LONDON.- The Madonna of the Cherries is one of the most celebrated paintings by Quentin Metsys, the father of the Antwerp school, to whom the National Gallery in London devoted a focused exhibition last year. The picture will be a highlight of the Old Masters Part I sale at Christie’s headquarters in London on 2 July, during Classic Week (estimate: £8,000,000 - 12,000,000). Painted in Metsys’s maturity in the 1520s, The Madonna of the Cherries is a work that had a wide-reaching and long-lasting influence, inspiring generations of artists and giving rise to numerous copies and variants. The painting is on view at Christie’s New York until 22 May, before returning to London for the pre-sale exhibition from 28 June to 2 July.

Henry Pettifer, Christie’s International Deputy Chairman, Old Master Paintings commented: “We are delighted to be offering this work by Quentin Metsys that has only recently been recognised as the prime version of his celebrated late masterpiece – The Madonna of the Cherries – which helped cement his reputation as the founder of the Antwerp School of painting.”

PROVENANCE: A MUCH-PRIZED WORK OF GENIUS

In August 1615, the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Albert VII of Austria and Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia paid a visit to the wealthy Antwerp spice merchant Cornelis van der Geest (1577–1638), one of the foremost art collectors and connoisseurs of his age. From the treasures of his cabinet, the regents offered to acquire his most prized possession: Quentin Metsys’s Madonna of the Cherries. Their visit was commemorated thirteen years later by Willem van Haecht in his painting The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest of 1628 (Antwerp, Rubenshius), in which van der Geest is surrounded by a semi-fictional bevy of Antwerp’s artistic and social elite, including Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, as well as van der Geest’s nephew Cornelis de Licht and the Antwerp collector Peter Stevens, both of whom would successively own The Madonna of the Cherries. Van der Geest’s Kunstkammer stood both as a homage to Antwerp’s role in the arts and Flemish painting, at the centre of which The Madonna of the Cherries was the zenith.

A TRANSFORMATIVE CONSERVATION TREATMENT

All trace of Metsys’s Madonna of the Cherries was lost following its sale after the death of Peter Stevens in 1668. By the time the painting resurfaced in Paris at a sale in 1920, its composition had been altered including the addition of a curtain across the window and landscape and it was no longer recognised as the painting that had once belonged to van der Geest. With the overpainting and a thick layer of discoloured varnish, the painting was offered for sale in these Rooms in 2015 as a studio variant deriving from Metsys’s original, reflecting scholarly opinion at the time. Subsequent conservation was transformative, revealing the exceptional condition of the original paint surface and enabling scholars to recognise it as the prime of Metsys’s Madonna of the Cherries.