Art Deco Knockouts, Velázquez, Hals at World’s Grandest Art Fair

For a couple of days, I’m at the European Fine Arts Fair, or TEFAF, in Maastricht in the Netherlands. It’s the grandest and greatest art fair in the world, held every year and this year attracting around 270 dealers, all connoisseurs, all showing their very best, each work museum-worthy. I’ve looked at thousands of works of art here, antiquities to contemporary art. I’m smitten by an old nun, a plump Dutch beer baron, and a donkey. “The road is long,” I’ve heard, “with many a winding turn.” Welcome to TEFAF, where quality and character take many shapes. Prepared to be staggered, heartened, and seduced. It’s a unique art experience.

The Nun Jerónima de la Fuente, from 1620 by Diego Velázquez, Philip IV’s court painter and curator, is a picture I know well. It’s owned by the Prado. Austere and reserved, Jerónima is a Seville-period Velázquez, based on the palette of southern Spain’s landscape, like lots of painting in Seville. Velázquez was only 19 when he painted the Prado picture and a near-identical replica that I’d never seen but knew to be in a private collection. Jerónima? She was then a 66-year-old nun and missionary slated to sail from Spain to Mexico and then to the Philippines. There, she’d establish its first convent, in Manila, which she led until her death in 1630. Stuart Lochhead Sculpture, an important London dealer, is selling it for the collector.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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For a couple of days, I’m at the European Fine Arts Fair, or TEFAF, in Maastricht in the Netherlands. It’s the grandest and greatest art fair in the world, held every year and this year attracting around 270 dealers, all connoisseurs, all showing their very best, each work museum-worthy. I’ve looked at thousands of works of art here, antiquities to contemporary art. I’m smitten by an old nun, a plump Dutch beer baron, and a donkey. “The road is long,” I’ve heard, “with many a winding turn.” Welcome to TEFAF, where quality and character take many shapes. Prepared to be staggered, heartened, and seduced. It’s a unique art experience.

The Nun Jerónima de la Fuente, from 1620 by Diego Velázquez, Philip IV’s court painter and curator, is a picture I know well. It’s owned by the Prado. Austere and reserved, Jerónima is a Seville-period Velázquez, based on the palette of southern Spain’s landscape, like lots of painting in Seville. Velázquez was only 19 when he painted the Prado picture and a near-identical replica that I’d never seen but knew to be in a private collection. Jerónima? She was then a 66-year-old nun and missionary slated to sail from Spain to Mexico and then to the Philippines. There, she’d establish its first convent, in Manila, which she led until her death in 1630. Stuart Lochhead Sculpture, an important London dealer, is selling it for the collector.