Double-sided painting by Van Dyck will be sold at Christie’s

When the owners of this painting by Anthony Van Dyck bought it at Christie’s in 2000, they thought they were buying a painting of a horse. But there was more to it than that: shortly thereafter, while removing the lined canvas, the restorer discovered that there was another painting on the reverse, a rare landscape study.

This December, the double-sided study will return to Christie’s with an estimate of £2 million to £3 million in the first part of its Old Masters auction, which takes place on December 3 in London.

Andalusian horse was painted in Antwerp, shortly before Van Dyck left for Italy in the fall of 1621. This is a study for a painting of Emperor Charles V, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, painted around 1621 and the earliest surviving equestrian depiction. portrait of the artist. Van Dyck’s love of horses is evident in this spontaneous, vividly drawn study—according to André Félibien’s 1685 biography of the artist, when his gifted student left for Italy, Rubens gave Van Dyck one of the most beautiful horses from his stable.

When the backing was removed in the early 2000s, an x-ray study revealed that Van Dyck had originally painted a rider on a horse, which was later removed. This prompted the Van Dyck scientist Oliver Millar when he wrote about the newly discovered landscape study in Burlington Magazine in 2002, to leave open the possibility that it might in fact be an earlier version of the Uffizi portrait and not just a preliminary study.

Following its sale at Christie’s in 2000, the double-sided study, once in the collection of the artist and collector Thomas Gambier Parry (1816-88) at Highnham Court, near Gloucester, was included in the 2004 catalog raisonné of Van Dyck’s works compiled by Susan J. Barnes, Oliver Millar, Nora de Poorter and Horst Wei. They considered it to be the artist’s earliest large-scale depiction of a lone horse, and the only surviving landscape painting in oil. Although five more landscapes were recorded in Antwerp collections in the 17th century, their whereabouts are now unknown.

The loosely drawn newly discovered landscape shows a tree-lined bank sloping down to a pond from which a dog drinks. Millar, writing in Burlington Magazine in 2002, linked this to the background of his Portrait of father and son, possibly Joannes Woverius with his son (circa 1620), which is now in the Louvre.

“There is a strong demand for Flemish Baroque paintings, particularly Rubens and Van Dyck – a number of our key collectors are active in this area,” says Clementine Sinclair, head of Christie’s London Old Masters department. In 2000, the painting was sold for £773,750 (including fees). Twenty-four years later, “the landscape on the back has now taken on even more significance,” says Sinclair. “The market is like a painting of a horse rearing up, which we sold in New York in January 2012 for approximately $2.5 million. This is the most comparable work that has been on the market since this study was sold in 2000.”

The 132 x 106 cm oil on canvas was consigned by a private European collector and is not yet covered by warranty.