GUTENBERG BIBLE

Johann Gutenberg’s Bible, the first real book to be printed (in Latin) using the technique of printing (movable type) which Gutenberg invented in the 1450s, was initially owned by the Benedictine monastery, S. Jacobus in Würzburg, Franconia. There are copies on paper and copies on velum.

There are 48 known copies of the Book of which 6 are in Great Britain. The British Museum owns two copies on velum, one was bequeathed to it in 1846 by British politician Thomas Grenville. It was bought at MacCarthy-Reagh's sale in 1817 for 6260 francs which was a fortune for the time.

Apart from the two copies of the Gutenberg Bible in the British Library there are 46 other complete copies of the Bible or substantial fragments worldwide. The country with the most copies is Germany (12), the United States has eleven and the United Kingdom six and not eight as falsely stated by Wikipedia. The Bodleian Library in Oxford has a complete copy printed on paper with a fascinating history. It was given by Erhard Neninger, mayor of Heilbronn, to the local Carmelite monks, probably in 1475. In 1633, during the Thirty Years War, they handed it over to the Swedish general Axel Oxenstierna (1583-1654), in order to buy off the army. The Bodleian Library bought it in 1793 for £100 from the French cardinal Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne.

There is a copy in Cambridge University Library. It has been digitalised, and is accessible from within Cambridge University. This copy is of special interest because, around 1469, Heinrich Eggestein, a printer in Strasbourg, used it for a new edition of the Bible which he produced.

Eton College has a copy on paper, notable for having retained a very early binding, made in the German university city of Erfurt. It is richly decorated, perhaps also in Erfurt.

At Lambeth Palace in London, the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury, there is a copy of volume 2, printed on vellum. This copy is of great interest as it was decorated in England, very beautifully and very expensively. The Gutenberg Bible was sold out already before printing was finished and it was evidently distributed widely from the earliest days. This may well be the first printed book to have reached England, but its first owner is unknown.

The John Rylands Library in Manchester has a copy on paper. Nothing is known about its early history. Its first recorded owner was George John, second Earl Spencer (1758-1834), ancestor of the late Lady Diana.

The copy now in the National Library of Scotland was acquired by the Advocates' Library, shortly before 1806 from David Steuart, Lord Provost of Edinburgh. It contains splendid South German decoration.

The first copy that attracted attention was discovered about 1760 among the books of the French statesman Cardinal Jules Mazarin. The Bible, printed at Mainz, probably required several years of work; it began in 1452 and was completed not later than 1455 and printed in an edition of about 180 copies. The text of the Bible is Latin. Colored initials and other illuminations were hand drawn after the pages were printed. The Gutenberg Bible lacks many print features that modern readers are accustomed to, such as pagination, word spacing, indentations, and paragraph breaks.

In 1978, the General Theological Seminary's Gutenberg Bible was given for sale on auction to Christie's : it sold in New York for $2.2 million. In 1987 an other Gutenberg Bible went for sale from the Carrie Estelle Donehy Foundation and found a buyer for $ 5.9 million.

CEZANNE : STUDY FOR CARD PLAYERS

Of all nineteenth-century painters, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is the oldest of the Post-Impressionists and had the greatest influence on the major movements of modern art, from Cubism to Expressionism. This canvas, one of a series of five studies depicting men engaged in a game of cards (left) , is a study for a larger work consisting of two pictures (currently one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and one at Le Louvre Museum, Paris) of two card players.

From 1882 on Cézanne lived in isolation near his hometown of Aix en Provence where the distinctive shape of the mountain Ste Victoire obsessed him.

Cézanne made his largest, most complicated watercolor still lifes at the end of his career, between 1902 and 1906. During these years, Cézanne worked in his final studio at Les Lauves, near his native Aix-en-Provence of which the above picture gives a pretty faithful idea as it is still today as it was at the time of the death of the artist.

In 1977, the Study, part of the Barlow collection, housed at the University of Sussex Library Building, went for sale and attracted several bid up to $ 450,000 by the art dealer Hans Berguen (Zurich) but did not fetched the reserve price (500,000) and the auctioneer bought it in at $ 480,000. Later the Metropolitan Museum bought it for an undisclosed sum.

STUBBS : GOLDFINGER BAY STALLION

This picture was painted by George Stubbs (1724-1806) born in Liverpool, son of a currier and one of five children. He had a minimum of formal instruction: in 1739 he was briefly a pupil of the minor painter Hamlet Winstanley. This was apparently enough to launch Stubbs off as a provincial portrait painter.

His interest in anatomy and its studies continued all his life and proved to be important not only to his art but also a new contribution to science. In 1766 his Anatomy of the Horse was published. Beginning in the 1760s was Stubbs’s portrayal of wild animals.

An Associate of the Royal Academy in 1780, Stubbs was elected to full membership in 1781. Stubbs died in 1806, July 10, in poor financial circumstances.

The first recorded owner of the picture, Willoughby Lacy, an actor and theatre manager, fell into debt in later life around 1800 and it was probably at this period that he sold the picture, which then passed into successive illustrious collections before finding its way into the auction rooms : it was sold in 1966 in London for $ 211,600 by Christie's and in 1987, it sold for the then princely sum of £380,000 through the gravel of Sotheby's.

George Stubbs's ''Baron de Robeck Riding a Bay Cob'' (1791), which depicts an aristocrat on a rearing horse, was sold the same year at Sotheby's for $2.42 million. In 2006 a red and white dog painting, fetched £ 960,000 ($ 518,400) at auction at Christie's.

DEGAS : DEUX DANSEUSES EN SCENE

Degas (1834-1917) painted this picture in 1874 as from 1870 he increasingly painted ballet subjects: Dance Class (1871), Dancing Examination (1874), The Star (1876-77). Among other reasons they were easier to sell. Degas’ ballerinas have determined his popular image to his day.

He sketched from a live model in his studio and combined poses into groupings that depicted rehearsal and performance scenes in which dancers on stage, entering the stage, and resting or waiting to perform are shown simultaneously and in counterpoint, often from an oblique angle of vision.

This picture was sold in 1927 for 7200 Pounds.

RUBENS : SAMSON AND DELILAH

This "modello" (oil sketch of 52.1 x 50.5 cm.) of the famous night where Delilah cut off the hair of the Jewish Biblical Judge Samson was made by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Rubens was a prolific XVIIth. century Flemish Baroque painter and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality.

It was commissioned in 1608-9 by Nicolaas Rockox burgomaster of Antwerp and official of the Guild of the Arquebusiers and the painting hung in his offices until his death in 1640. During this period, it was copied by Frans Francken II (1581-1642) and Jakob Matham (1571-1631). After his death the picture was mentioned in his inventory. It reappeared in 1692 in the inventory of a Guillelmo Potteau and in the property of councillor Segars in Antwerp in 1698-1700. It 1700, the Prince of Liechtenstein said he would buy it and effectively in May 1700 the art dealer Forchoudt sold it in Vienna to an unidentified buyer.

The same month it became part of the collection of Prince Johann of Liechtenstein but was attributed to Jan van den Hoeck(1611 - 1651) , a student of Rubens. Then it stayed in this collection until 1880 when it was sold by Prince Johann II to an unnamed buyer. It resurfaced in Paris in 1929 (with slightly smaller dimensions : - 1cm, actually the tip of the toe of Samson was gone) in the hands of the German art galerie van Diemen (Berlin) but attributed this time to Honthhorst, the Dutch Caravaggist.

The German galery offered it to a German collector from Hamburg named August Neuerburg who asked an advice from a Dr. Ludwig Burchard, an art dealer associated to van Diemen Galerie under the umbrella of the Margraf Concern, until then owned by Albert Loeske. I has just passed to long time employees Jacob and Rosa Oppenheimer. In 1937 the Nazis will close down the galerie.

Dr Burchard pronounced the picture as "original work of Rubens" and on this advice Neuerburg bought it as such in 1930. Many years later in 1967 the modello appeared at a Christie's auction and was sold for $ 70,560 to Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Leyman who endowed it to the Museum of Art of Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1972.

Amusingly enough the National Gallery in London bought another Samson and Delilah by Rubens in 1980 for £2.3 million ($5.4 million)whose autenticity is now contested.