DENNER Balthasar - Lot 45

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Lot n° 45
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DENNER Balthasar - Lot 45
DENNER Balthasar Hamburg 1685 - Rostock 1749 Portrait of the painter's daughter with cello. Original oil on canvas H.: 75 cm - W.: 62 cm Wooden frame and gilded stucco with foliage and flowers. Balthasar Denner was born in Hamburg, then a Danish city. A miniaturist at first, he was at the Berlin Academy in 1707 before being called to the Copenhagen court in 1712. This was the beginning of a series of stays at European courts, in London, Dresden, Berlin, Kiel and Amsterdam in particular. After four years in Amsterdam, from 1736 to 1740, he settled in Rostock where he died in 1749. The most famous part of his work, heads of elderly men and women, fascinate by their realism and accuracy. Balthasar Denner loved music and it is said that he had his children play while his models posed for him. Amongst these, we can mention Georg Friedrich Haendel, portrayed in 1726 (London, National Portrait Gallery) and in 1733 (Berlin, Deutsch Historisches) and John Walsh, editor of the famous composer's scores. We also owe him a Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach with his three sons (1733, private collection), painted while they were benefiting from the same patrons. He depicts his own family playing music in a painting probably painted in London in 1728 before his departure for Germany and preserved in the Copenhagen Museum (canvas, 126 x 103 cm). The harpsichord on which the score of our cellist is placed is probably Catharina, his daughter born in 1715 after his marriage to Esther Winter in Hamburg in 1712. She is clearly recognizable in the portrait of the Denner family in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, painted around 1740 by Jacob Denner (1722 - 1765), Balthasar's son. Here Catharina is in an appropriate pose. She is holding a cello and a bow that can be used for both the viola and the cello. If the viola hold, from below, was no longer used in the 18th century for cello solos, it could still be used to play basses in accompaniment. The spike of the instrument only really appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, the instrument having previously been placed on a small stick or a stool. Professor Helmut Börsch - Supan confirmed the authenticity of the painting after examining it in 2013.
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