Deep insight and a highly personal approach to beauty and harmony of design are the hallmarks of the sumptuous Brock collection of aristocratic furniture, decorative objects, drawings and paintings showcased in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) from January 22 through May 17. “Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection,” on view in the Museum’s Torf Gallery, features more than 160 works assembled in the last 30 years by New York collector Dr Horace Wood (“Woody”) Brock, who has sought to return objects of beauty and elegance to positions of prominence in the art world.
Heavily concentrated in the French and English Eighteenth Century, the furniture and decorative arts range from Seventeenth Century Flemish to the Regency period (George IV) of early Nineteenth Century England. Art cabinets, console tables, vases in rare materials splendidly mounted in gilt bronze, sturdy blue and white delft ware, fine porcelain from Chelsea, Meissen and Sèvres, French clocks and andirons in imaginative forms all testify to the beauty and fantasy of design characteristic of the baroque, rococo and neoclassical eras.
The some 70 choice drawings reveal Brock’s passion for drawing materials that have a subtle but rich coloristic impact †examples include drawings with glowing ink washes from gold to brown, red chalk and blue paper. The drawings are primarily Italian and French in origin and range in date from the mid-Sixteenth to the early Nineteenth Centuries. These include outstanding works by such masters as Jean Honoré Fragonard, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Peter Paul Rubens and Guercino, as well as many equally expressive drawings by less-celebrated artists.
The works assembled in the exhibition are an eclectic mix of furniture, decorative objects, drawings and paintings that showcase breathtaking craftsmanship, abundant fantasy and perfect harmony of proportion, whether it be a rare long-case clock made by André-Charles Boulle for Louis XIV, a fantastic English chinoiserie tea table from the age of George II or a François Boucher oil sketch †a preliminary study for a tapestry on mythological themes.
The drawings and paintings are extremely diverse in subject matter, including: Biblical and mythological narratives, literary illustrations, architectural fantasies and ruins, landscapes, studies of the human figure and design drawings for the decorative arts. Many of the narrative drawings involve the sculpturally rendered human figure in action, but the key figure drawing in the collection is the pen anatomical study by the young Rubens. The outstanding landscape in the collection is a painting, “Mountain Landscape with Travelers,” 1623, a large-scale painting, part of a set of six created by Joos de Momper in the 1620s for the Spanish ambassador to the Netherlands.
The greatest Biblical illustration on paper is Domenico Tiepolo’s “Resurrection of Christ,” one of the finest pen and wash drawings from the series of more than 300 large format finished New Testament drawings Tiepolo made after 1785. Among the liveliest literary illustrations are those on blue paper by J.B. Oudry for the fables of La Fontaine, such as The Rat and the Elephant , 1732.
The exhibition involves a complex dialogue between harmonious stylistic groupings of furniture and objects (Louis XIV, English neo-Palladian, German rococo, Empire, etc), arranged in a roughly chronological sequence, alternating with thematic clusters of drawings that provide a counterpoint to, as well as a cultural backdrop for, the objects.
In the exhibition, beauty is celebrated in a rich variety of objects from England, France, Germany, Holland and Italy, shown in period groupings. Several spectacular pieces from the Seventeenth Century include the cabinet-on-stand (Flemish, about 1650), ornately detailed and made of pine veneered with tortoiseshell ebony, palissander and bone.
Also of note is Boulle’s longcase clock (about 1685), a rare French clock commissioned for Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, crafted from oak, enamel and glass, with tortoiseshell, brass and pewter marquetry, and accented by gilt-bronze mounts. The classically inspired vase with lion handles (delft, about 1680‸5), from the Het Moriaenshooft factory, is one of the collection’s important examples of early delft wares.
The unifying theme in “Splendor and Elegance” is the collector’s personal commitment to the aesthetics of beauty and design. By integrating furnishings and pictures from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century, the exhibition recreates the splendor and elegance of times past for new audiences to enjoy.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is at 465 Huntington Avenue. For information, 617-267-9300 or www.mfa.org .
