This provides the last opportunity to raise money to keep the paintings in the country.
The pair of paintings - Calme: A Landscape at Sunset with Fishermen returning their Catch and TempLte: A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas - depict contrasting states of nature and are considered to be of outstanding aesthetic importance.
They typify the work of Vernet, who was an important influence on British landscape and marine painters, including Turner, and whose work was among the most sought after of his contemporaries in Britain. These paintings are therefore of outstanding significance for the study of Vernet and 18th-century European painting.
Estelle Morris's ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art that the export decision be deferred. The deferral will enable purchase offers to be made at the following agreed fair market price:
A pair of paintings by Claude-Joseph Vernet; Calme: A Landscape at Sunset with Fishermen returning their Catch and TempLte: A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas, deferred at the recommended price of just over £2,402,000 (including VAT) until after 16 December 2003. The deferral period could be extended until after 16 April 2004 if there is a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making an offer to purchase.
Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase the paintings should contact the owner's agent through:
The Secretary
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street
London SW1Y 5DH
NOTES TO EDITORS
1. Pictures of these items can be downloaded free of charge via the DCMS site on PA Picselect, the Press Association's publicity image service. Please go to the DCMS folder situated within the arts section of Picselect either at
www.papicselect.com/ or through the PA bulletin board.
2. A pair of paintings by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), Calme: A Landscape at Sunset with Fishermen returning their Catch and TempLte: A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas
This pair of paintings was commissioned by Stanislas Poniatowski, King of Poland, in June or July 1772. However, the King was slow to pay and in March 1773 Vernet wrote to the banker Henry Hoare, agreeing to reserve both paintings for Hoare's client, Lord Clive of India. The pictures reached London in May 1773 in the frames which had been made for them in Paris. The paintings remained with the descendants of Clive until their sale, still in these frames, at Sotheby's, London on 10 July 2003 (Lot 65).
The paintings portray contrasting states of nature. Calme shows a port bathed in glowing evening sunshine. The overall mood is one of serenity, yet the painting is full of details of human activity, for which Vernet was particularly known. On the right of the picture a man directs a donkey carrying a woman along the coastal path, his little dog running on ahead. In the centre two pilot boats rowed by a dozen oarsmen guide the ship, its pennants caught in a gentle breeze, to the mouth of the river. In the foreground women prepare the day's catch that fishermen are unloading in baskets. Throughout the picture the effects of light are rendered with breathtaking delicacy.
TempLte is one of the sensational scenes of storm and shipwreck with which Vernet's name is most readily associated. Rain lashes the coast where a lighthouse flashes out warnings above treacherous rocks. Ships are tossed on the sea, and some survivors scramble onto the rocks to escape the waves, dragging themselves and their possessions onto the sand; others tend to a woman who is half-dead. The effects of light within the painting are exceptional: to the right lightning appears to strike a distant ship on the horizon, whereas in the background in the centre of the picture the sun is breaking through the clouds, warming the walls of a village along the coast. Vernet himself referred in his letter to Hoare to the "effet piquant" made by the contrast between the darkness of the sea and the light in the foreground.
Taken together this pair of paintings illustrate the contrast between the aesthetic categories of the Sublime and the Beautiful as defined in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, translated into French in 1765. Their popularity was increased through the publication of the engravings of Daniel Lerpiniere in 1782.
Among those of his contemporaries, Vernet's paintings were the most sought-after by British collectors, comparable only with Canaletto, and they graced the walls of many country houses. There are thirty-one paintings by Vernet in UK public collections, but no pairs showing contrasting states of nature. The only comparable set is the group of The Four Times of Day at the National Trust's Uppark, which, like most of the examples of Vernet's paintings in the UK, date from his years in Rome (1734-53).
Vernet was an important influence on British landscape and marine painters, including J M Turner, and the popularity of his works with British collectors stimulated the rise of a national school of landscape in the 1770s. Artists who saw his work included, his student, Alexander Cozens, Thomas Jones, George Morland, Paul Sandby and Richard Wilson.
Both paintings are in excellent condition.
