Past masters

KENNETH Reed is a retired Sydney solicitor who has supported the arts in Australia and now has promised to bequeath his collection of paintings and ceramics to AGNSW.

Kenneth Reed, who has bequeathed 70 items to the Art Gallery of NSW. Picture: Alan Pryke

KENNETH Reed is a retired Sydney solicitor who generously has supported the arts in Australia - particularly the Australian Ballet - and now has promised to bequeath his collection of paintings and ceramics to the Art Gallery of NSW.

 They have been lent to the gallery for the summer so visitors have an opportunity to enjoy the works that will one day enrich the permanent collection.

The pictures are mostly from the 17th and to a lesser extent 18th centuries. They are smaller than some of the large religious paintings of the 16th century and more carefully painted; exquisite finish and consistently high quality, in fact, are among the most striking features of Reed's collection.

These aspects of the work are not only a credit to Reed's taste but reflect changes in the audience and market for art in the 17th century, which are apparent in the physical properties of his paintings and their subject matter, just as they are articulated in the writings of contemporary critics. These are cabinet pictures made for a new age of private collectors and lovers of art.

Contrary to what is often assumed today, artists were held in high esteem during the Renaissance and generally well rewarded; Michelangelo and Titian, superstars of the 16th century, were described as divine in their own lifetimes. Even earlier, collectors had begun to seek out the work of great masters for their own sake. Nonetheless, the 17th century was the period in which collecting spread to a wider aristocratic and middle-class public. Names arose for this new class: the art lover or kunstliefheber in Dutch; the virtuoso or dilettante in Italian -- terms also borrowed by the English -- and simply the lover, the amateur, in French.

This evolution can be followed in the art writing of the time. Sixteenth-century authors such as Gian Paolo Lomazzo and Federico Zuccaro are weighed down by displays of textual erudition or complicated demonstrations of philosophical prowess, intended to prove that art is what today would be called a conceptual practice. In contrast, authors of the 17th century such as Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Giovanni Battista Passeri, or in France Andre Felibien and Roger de Piles, write in a clear and accessible prose, addressing an educated generalist readership.

There are collections of artists' biographies as well as books that seek to explain the arts of painting and printmaking, and to equip the viewer to judge between good and bad examples. A particularly interesting feature of these works, especially in France, is a tendency to include glossaries, which not only explain the technical language of art theory but even give examples of how these expressions can be used in conversation. Such books are, among other things, introductions to art appreciation.

Not all the pictures in Reed's collection are from this time, and one of the earliest and most beautiful is Corneille de Lyon's portrait of a man who had little time for art appreciation, John Calvin, leader of the reformed church in Geneva. It is an exquisite example of the fine and minutely realistic but psychologically hypersensitive portrait style of the 16th century in the north, also practised by Holbein and Clouet. The reformer's red beard is set off against a bright green, presumably malachite background.

There are also two fine small paintings from Venice, an Entombment by Giuseppe Porta, known as Salviati after his master, and an obscure mythological subject by Andrea Schiavone. It is a cassone panel, that is, one set into a wedding chest, and as Richard Beresford suggests in the accompanying label, may have some significance for the young couple. At any rate it is a bucolic scene, with a young shepherd on the left, Pan, the god of flocks, presiding in the centre, and a young woman who appears to be fleeing on the right but is reproved by a matron.

Among the 17th-century pictures, the Dutch are particularly well represented. There was little demand for large-scale and ambitious religious subjects in Protestant Holland, as Rembrandt discovered, and an enormous quantity of pictures were produced for domestic settings; even shopkeepers and artisans seemed to have owned paintings, judging by contemporary representations of such interiors.

There are some fine examples of Dutch landscape, which will complement those already in the gallery's collection. Two of these are Jan van Goyen's Landscape with a Monastery (1642) and Salomon van Ruysdael's River Scene with a Fort (1659); both artists, but especially Ruysdael, reflect the pride the Dutch took in their own land with its characteristic flatness, low horizon and wide cloudy skies, while the fort also recalls their recent struggle for independence from the Spanish.

In this age of prosperity -- Simon Schama's book on the period is titled The Embarrassment of Riches -- the Dutch never tired of celebrating plenty in painting. Abraham van Beyeren's Still Life (1656) presents a collection of luscious fruit of late summer or early autumn -- peaches, grapes, melons and citrus, presumably imported from warmer climates and thus luxuries -- spilling out of a Chinese blue and white bowl typical of the wares brought to Europe by the Dutch East Indies Company at this time.

There are flowers, too, sumptuous displays in which snails or caterpillars may add a touch of the memento mori, reminding viewers of Christ's injunction not to set store by wealth that moth may devour or rust corrupt -- but as so often, one suspects that the didactic point has become little more than a conceit to add a touch of melancholy reflective piquancy to the more obvious sensual appeal of the flowers themselves.

Among Dutch figure compositions there is a Catholic-inspired image of the risen Christ, holding the banner of victory over death in one hand and blessing the viewer with the other, while he tramples on a serpent -- an image more often associated with the Virgin Mary -- and a skull presumably alludes to Adam, who brought sin and death into the world.

Of particular interest to the gallery is Abraham Bloemaert's Cimon and Iphigenia (late 1620s), not a classical myth but a subject drawn from Boccaccio that is also the inspiration for an important painting by Lord Leighton in the collection. Cimon, a rich but boorish youth, comes upon the sleeping Iphigenia and is transformed into a refined and valiant young man by the vision of her beauty.

Important Italian figure compositions include a favourite baroque allegory by Giacinto Gimignani, Time Revealing Truth (1669): the winged figure of Father Time, with his scythe, pulls aside a veil to uncover the pink and naked Truth, leaning on an open book, while a putto drives off a serpent-haired Envy; on the horizon we see the chariot of the sun appearing, driven by Apollo. Such a picture may have hung in the house of a man whose reputation had been restored after false accusations or of one who was hoping for such an outcome.

Like Gimignani, Andrea Camassei worked at different times for Andrea Sacchi, leader of the classicising party in Rome, and Pietro da Cortona, who became the principal exponent of the baroque style; the two artists, also influenced by their great contemporary Poussin, represent something of a juste milieu of the 17th century between the two stylistic tendencies.

The Camassei picture is of special interest, because it is either a modello, a compositional study made for the patron before undertaking a full-scale work of significant dimensions, or else a ricordo, a scaled-down version made afterwards for the patron's private collection, when the work itself was for a public place. In this case, the commission was for a very public place indeed: the new basilica of St Peters in Rome.

Pope Urban VIII began to commission altarpieces for the many new altars of the vast church in the later 1620s; the subjects were mostly martyrs of the early church, witnesses (the literal meaning of martyr in Greek) to the authority of the papacy in the face of the challenge of the Reformation. Among the artists invited to produce work for this extremely prestigious site were Nicolas Poussin and his compatriot Valentin de Boulogne, then regarded as two of the most promising young painters in Rome. Poussin painted The Martyrdom of St Erasmus and Valentin The Martyrdom of Sts Processus and Martinian.

Even those who are reasonably familiar with the saints may be unacquainted with these two rather obscure early figures, but Camassei's painting, executed a few years later, tells the story. They were St Peter's Roman guards when he was locked up in the Mamertine Prison, which can still be visited today near the Forum. In Camassei's painting we see St Peter, traditionally marked by his blue and gold robes, baptising the two soldiers, while St Paul, in his equally regular red and green, stands on the left; above, Christ appears surrounded by angels.

The altarpieces, painted in oil on canvas, suffered from environmental problems in St Peters and all but one were replaced with mosaic copies in the 18th century (the originals were moved to the Vatican Museum). Camassei's picture was painted in fresco directly on the wall but was destroyed in the 18th century when Canova's tomb of Clement XIII was put in its place, so this painting is significant both aesthetically and historically.

Canova and the Venetian Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico take us into the 18th century and to Venice, the subject of a charming painting by Antonio Joli that looks out from the Dogana, on the side from the Grand Canal, towards the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Such pictures were addressed to a different audience and a different market, typically to the wealthy visitors from England, France and the north of Europe who travelled to Italy on the Grand Tour.

Some of these later pictures of Italy are in fact done by northern artists, who had already been coming to Rome for at least a century to pursue their studies from the great examples of ancient and modern art. Hubert Robert's landscape with temple (c. 1765) is loosely inspired by the often-painted Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli near Rome, which had also been converted to a Christian church at the time, although the landscape setting is different.

The figure of the priest standing in the centre of the composition fortuitously recalls a memorable passage in Gibbon's autobiography: it was as he sat among the ruins of the Forum, he writes, listening to the barefoot friars chanting their vespers on the site of the temple of Jupiter, that he resolved to write the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.