German — all types of European collectors — can get here easily. Once dominated by Old Masters dealers, TEFAF now devotes only around half its booths to historic art. It’s the market. Younger collectors want newer art. Lots of the Old Masters specialists are retiring.
I’ll write a piece next week on some very niche treasures I’ve seen here, most small but all pulse-quickening.
"https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/art-deco-knockouts-velazquez-hals-and-more-at-the-worlds-grandest-art-fair/" - Brian T. Allen