Aspect Art | art history, info & news

A portrait of a young girl that some believe is the only known painting of English novelist Jane Austen has failed to sell at auction.

Christie’s says no one offered the owner’s minimum price for the painting that had been expected to fetch between $US400,000 and $US800,000.

A spokeswoman for the auction house says the minimum level was kept secret.

The portrait by English society artist Ozias Humphry was put up for sale by Henry Rice, a distant relative of the writer of classics such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice who died in 1817.

Rice has said the sale of the work, which some experts have said does not depict Austen, had stirred up controversy.

In 1948, a leading Austen scholar dismissed the authenticity of the portrait, saying the style of costume the subject wears does not match the date.

But Rice and his family have said they never doubted the girl wearing a long white dress and carrying a parasol was their ancestor.

The painting is thought to date from 1788 or 1789 when Austen would have been about 14.

Rice had the painting examined by academics including Austen scholar Claudia Johnson at Princeton University, and they supported the original attribution and subject matter.

“The painting had rather fallen into the abyss,” Rice told Reuters in an interview last month.

“So I decided to take up the challenge and found that many of the arguments against the painting [being of Austen] were extremely weak.

“Effectively they were calling us liars. Then we really started a bit of a crusade.

“We were lucky in the people we met, including quite a lot of Americans, and the thing gathered strength, but there was fierce resistance and there probably still will be.”

He offered the painting to the National Portrait Gallery in London several times, but officials there turned it down because of doubts over its authenticity.

“So we decided to take it to America where it has more friends,” he said.

Christie’s auctioneers say they were sufficiently sure of recent research to go ahead with the sale.

The history of Western painting beings approximately thirty thousand years ago, with prehistoric depiction if animals, various shapes and symbols, and human beings on the walls of caves. Some of the best examples of Cro-Magnon painting are the Palaeolithic paintings found in the caves at Altamira in Northern Spain and Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France. (“Palaeolithic” made up of the Greek words paleo, meaning “old” and lithos, meaning “stone”, is a term used by scholars to describe the early Stone Age, from c. 40,000 to 8,000 B.C.) The creators of these pictures used crushed minerals mixed with water and saliva as paints; “brushes” were most likely made of chewed twigs, blunt pigments were probably more commonly applied with the hand or by spitting them from the mouth or through tubes made of bone or reed. The resulting earth-toned images tend to be rather blurry. Given the undefined space and the uneven, rough surface of the ceilings and walls of the caves, these images appear to be positioned somewhat haphazardly, without ground-lines (baselines indicating the ground on which figures stand) or background settings, and only rarely combined to suggest a narrative.

The caves at Altamira were first found by a hunter in 1868; in 1879, Maria the young daughter of the Marquis Marcellino de Sautuola, an amateur archaeologist studying portable prehistoric artefacts, noticed the paintings by accident. Many of the Marquis’ late nineteenth-century colleagues would have thought the function of the painted images that adorn the vast walls and ceilings of prehistoric caves to be purely aesthetic. Clearly, those commentators might have mused, the desire to be surrounded by beauty has been inherent in human nature since the beginning.

Bison c 12,000 B.C.

Altamira cave, Santander, Spain. Paint on limestone

The fact that animals are overwhelmingly the main subject of cave paintings may point to a more practical, less romantic interpretation. Palaeolithic peoples were hunters – animals were essential to their survival. Given that the pictures for the most part do not seem to be composed narratively, as if recording an actual episode, their purpose was more likely conjuration. Painting animals on cave walls might also have been an equally magical way to ensure their continued reproduction. In a few instances animals are depicted as if wounded, suggesting that a ritual injuring or killing of an animal rendered in paint perhaps guaranteed a successful hunt in real life. The frequent overlapping of imagery and the fact that entire cave surfaces appear to have been repainted many times suggest that the act of painting was more important that the pictures produced. This supports the interpretation that these images had a magical function, that they represented attempts to control the animal kingdom and thereby assure the survival of the human group.

The animals painted on the surface of prehistoric caves are depicted remarkably accurately; in some examples, the artists even suggest muscular bulk through deft shading. By comparison, the rarely found representations of humans are very schematic, often resembling stick figures. Added to this fact, the sheer number and the wide variety of animals portrayed – including horses, bison, mammoths, bears, ibexes, aurochs and deer – suggest the great significance of animals to Palaeolithic society. We will never know for certain what functions prehistoric cave paintings served. The various interpretations necessarily reflect more the interpreters’ theoretical frameworks than any verifiable reality: lacking a written language, the prehistoric people of the caves left no verbal records to help further our knowledge.

A 27-year-old student from London has been awarded the Nationwide Mercury art prize at a ceremony held in Covent Garden.

Mark Melvin, who is studying at Central Saint Martins in the capital, won the award for his installation piece Applause, securing a £5,000 prize.

DJ and TV presenter Lauren Laverne was on hand to announce the winner and the artwork will now grace the cover of the 2007 Nationwide Mercury Prize compilation CD, which is released in August.

Mr Melvin studied as an undergraduate at Glasgow School of Art before moving to London. He said the award will ‘make a huge difference’ to his career as an artist.

‘This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. I am completely overwhelmed to win this prestigious prize and be recognised in this way,’ he added.

Other artists picking up the £1,000 highly commended awards included Rachael Clewlow from the University of Newcastle and David Sullivan and Tamara Dubnyckyj, from the Royal College of Art.

David Rankin from Manchester Metropolitan University and Clare Dorsett from the University of Brighton also won the £1,000 award.

Sir Peter Blake, an artist on the judging panel, said: ‘The art here is from students from all over the country - it was a difficult task choosing the finalists.

‘This is a very impressive exhibition that highlights the outstanding quality of work coming out of British art schools and the ongoing relationship between music and art.’

Over 2,000 entries were received for this year’s art prize, including work from over 130 art colleges and universities.