The first is a Penitent Magdalene by Joseph Heintz I (1564-1609). Heintz was a Swiss-born master active in Italy, Germany, and Prague, who worked in a stylistic vein related to Dutch Mannerism, an area in which the museum has numerous paintings, prints, and drawings. A museum purchase and partial gift of Stephen Mazoh, the Penitent Magdalene supports the teaching of Professor Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann of the Department of Art and Archaeology, who has written on the artistic flowering of Prague during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II. The paintings iconography also fills a gap in the collection, which possesses many representations of the prototypical male penitent Saint Jerome. Heintz’s half-length Magdalene is derived from Titian’s seminal paintings of the Magdalene, dated ca. 1560. She inhabits a dark desert wilderness, and rests her hand on a skull, the reminder of mortality, while pointing to a crucifix, offering hope for salvation. An angel hovers beside the jar that contained the oils with which she anointed the body of Christ before the entombment, and she raises her eyes toward a ray of light streaming from heaven. While the spare and simple portrayal adheres to the recommendations of the Council of Trent, this exhortation to contemplation and penitence also expresses the Counter Reformation’s fervent zeal for spiritual renewal.

A small oil sketch by Joseph-Marie Vien, Love Fleeing Slavery, a study for a painting in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, has been purchased with the Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund and the Felton Gibbons Fund in honor of Duane Wilder, Class of 1951, in gratitude for his dedicated service as chair of the museum Advisory Council. The recently rediscovered sketch is related to the Toulouse painting, shown in the Salon of 1789, and was described in the 1813 sale catalogue of Gabriel-Auguste Godefroy, a Paris collector. The duc de Brissac commissioned the painting to serve as a pendant to The Cupid Seller by Vien, dated 1763, which had entered his collection. Based on an ancient fresco discovered in Herculaneum, The Cupid Seller is a precocious work in the “neo-Greek mode,” which was on the cutting edge of French taste in 1763. Brissac is thought to have commissioned the pendant, Love Fleeing Slavery, before making a present of the pair of paintings to the mistress of Louis XV, Mme. DuBarry. However The Cupid Seller and Love Fleeing Slavery may have come into Mme. DuBarrys possession, they were among the furnishings of her bedroom at the pavilion of Louveciennes in the inventory made when her property was seized during the French Revolution.

In its loose, open brushwork, vivid colors, and free rhythms of paint, Joseph-Marie Vien’s Love Fleeing Slavery epitomizes the spontaneity of the oil sketch, a quality that has often made such works more desirable to collectors than finished paintings. Despite the coy subject matter, the composition is influenced by the dramatic style of Vien’s student Jacques-Louis David, who by the late 1780s was the most influential artist on the French scene. Most of Vien’s thirty-five known oil sketches are in French museums and private collections, and it is a great stroke of fortune for the museum to be able to acquire this historically important work, which speaks to a moment in French art poised between the Rococo and Neoclassicism.

The museum also has acquired an important British pencil drawing, Castle of Chillon, Near View, Dent du Midi and Upper End of Lake Geneva, by Sir John F. W. Herschel. Signed and dated September 15, 1821, it is the first drawing to enter the collection made with the aid of a camera lucida. The camera lucida, an optical instrument invented in 1807, aids artists and draftsmen by projecting reflected images on paper with an exactness unmatched by the naked eye. Herschel began to use this device as early as 1809, and used it extensively until 1865.

Sir John Herschel was a preeminent British astronomer, mathematician, and scientist, and a major figure in early photography. Well acquainted with the work of the inventors of photography, he experimented with chemical processes to make photographs permanent and is credited with originating the terms “photography,” “negative,” and “positive”as they refer to photographs. He is also known to the world of photography through his friendship with Julia Margaret Cameron and her remarkable portraits of him, one of which was included in the museum’s recent “Camera Women” exhibition.

Castle of Chillon is typical of landscapes made by Herschel on his frequent travels to the continent, and complements a rare pen and wash drawing by the French inventor of photography, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, in the museums collection. Together these works provide important insights into the origins of photography. Of further note is the relevance of this work to the current controversy, originated by the painter David Hockney, over the use of optical drawing aids.