I
receive a lot of calls to clean and repair
damaged pictures. One brought to me was
an exceptional beauty with quite interesting
provenance, having once belonged to Count
Alexander Buxhoeveden of Russia. It is a
landscape nocturne lit by a full moon, with
the silhouette of a cathedral in the distance. It
measures about 3 x 4’. No signature could be
found. The only school that came to mind was
German Romanticism, of which a central figure was Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840),
who never signed his paintings. Excitement began to grow when a senior European paintings
specialist for a major auction house declared
his opinion that it is a rare Friedrich, seeing
million dollar signs, and was champing at the
bit to get hold of it. We needed a high-resolution digital image and the owner knew of a
large flatbed scanner that could accommodate
the piece. When set up under the lights the
owner noticed something peculiar: a signature
in the bottom left corner. It had been examined under magnification in various types of
light without detection, but here it was, visible
in the unusual lighting angle: “Sörensen 1854.”
The artist is Jacobus Sörensen (1812-1857). The
piece sold at auction for a profit but, beautiful
as the painting is, this artist could come nowhere near a million dollar price. This is understandable. Artists’ reputations are largely
measured by unique achievements. Great artists are seen as those who break new ground,
the pioneers, not the followers. Sörensen was
an obscure Dutch landscape painter. Friedrich
is looked upon as one of the most important
German artists of his age, on the vanguard of
the Romantic Movement, and exercising wide
influence on later artists.
Moonlit Landscape by Jacobus Sörensen
Photo: Melville Holmes
July |August 2016 39