Nicholas Hall

We are an art gallery specializing in Old Master paintings. Discover 700 years of European art to buy and sell.

With over 40 years of experience in sourcing and selling some of the finest Old Master paintings, sculpture and drawings on the market, Nicholas Hall is among the most trusted and reputable dealers of classical European art. Privacy and discretion is paramount to our business and our appointment-only modus operandi gives you the confidence to sell, maintain and grow your collction with us.

06/04/2024

Art 101 quiz of the day: Can you identify the artists?
Hint: She lived in Britain between 1520-1920 (in some cases this is her only surviving work).

05/30/2024

How might Annibale Carracci and Giulio Romano have painted differently had they seen these spectacular mosaics at Villa Romana del Casale? From heroic depictions of Hercules defeating colossal giants, Ulysses about to trick Polyphemus, to massive hunting scenes taking place in Africa and children racing chariots drawn by birds - room after room, the floors of the villa, measuring over 3500 sq meters, are decorated with most elaborate Roman mosaics. It is a unique record of a sprawling, luxurious private home which probably belonged to a 5th-century Roman governor stationed in the arid mountains of central Sicily. Here, charming and humorous scenes from contemporary life are mixed with erudite episodes from Greek mythology, such as that of Arion and Orpheus, that tied into the function of the rooms. These mosaics miraculously survived, hidden for centuries under a landslide until they were excavated, for the most part, in the 1950s.

05/23/2024

Meet our new Dalmatian – not only did his portrait survive from the late 1600s but also that of his father or brother, painted by same hand, in the princely collections of Liechtenstein. The Antwerp-born David de Coninck was a highly successful animalier active in Paris, Munich, Vienna, Venice, and epscially in Rome where he appealed to crowned heads and dignitaries across Europe – among them Sir Thomas Isham, who was one of Britain’s first ‘Grand Tourists’. Isham bought a pair of game still life by de Coninck in 1678, which still hang, alongside works by Carlo Maratti, Salvator Rosa and Filippo Lauri, in his beautiful house in the rural heart of Northamptonshire, Lamport Hall. Embarrassingly, Lamport’s most famous attraction is probably the first garden gnome ever brought to England from Nuremberg…

05/17/2024

‘In Man with a Turban, however, it’s the glowing, celestial form of the turban that hits the highest note. Thick strokes of lead pigment conceal almost imperceptible traces of a mauve floral patterning; skeins of light blue, eau de nil and Naples yellow hide in their folds darker greys and browns. The whole is a tightly knotted compound of tonality and luminosity. The strokes of pigment seem themselves to bind the turban tight: they are painted with such confidence that it would be pointless ever to try to paint a turban again. With a final flourish, Lievens appears to spin the brush in his fingers and leave a set of perfectly judged lines in the wet paint of the old man’s beard, like sparks dropping from the pulsating mass above.‘

One can hardly capture the visceral reaction to seeing Jan Lieven’s 1629 tronie, Man with a Turban, better than such an eloquent passage by John-Paul Stonard, published in the current issue of the . We know this picture well as it was discovered in a private French collection with an old varnish a few years ago and the beautifully preserved paint surface — textured with impasto and curling lines incised with the end of the brush — emerged with a light cleaning.

The painting is now shown in public for the first time at the .ie , lent by a private collector who acquired it through us. If you plan to pass through Dubin before next Sunday the 26th, see it hanging in their special exhibition, Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer.

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🔗 in bio: John-Paul Stonard, ‘On Jan Lievens’, London Review of Books, Vol. 46, No. 10, 23 May 2024.

Image: Jan Lievens, Man with a Turban (detail), ca. 1629, Private Collection, Courtesy of Nicholas Hall

05/09/2024

‘Medieval modern’ encounters in our new exhibition, featuring European drawings on loan from the and old master paintings going back to Giotto’s circle. On view until this Saturday.

04/25/2024

Early next year, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, will have its first exhibition in 35 years devoted to European works on paper— a substantial but rarely publicized collection. It is a great honor that the museum will lend a selection of these drawings, from Carlo Maratti to Joan Miró, to be shown at our gallery in New York between 9-11 May.

Back in the days when ‘Chick’ Austin was director, the Wadsworth pioneered thematic exhibitions such as Landscape Painting (1931), a survey of over 140 paintings from Sassetta to Matisse, that put old master and contemporary art in dialogue. Groundbreaking also was their effort to engage other museums, collectors and dealers in such loan exhibitions — and evidently this continues to this day!

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Images courtesy of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford
1 - Joan Miró, Acrobatic Dancers, 1940;
2 - Leon Bakst, Costume Design for Vaslav Nijnsky as the Faun, (detail), 1912;
3 - Gustave Courbet, Self-portrait (detail), ca. 1849;
4- Carlo Maratti, Academy of Drawing (detail), ca. 1682

04/17/2024

A bird in the hand is worth two (million) – an archetypical Grueze from his very best period. Diderot didn’t lavish praise on it in the Salon of 1759, but even out of fashion as sentimentality may be today, the market knows good art!

03/25/2024

How rare is it to find an old master painting in its original frame? How can you tell the difference between a fake and a replica? Is it true that some framers hit the frames with a bicycle chain to tone down the gold? A while ago Yuan had a fun and informative visit to Paul Mitchell’s studio in London’s West End. A connoisseur of European historic frames, Paul carved out a niche in this area over the last 50 years—prompted by what he sensed as the growing oblivion of frames in modern-day art history; indeed, one does not expect to see framed pictures in old master catalogues and text books! Condensed into a 20-minute convo, Paul gets us thinking about the episteme of frames as well as practical tips on choosing between antique and replicas. Follow the link in our bio to listen and read on.

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With gratitude to Em Joseph , Mary Wang and Paul Mitchell.

03/14/2024

What gives this sensual painting of Flora a distinctive, tactile quality is the exposed slab of bardiglio—a veined, cool grey marble native to Tuscany—measuring 82 x 67cm.

Most recently lent to the ‘Painting on Stone’ exhibitions at the and , this is one of three paintings on stone by the seicento Florentine artist Vincenzo Mannozzi. One such commission on slate was from Lorenzo de’ Medici. See it on our stand 342 at Maastricht 2024 before the closing at 7pm tonight.

Detail: Vincenzo Mannozzi, Flora, ca. 1640, oil on marble

03/11/2024

Tender detail from one of four paintings by Pieter Coecke van Aelst in the collection. Coecke was an avid traveller and entrepreneur who, very unusually, ventured to the heart of the enemy Ottoman Empire in 1533. Here in Maastricht, close to his native Flanders, the artist has been actively collected until as recently as 2020.

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Detail from Holy Family, ca. 1525, oil on panel
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03/09/2024

A tale of two peaches painted 20 years apart by the virtuoso still-life painter Willem van Aelst and his star pupil, Rachel Ruysch who was at the time only 19 and quoted directly from his refined technique and strong diagonal composition.

See both pictures in person at Maastricht: van Aelst is at Nicholas Hall stand 342, and Ruysch is around the corner at stand 370.

02/27/2024

A fascinating new exhibition at focuses on ‘tronies’—pictures of the human faces. All about striking expressions, fantastic costumes, exquisite effects of light and shadow, they were least concerned with the sitter’s identity. The genre is particularly associated with Rembrandt and his friend Jan Lievens: possibly sharing a studio, the two young men famously painted friends, family and each other in exotic costumes. The curators here takes on unexpected examples from Leiden and well beyond, to include Vermeer, Rubens, and many earlier Flemish examples.

01/26/2024

Master Drawings New York preview tonight with Perino del Vaga, Taddeo Zuccaro, Peter Candid, Nicolas de Plattemontagne and 50 or so works on paper from the 1490s to 1954.

12/23/2023

Not just a Christmas card staple today, the Adoration of the Magi was the defining subject of Antwerp paintings in the first decades of the 16th century — much to the credit of Pieter Coecke van Aelst and his studio who specialized in painting the three Kings who brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to baby Jesus. A Coecke van Aelst production from the late 1520s, this soulful depiction of Balthasar the black magus attests to the visibility of real Africans in Europe at that time. An intriguing and conscious decision to move away from a whitewashed, caricatural impression championed by artists a mere generation earlier, like Coecke’s teacher Jan van Dornicke.

Our gallery is now closed for the Holiday season. We look forward to welcoming you upon our return on Monday 8 Jan 2024.

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Detail: Pieter Coecke van Alest, Triptych with the Adoration of the Magi (detail), ca. 1525-30, oil on panel

12/15/2023

Gazing into the distance as though lost in thought, this expressive life-size drawing is a prime example of Lorenzo Tiepolo’s rare chalk drawings of heads, which are considered the high point of his originality and technical prowess. Only about ten are known in existence, including three sheets in the the Morgan’s permanent collection. It would have been interesting to see them alongside drawings by his father Giambattista and elder brother Domenico in their current special exhibition, Spirit and Invention (closing Jan 28). Sourced from a French aristocratic family and never been in public auction, our Tiepolo will be shown as part of Master Drawings New York 2024 in an exhibition presented together with W. M. Brady & Co.

12/13/2023

From his early portrait of the Leiden joker Pieter von der Mersch (1616) to the Fitzwilliam portrait of an unknown man (1660s) who appears to have had a drop too many – Frans Hals found a winning formula in capturing an unabashed sense of immediacy in his portraits. His bravura display of wet slashes of paint was quite remarkably, a strategy for life. As there are no suriving drawings, one gets the impression that these portraits were painted directly on the support, a style that was much ahead of his time.

It is perhaps no surprise that his rediscovery, after two-centuries of obscurity, coincided with the emergence of the likes of Édouard Manet. Still, not everyone was a convert: the National Gallery’s former director Kenneth Clark criticized Hals for being ‘revoltingly cheerful and odiously skillful’ in the 1970s, but perhaps that is why people find him so gripping.

11/29/2023

Bought in Rome in 1968 by its current owner, the intensely poetic depiction of Saint Louis Gonzaga above our fireplace was painted by the 36-year-old Pompeo Batoni. By then he had become the preeminent painter of alterpieces and history paintings in Rome, and had not yet turned his full attention to the lucrative business of painting portraits of foreign tourists. Its first owner was, however, the English Protestant Sir Charles Turner. His father might have got a bit of a shock when he saw this was the Batoni his son came home with. Its preparatory drawing in red-chalk drawing is also in our current exhibition, The Hub of the World, on view until 6pm tomorrow.

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P.S. Tony Clark’s notebooks will head to the tomorrow. So visit before 6pm today to see the show in its entirety.

11/09/2023

The set for Un Ballo in Maschera, one of Verdi's last operas had been colonial Boston (of all places!) until the mid-20th century, while the plot is based on a real event that took place in Stockholm: the assassination of King Gustavus III of Sweden at a masquerade ball at the Royal Opera House in 1792. We enjoyed the ‘s current production which ends with an homage to Louis-Jean Desprez’s work at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm in the late 18th century. It works surprisingly well with the sparse, minimalist stage set. Known for his superb sense of fantasy, drama and architural drama, Desprez famously recorded the fanfare of Gustavus III on his formal visits to Rome in the early 1780. Apparently he saw the King every day during his time in Rome and soon after, Desprez moved to Stockholm to work at Gustavus III's court and to work at the opera house. His debut was, appropriately, for the opera Queen Christina.

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Image detail from Desprez’s drawing of Pope Pius VI at the Ceremony of the ‘Papal Chapel of the Annunciation’ on 25 March 1784, with King Gustavus III in the lower left

11/02/2023

Taking the gnocchi-loving Punchinello beyond the scenes of carnival, Domenico Tiepolo’s drawings of this commedia dell’arte character feel so relatable and perhaps even closer to us today than to his father Giambattista’s take on the subject. The series was practically unknown before its dispersal at auction in 1920 when all 104 drawings sold for £610 (around $9,300 today); in 2019 a single sheet made over $1 million. A dozen or so are on view at the ‘s new exhibition on the Tiepolo father and son, most of which are lent by the celebrated architect Peter Marino, aka ‘the leather daddy of luxury’.

10/26/2023

The former residence of Christian Ludwig David in central Copenhagen (now his namesake foundation) houses the largest private collection of Islamic art in Europe. Starting with the Danish modernists, he moved on to collecting 18th-century European decorative arts and kept looking further east. Boucher’s Le chinoise galante in the center of this ensemble is probably commissioned for the blue room of the Countess de Mailly at the Château de Choisy around 1742, while she was Louis XV’s mistress. Chairs belonging to another one of Louis XV’s mistresses just sold for over $6 million!

10/24/2023

When Juan de Zurbarán painted this still life in 1640, age 20, his father Francisco was the art world darling in Seville dominating the market for religious commissions. Juan chose instead to specialize in the painting of still lifes. Only a dozen of them survived as his career was cut short by the plague 9 years later, only to be rediscovered in 1938, after the cleaning of a still life in the Museum of Western Art in Kiev that revealed a signature with Juan as the first name. Now recognized as one of the greatest still-life painters of 17th-century Spain and among the first in Seville to specialize in this genre, the Prado and the National Gallery London have both recently added to their permanent collections works by the artist.

10/11/2023

With a staggering 450 works, ‘The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome’ exhibition at and was the last major exhibition devoted to this subject in North America. That was in 2000. Pete Bowron dedicated the catalogue to Anthony M. Clark, whose love for Rome influenced a generation of collectors and museums (as well as his own scholarship) and it is to him that we pay homage in our new exhibition. Instead of a modernist white wall look, we went instead with a classic red.
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The Hub of the World: Art in Eighteenth-Century Rome
Tuesday – Friday 10:00–18:00
Saturday 11:00–17:00
on view until 30 November 2023

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Image 1: installation view of The Splendor of 18th Century Rome exhibition in Philadelphia, 2000

10/11/2023

With a staggering 450 works, ‘The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome’ exhibition at and was the last major exhibition devoted to this subject in North America. That was in 2000. Pete Bowron dedicated the catalogue to Anthony M. Clark, whose love for Rome influenced a generation of collectors and museums (as well as his own scholarship) and it is to him that we pay homage in our new exhibition. Instead of a modernist white wall look, we went instead with a classic red.
____
The Hub of the World: Art in Eighteenth-Century Rome
Tuesday – Friday 10:00–18:00
Saturday 11:00–17:00
on view until 30 November 2023

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Image 2: installation view of The Splendor of 18th Century Rome exhibition in Philadelphia, 2000

10/05/2023

'Robert of the Ruins' was the name bestowed upon Hubert Robert by Denis Diderot (born on this day in 1713) and he owes it to Rome, where he spent nearly eleven years in the city's piazzas and palaces, exploring this passion for antiquity that became his trademark. Villa Medici was at the time the embassy for the Grand-Dukes of Tuscany and in this lighthearted view, generously lent to us by the Assadour O. Tavitian Trust, it shows that what only became the French Académy after 1801 was already a popular destination for artists.

10/03/2023

This striking statue of Hermes, originally from the 2nd century Villa Hadriana in Tivoli, was restored in the 18th century by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, the Roman sculptor and restorer to Cardinal Albani. He famously made a business out of 'upcycling' ancient materials – adapting and reconfiguring Greek and Roman antiques, quite unashamedly, with no attempt to pass them off as original. Cavaceppi's workshop, which employed some 50 people, became a destination for British visitors who wanted to start their own collections of antiquities at home. Solidifying his fame was the three-volume illustrated catalogue of sculptures he had restored or owned, the Raccolta d'antiche statue, busti, teste cognite (1768-72). No. 39, which was bought for 50 pounds by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham (1730-1782) is on view at our gallery starting this Friday.

09/28/2023

Waking up in his bedroom at Via del Corso 18, Goethe would have laid his eyes each morning on this painted marble ceiling – the only part of his apartment, now the Casa di Goethe museum, preserved from the author's stay in Rome between 1786-88. The interest in faux marbre as architectural decoration has been around for centuries, but on paper one must think of Pier Leone Ghezzi's 1726 album of 265 watercolor studies of classical polychrome marble, Studi di Molte Pietre. Each type of stone is identified with Ghezzi's distinctive handwriting, as is the case of a set from the same date in our upcoming exhibition (detail see last 4 images).

The late 18th century saw a burgeoning interest in mining, geology and minerolgy and a realization of the incredible antiquity of our planet. Goethe went on to collect over 18,000 specimen of rocks and minerals – an activity so popular in his circle that even a satire was written in 1792, The mineralogists at the End of the Eighteenth Century.

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Images 2-3 are frescoes we saw in Brescia in 2021

09/21/2023

A year ago we found Franz von Stuck's ‘Listening Fauns’ sitting in a cornfield ready to be sold off alongside tractors and farming equipment. How it ended up there is a long story but the painting's journey to the U.S. took place soon after it was painted in 1899, as it was bought by Hugo Reisinger (Img. 2) German-born banker and co-founder of the Busch-Reisinger museum at Harvard. He was a resident of 993 Fifth Avenue at 80th street, just around the corner from our gallery, when it was, until its demolition in the 30s, a splendid French-Gothic style mansion (also known as the Louis Stern Mansion; img 3). Reisinger organized the influential 1909 'German contemporary art' exhibition at the , where the picture hung next to the monumental ‘Inferno’ that is now part of the Met's permanent collection.

A celebrated German Symbolist and co-founder of the Munich Secession, Stuck is surprisingly under-represented in American museums but in the last decade a new appreciation of his pictorial inventions and recognition of his work as a teacher to artists such as Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee has brought him back into the spotlight. We are thrilled to announce that Listening Fauns has found a new home at !

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Anders Zorn, Portrait of Hugo Reisinger, 1907. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 1957.4.3

Reisinger Mansion, 993 Fifth Avenue, ca. 1910, Photograph by Wurts Bros

Listening Fauns in ‘The Exhibition of Contemporary German Art’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1909, photograph

09/18/2023

Arriving at our gallery this week is this superb oil on copper by Claude-Joseph Vernet, comissioned in 1761 by Antoine VIII (1722–1801), duc de Gramon. Landscape painting became a crucial medium in French modernism but a mere hundred years before the experiments of Monet, Seurat and Cezanné, the landscape genre was kept in the margins in France. It was in Rome, where Vernet spent almost two decades after moving there aged 20, where he developed a clientele for his gauzy coastal views and port scenes which play on the atmospheric effects of light on water, often at recognizable times of day. And so Diderot wrote ‘the marines of Vernet, which show all sort of incidents and scenes, are as much history painting to me as the Seven Sacraments of Poussin’.

09/07/2023

The god of the changing seasons, Vertumnus, may not have dispelled the infernal heat in New York but our team is back online and in full action. From Rome where we left off in July, a month-long train journey took us up to the remote Skokloster Castle in Sweden. Here Arcimboldo’s painting has been hanging since the early 19th century, having entered the country as the spoils of war after the Siege of Prague. It depicts Emperor Rudolf II, Arcimboldo's great patron and a lover of the natural sciences. The famed botanical garden of Carl Linneaus, just an hour north in Uppsala, attests to another golden age of art and science. Credited the father of modern taxonomy, Linneaus catalogued and published the rocks, minerals, fossils, shells among others in the national history collection of Count Tessin, his friend and patron who also formed a superlative collection of French art.

08/02/2023

Looking at Rome through Piranesi’s keyhole. Then a stroll through the Palazzo Barberini for a forthcoming video with our colleague Carlo Orsi, in the company of Batoni’s Senator Abondio Rezzonico and Mengs’s take on Antiquity. The fresco doesn’t fool us now but it did, at the time, take in his good friend Winckelmann!

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http://nicholashall.art/

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Videos

Watch our 90-second teaser, filmed at the Palazzo Barberini in the months leading up to our current exhibition on Settecento Rome. ‘The Hub of the World: Art in Eighteenth-Century Rome’ is open until next Thursday, 30 November. Don’t miss it! —— Our special thanks go to Gabriele Drago @movingstillsit for the on-site filming, Em Joseph @josephjosephstudio for the beautiful storytelling, Frank Dabell for his enlightening presence and dottoressa Gennari Santori for the permission to film.