For me this December's Old Master Sale is, above all, a treasure trove of surprises: it seems to be full of pictures previously overlooked, or recently rediscovered, or so transformed by recent cleaning it is as if they were painted yesterday.
All of those remarks might apply to Anthony Van Dyck's fresh and vibrant portraits of the Antwerp notary Jacob de Witte and his wife Maria Nutius. For many years these pictures were completely unknown, reemerging only at the great exhibition held in 1899 to mark the tercentenary of Van Dyck's birth - following which they returned to a relative obscurity from which they have, only now, emerged once again. Unfamiliar even to many of the most dedicated admirers of Van Dyck's work - and only exhibited once in the last 40 years - they are all the more striking now that the accumulated dirt of time has been removed to reveal their superlative condition. The painter's capturing - or conjuring - of human presence and personality comes across in every detail: in her fragile smile and slightly wary eyes, in the sheen of reflected light in her smooth forehead, framed by wisps of dark hair; in the insouciance of his raised eyebrow and assertively pursed lips, and the effortless virtuosity with which Van Dyck has laid in, stroke by stroke, each blonde hair of his straggly beard and moustache. This husband-and-wife pair must be counted among the masterpieces of the painter's second Antwerp period. They strike me as just the sort of pictures over which the great collectors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have fought one of their transatlantic battles (had they known of their existence). They certainly would not look out of place on the walls of the Wallace Collection, or the Frick....
