A painting by the British artist JMW Turner, depicting the city, returned to Rome, after nearly 200 years, and for a short time, and was described as his “great love letter” to it, before it was put up at auction next December, when it is expected to achieve a record price.
“Rome from the Aventino Hill,” one of Turner’s rare works that is still in private collections, will be displayed in the Rondini Palace in central Rome for days. It will then be displayed in Hong Kong and New York, before being transported to London, where it is expected to fetch £50 million when it is auctioned by Sotheby's on December 9.
The Guardian reported that the last time the painting was sold was in 2014, when an art collector paid 30.3 million pounds sterling for it, making it the most expensive Turner painting sold until then.
The painting, which has a golden tinge, depicts the Tiber River in Rome as seen from the Aventino Hill, and is still on its original canvas and in its original frame. It has never undergone a lining or restoration process, and traces of Turner's palette knife and brush are still visible on its surface, as well as his fingerprints from when he picked it up to transport it into his studio.
The chief specialist at Sotheby's in London, Julian Gascoigne, told reporters in Rome: “Because it is not lined, the surface of the painting is exceptionally preserved.” All of the thin, translucent layers of paint that have accumulated over successive painting sessions can be seen, giving the painting this extraordinary sense of light, depth and glow. Brush hairs and palette knife scratches can also be seen on the canvas in a way that is hardly seen in any other work by the artist.”
The painting has passed through only two owners since it was commissioned by Hugh Andrew Johnston Munro of Novar, a British amateur artist who accompanied Turner on his sketching tours, in the late 1820s.
Turner began work on the painting in Rome and completed it in London, where it was exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1836, amid mixed reviews.
It remained in the Monroe collection until 1878, when it was purchased by Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery and a prominent British Prime Minister of the 19th century, as a wedding gift for his bride, Hannah de Rothschild.
Turner visited Rome for the first time in 1819, then returned to it in the late 1820s, when he was part of an active artistic community that included painters, sculptors, writers, and poets who made the “Spanish Steps” area their home.
Turner, who died in 1851, produced several paintings of the city. Gascoigne said: “But this painting is the only work by the artist that depicts Rome as it appeared in his time.” All his other paintings of Rome were evocations of a bygone era. This is the only painting that depicts the city in a living way. “It is, by all accounts, his greatest love letter to the city that has inspired him throughout his life.”
For his part, the president of Sotheby's Europe, Mario Tavella, expressed his hope that the painting would be transferred to a public museum "where everyone can enjoy it."
In a quiet corner of northern Serbia, where nature intersects with the details of daily life, a coffee session is no longer just an opportunity to relax or exchange conversations. In an unfamiliar café inside a rural resort, the visitor may find himself sharing the place with 6 alpacas, moving quietly among the guests, approaching them at times and moving away at other times, as if they were an authentic part of the rituals of the place.
The café has only been open for a week, but it has become a rare sight in Europe. Zoran Ostojin, owner of the Tiganjitsa Ethno Village resort near Stačevo, north of Belgrade, said that the idea of establishing the café came to him after he saw a similar experience in Slovakia.
“My wife and I were at an alpaca café in Slovakia, and we were captivated by the scene,” Ostoin told the Associated Press. “We wanted to give people in our country the opportunity to get to know it, and to feel this animal and its energy.”
Alpacas are characterized by a calm, friendly nature and easy to handle. Although they are related to camels and llamas, they are smaller in size and are popular because of their soft fur and the gentle humming sounds they make to communicate with each other.
In Tiganjitsa, alpacas mingle with visitors, many of whom come on organized trips to see the animals and spend some time with them.
On a board in the place, a set of rules were written that visitors must adhere to. They are asked not to approach the alpacas from behind, or to feed them foods they bring with them. Instead, guests receive small buckets containing carrots, lettuce and apples to give to the animals.
The visit must be arranged in advance, costs about 10 euros ($11.35), and includes a drink and a small bucket of alpaca food.
The six animals have different personalities, according to Simona Frangi, who takes care of them. She says that a black alpaca called “Ljubisa” has a sullen nature, while “Snezana” leads the herd even though she is the smallest member.
“She is very sensitive to people’s intentions,” Frangi explains. She feels that if someone wants to harm her, she stays away from him. But if someone wants to offer her something, she approaches him.”
Ostoijn runs a small zoo inside his resort, which also includes a restaurant and a garden on the family property. He says that the story of the place began when he and his brother, since they were boys, would bring injured animals home to take care of them.
The first alpaca to arrive at the site was a gift from the Belgrade Zoo 8 years ago. Oostoin says that he very much loved the energy and feelings that this animal emits, adding that “it has an ability almost like healing.”
In April 1912, Helene Kröller-Müller was on an extensive art acquisition tour; She was not interested in the latest shoe or fashion trends, but rather was seeking to find Vincent Van Gogh's painting depicting “Madame Augustin Rolland.”
She succeeded in finding “La Berceuse” - as the painting is commonly known - in a Paris gallery and bought it immediately. The next day, she continued to move between exhibitions in search of more works by Van Gogh, and returned with an amazing tally: 15 paintings in one trip.
Kröller-Müller, a wealthy heiress of German descent, made it her life's goal to establish a great public collection of modern art, and became one of the first major art collectors to recognize Van Gogh's genius. Now, more than a century after that Paris tour, her entire collection of Van Gogh paintings is on display in the museum she built in the middle of a Dutch forest for the first time since 1984. It is the second largest trove of Van Gogh's work in the world, after the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and was assembled by a woman who took great risks to buy his works at a time when few dared to do so.
The exhibition at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands - titled “Van Gogh: All Our Paintings” and running until January 3 - presents the entire collection according to the vision set by Kröller-Müller; The collection reflects the artist’s development, the diversity of his works, and his spiritual aspirations. “It is a rare moment to have all the paintings here in the museum,” says Benno Temple, the museum’s director. “This has not happened for a very long time.”
The exhibition was organized around three main themes - faith, hope and love - to reflect the spiritual dimension that Kröller-Müller saw in Van Gogh's works.
The collection includes many of his famous works distributed into these broad categories, such as the paintings “Café Balcony at Night,” “Portrait of Joseph Rolland,” and “The Sower.”
The daughter of a German industrialist, Kröller-Müller showed an early interest in art, but was forced to end her formal education at the age of sixteen. At the age of eighteen, she married one of her father's employees, who later took over the management of the family business. Her husband, Anton Müller, encouraged her to pursue her intellectual interests, including her passion for art, which was considered a socially acceptable pastime for wealthy women of the era.
“At that time, a married woman had to put all her money and possessions at her husband’s disposal,” says Rensky Cohen Tervart, the exhibition’s curator. “So he was more or less open-minded in allowing her to pursue her dream in that way.”
However, Kröller-Müller did not collect artworks purely as a hobby, but rather she dealt with art with a kind of religious enthusiasm. She bought her first Van Gogh painting in 1908 for 110 guilders - roughly the price of a luxury dress - according to her biographer, Eva Rovers.
Four months later, she bought his painting Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed for 4,000 guilders. Prices have risen greatly as a result of their heavy purchases.
Tervart points out that Kröller-Müller's philosophy of collecting art was largely shaped by the influence of art historian Henk Bremer, from whom she received lessons in art appreciation.
She adds that Bremer believed that the essential element of good art lies in its ability to arouse the viewer's feelings or give him a spiritual experience.
Kröller-Müller sought to find art that touched her soul, and she found what she was looking for in the works of Van Gogh. Van Gogh was not highly regarded in the early 20th century, Rovers says; She explains: “If the general public knew him at all, they would have considered him crazy and incapable of drawing.” But because he worked as a religious preacher before becoming an artist, Kröller-Müller viewed him as a man who found a connection to faith through his art.
“I understood his desire to transcend suffering, and his goal of using art to rise above that suffering,” Rovers adds. While most art collectors in the Netherlands were buying works by the Old Masters and 19th-century Dutch paintings, Kröller-Müller focused her attention on Cubism, Pointillism, and the work of De Stijl artists, including Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso.
Rovers points out that Van Gogh's works dominated the collection for a simple reason: “He was standing at the cradle of the beginnings of avant-garde art.” She adds that Kröller-Müller has formed a group “capable of showing the great diversity of his works, including landscapes, portraits, and cityscapes.”
In the late 1930s, as Europe approached World War II, Kröller-Müller's health and her family's fortune declined. She decided to present her art collection - whose value was estimated at about 4 million guilders at the time - in addition to the family property in the Velofe Forest, to the Dutch state, on the condition that the state agrees to build a museum to display these works. She envisioned the museum - with a 62-acre sculpture garden - as a haven for spiritual and philosophical contemplation. The result was a unique artistic treasure trove in a remote Dutch forest (now a national park) built specifically to house her collection.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam includes more than 200 paintings, but its collection has a different history. It was established to display the collections of the Van Gogh family, which owned the artist’s unsold works during his lifetime, while the “Kröller-Müller” collection reflects the private artistic vision of an art collector. “The Van Gogh Museum only houses what’s left,” Temple said. “This is a select group.”
