Kasteel Hex Casts her Glorious Spell

Each June, Kasteel Hex, an 18th-century château in Heers, Belgium, heralds spring with a three-day festival of flowers. The estate's gardens, which display an abundance of old roses, as well as other interesting plants, are the stage for this annual celebration. The event offers garden enthusiasts a variety of exhibitions and lectures, along with walking tours and demonstrations by some of Europe's finest collectors and breeders of rare plants.




R.Gallica 'Belle Isis'









The château was constructed by Count Charles-François de Velbrück, a naturalist and philosopher, who became Prince-Bishop of Liège in 1772. Built originally as a hunting lodge, the Prince-Bishop surrounded the house with 12 acres of formal, French-style gardens, a rose garden, a Chinese pavilion, and a large kitchen garden. Once the formal grounds were laid, the Prince-Bishop began a landscape park, in the style of Capability Brown, England's most influential landscape architect. Begun in the early 1770s, it is believed to be the first park of this sort on the Continent. Today, the park and gardens still reflect the original vision of the Prince-Bishop.




A late-19th century watercolor by Jos Damien.










In the Prince's garden, a statue of putti surrounded by R. chinensis centifolia.






Immaculately maintained by the late Countess d'Ursel, Kasteel Hex still has roses that date to the 18th century as part of the original garden plan. The collection of old roses at Hex is one of the most important in Belgium and ranges from botanical roses, or wild roses, to sophisticated hybrids. Many varieties are represented in the gardens, including Centifolia and Bourbon roses, Damask roses, Gallicas and Albas, Floribundas, Moss roses, Polyanthas wichuraiana and dwarf roses that serve as ground cover. The box-hedge lined kitchen garden, original to the Prince-Bishop's layout, continues to provide the household with fruits and vegetables throughout the year.



The kitchen garden blossoms with borders of roses and herbaceous peonies.










A view of the kitchen garden from the château, the spire of a village church rising in the distance.






This year's spring festival is organized by Count Ghislain d'Ursel, and is scheduled for June 8, 9 and 10th, 10-5pm daily, with an admission fee of €7,50. Kasteel Hex is a private home, so this is a rare opportunity to tour the grounds, which will not open again until September 8-9th, for the fall festival, Tasting What Nature Offers; Late Flowering Plants. The 2008 festivals are currently listed as Wild Flowers (spring) and The History of the Art of Gardening (fall). For more information, visit www.hex.be.

Nocturne Illuminates Christie's King Street Sale

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893)
Lovers in a Wood by Moonlight
Signed and dated 'Atkinson Grimshaw 73/+' (lower left)
Oil on card
14 1/8 x 9 1/8 in. (36 x 23.2 cm.)
Estimate: £100,000 - 150,000

John Atkinson Grimshaw, more readily known as Atkinson Grimshaw, was one of the most successful English painters of the Victorian era. He developed a particular, if rather peculiar, expertise in nocturnal scenes and specialized in atmospheric pictures - cityscapes with rain-soaked streets reflecting the glow of gas lamps, and misty, moonlit-river scenes. He also painted eroticized fairies, a highly-popular theme at the time.

This painting, Lovers in a Wood by Moonlight, was produced just as Grimshaw was beginning to experiment with the nocturnal images for which he became known. Despite the haze of atmospheric effect, areas of the work are in sharp focus, with an extraordinary clarity given to the barren twigs and masses of dampened leaves. Only the lovers upon which we have intruded are painted in shadowed obscurity.

James McNeill Whistler, a contemporary of Grimshaw's, said of his friend, "I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures." Not only was he admired by colleagues, but his paintings garnered a great deal of success with the public, as well. His work was included at the Royal Academy in 1874 and he was represented by London's leading dealers, Thomas Agnew & Sons. But the financial success was temporal, and tempered by the loss of three of his children. Grimshaw often revisited previously-painted scenes, and a similar example to this image, but with only one figure, is in the collection at Leeds City Art Gallery.

Grimshaw's Lovers in a Wood by Moonlight (lot number 104) is the highlight of Christie's February 28th sale, Christopher Wood: A Very Victorian Eye, at their King Street location. With a provenance including Wood, England's preeminent expert on Victorian art, the hammer price for this small, but important work may well exceed the estimated £100,000 - 150,000. The last major Grimshaw, a work titled Liverpool Custom House and Wapping, was sold by Sotheby's in December 2006, and brought £612,800 - well over its estimate of £150,000 - £ 200,000.

www.christies.com

Instant Impression

In 2002, Philippe Starck's Louis Ghost armchair hit the market and inspired a multitude of lucite interpretations of 18th-century designs. Clear and/or colorful... candelabra, clocks and chairs were everywhere, in varying levels of quality.

Taking this idea one step further and adding a theatre-prop element, based on their own set-design experience, White-Webb, a Los Angeles-based interior design firm, has introduced Intaglio, a group of furnishings based on 18th and 19th-century engravings. The images are blown up to a monumental scale and applied to a base structure. Think decoupage-on-steroids. All of the gratification, none of the clean up. They even pack flat. Shown here, from top to bottom, Chandelier A, Mirror A and Console A.





www.whitewebb.com

A is for Art Glass

Apple vase, designed by Ingeborg Lundin for Orrefors, Sweden, 1957
Signed Orrefors Expo D32-57 Ingeborg Lundin.
H: 37 cm/ 14 1/2"
55 000 SEK (about €6100)

Possibly the most iconic design of mid-century Swedish glass-making, a fine example is currently available at Modernity, a top gallery of 20th-century design, in Stockholm.



So representative was Lundin's vase, that it was chosen for the cover image of Leslie Jackson's definitive 1998 publication, The New Look: Design in the Fifties.



www.modernity.se

Powerful, Ethereal: The Arts of Persia

Figure of a griffin, gold, 4th century BC



In a mindset familiar with art exhibitions that cover several centuries of material, one might do a double-take at the newest show to open at the Amsterdam Hermitage, one of the city's exciting new cultural venues. The exhibition, Persia: Thirty Centuries of Art, is on loan from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

That's right, thirty centuries. Thirty centuries of art from the Russian Hermitage, for the Amsterdam Hermitage, on view in a 17th-century Dutch canal building that's undergoing a Modernist renovation. That's a lot in one bite.

In the early 1990s, the State Hermitage began researching satellite venues in Western Europe, as a means of further displaying its collections. They had already worked closely with the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam's main exhibition center, on a variety of cultural projects, so the city seemed a likely option. All they needed to find was a location. When the Amstelhof building, built in the early 1680s, was given to the city in 1999, a deal was struck and the €39-million Amsterdam Hermitage is slated to open in 2009. In the meantime, a smaller gallery has opened within the complex and functions as the primary venue. When completed, the Amsterdam Hermitage will provide the St. Petersgburg Hermitage with more than 40,000-additional square feet of programmable space.



Bas-relief fragment depicting a Persian warrior, stone, 5th century BC





Flask, faience, late-16th/early-17th century



The Hermitage's collection of material from the Persian Empire was amassed largely by Peter the Great, who began excavations of Scythian Empire burial grounds in southern Russia during the early 18th century. The collection has grown over the centuries, and now contains objects from antiquity to the end of the Qajar Dynasty (1785-1925).

Promotion of the arts of Persia in a Western capital city, offers a rare glimpse into the often-misunderstood Islamic culture, via the powerful and ethereal arts it produced. It also clearly reaffirms the millennia-long connection, as well as the present alliance, between Russia and modern-day Iran.


Two lovers, oil on canvas, early 19th century


Persia: Thirty Centuries of Art
March 31 - September 15, 2007
www.hermitage.nl