Lost van Dyck study for St Jerome painting is set to fetch £2.5m (2024)

An oil painting spattered with bird droppings found in a shed in upstate New York will go on sale at Sotheby’s next week, where it is expected to fetch up to $3 million (£2.5 million) after it was identified as a rare, live study by Anthony van Dyck, once the court artist to Charles I.

The painting, in which an old man is seated nude with his beard tumbling on to his chest, was discovered in Kinderhook, a tiny town founded by Dutch settlers in the late 17th century. Albert Roberts, a civil servant and part-time collector and treasure hunter, suspected it was a Dutch work of some vintage and bought it for $600 in 2002, adding it to his “orphanage for abandoned art”.

It rested for years against a wall in his house before he decided to investigate its origins, he told an audience at the Albany Institute of History and Art in 2019. When he did, he began to suspect that it had been painted by van Dyck as a study for his composition Saint Jerome with an Angel, which was completed between 1618 and 1620.

Susan Barnes, an art historian and specialist on van Dyck who examined the painting, which is nearly a metre high, concluded that it was one of only two “live studies” by the artist of such a scale that had survived.

“They weren’t really meant to be exhibited,” Christopher Apostle, head of the Old Master paintings department at Sotheby’s in New York, said. “The artist would often keep them in the studio to refer back to later.” He said van Dyck would have been in his late teens and working at the studio of Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp when he painted the study.

“This was their working practice,” he said. “They would drop the figures into their compositions.”

Van Dyck had emerged almost fully formed as one of the greatest of his generation, Apostle said. “Certain artists, including Rubens, had to work really hard to become great artists. Van Dyck was like Mozart. He was born a genius.”

By his late teens, “he was close to imitating Rubens, which was convenient, but it was also, supposedly, unnerving for Rubens and so they had a falling out”. Van Dyck left to work in London and in Italy before becoming, in the 1630s, court artist for Charles I. He is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.

It is unclear how his study arrived in a shed in the Hudson Valley, although Apostle said it was not unusual for such works to be found in unexpected places.

Roberts, who died in 2021, initially displayed it in what he called “its pristine condition [that] happens to include bird droppings on the back”, according to The Daily Gazette of Schenectady, New York. Later it was exhibited alongside Saint Jerome with an Angel in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

It is now being sold by Roberts’ estate and will be offered by Sotheby’s next Thursday. “I’m sure I’m going to have people coming through the gallery looking at it hanging on a big important wall, thinking, ‘Why is this picture here, with lines on it, and it’s dirty?’ ” Apostle said. “What I like about the picture myself is I’m close in age to this guy in the painting . . . the guy is quite muscular and powerful, but he also has a slackness of the skin. There is something quite humane in van Dyck’s portrayal. There is a nobility to it, that’s what he’s trying to capture. That’s what Jerome was, he was a heroic figure.”

Van Dyck, he said, “finds someone on the streets of Antwerp, maybe he was a porter or working in the docks. He says, ‘There is my Saint Jerome.’ He finds the nobility in this person.”

Forgotten treasures

• In 2014 the owners of a house in the French city of Toulouse ventured into the attic to investigate a leak, only to find a painting by the Italian master Caravaggio. Judith and Holofernes, which dates from 1607 and depicts the biblical heroine Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes, was expected to fetch up to $170 million at auction, but was sold to a private buyer for an undisclosed sum.

• In 2019 a tiny early Renaissance masterpiece, which for decades had been hung in a woman’s kitchen in a house north of Paris, fetched more than €24 million at auction. Christ Mocked, by the 13th-century Florentine painter Cimabue, attracted huge attention from buyers.

• In 2010 an 18th-century Chinese vase found by a brother and sister “in a dusty attic” while they were clearing out their parents’ home near Heathrow airport in west London sold for £43 million.

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