At Sotheby's Old Masters and 19th Century Paintings auction on 29 January, works from the collection of the Brazilian investor of Syrian-Swiss descent, Jacqui Eli Safra, will be highlighted, including a revealing scene by the Dutch baroque painter Jan Lievens, which features fellow artist Rembrandt as the model.
Jan Lievens was born in Leiden, South Holland in 1607 and completed his training as a painter with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. Lastman also taught Rembrandt van Rijn, who was also from Leiden and a year older than Lievens. The two talented students became friends and returned to their hometown after completing their training. While it is not entirely certain whether they ran a joint workshop, it is known that they served as models for each other. In fact, the the young man in Lievens' Woman Embraced by a Man, which dates to around 1626/27, is the 20-year-old Rembrandt.
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Genre scenes with a certain degree of sexual freedom were popular in the Netherlands. Later owners of the painting, however, seem to have been more conservative, because when this work was rediscovered in 1998, the bare breasts were covered with a painted scarf. A restoration removed this censorship.
Jan Lievens had used the hugging couple in a slightly modified form – and without Rembrandt as a model – a few years earlier in his 1622 painting Allegory of the Five Senses, which was painted when the artist was just 15 years old. The work is now in a private collection.
Over the years, Jan Lievens and Rembrandt settled independently in Amsterdam, where they ran their own studios as members of the Guild of Saint Luke. While both were successful as artists – Lievens worked temporarily in England, Berlin and The Hague – they were bankrupt by the end of their respective lives. Lievens left such immense debts that his children refused to inherit when the painter died in 1674.
With such an illustrious model and the boom that Old Master's paintings have experienced in recent years, it is not surprising that Woman Embraced by a Man, estimated at US$4-6 million (£3-4.5 mil), could bring a new auction record for Jan Lievens. According to Barnebys price bank the current record for a Lievens' work is a vanitas painting showing an old man holding a skull in his hand that sold in 2007 for £2.1 million at Christie's.
