FOGG ART MUSEUM RECEIVES GIFT OF IMPORTANT DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS FROM THE HEINEMANN CHARITABLE TRUST

"The Harvard University Art Museums is pleased to announce the arrival of a generous promised gift to the Fogg Art Museum from the Dr. Rudolph and Mrs. Heinemann Charitable Trust, following the death late last year of our good friend and valued patron, Mrs. Lore Heinemann," James Cuno, director of the Art Museums, announced recently. "The Heinemann gift adds three drawings to the collection, including one by the major German nineteenth-century master Adolph Menzel, as well as two highly important panel paintings by the greatest Flemish artist of the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens."

From the late 1920s until his death in 1975 Dr. Heinemann, who acquired the two Rubens panels in 1936, was a leading German scholar-dealer and the principal old master paintings adviser to Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and his son, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. The famed Thyssen Collection reflects Dr. Heinemann's great power of discernment, a connoisseurial skill he applied to building his own exquisite collection of which the two Rubens panels were a key element.

Ivan Gaskell, the Fogg Museum's Margaret S. Winthrop Curator and author of the catalogue of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Thyssen Collection, described the Rubens paintings as "bust-length, generously bearded representations of Saints Peter and Paul - a pendant pair - most likely dating from about 1615 when Rubens had established himself in Antwerp following his years in Italy. Devotionally they portray the two principal founders of the Church, the prince of the Apostles and the first theologian respectively, with a vigor and intimacy quite novel in European art. They join the Fogg's existing work in oils by Rubens - a sketch of Neptune Calming the Tempest for the Triumphal Entry of the Cardinal-Infant Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635 - to enable us to better interpret, for Harvard students, faculty and the general public, the work of Peter Paul Rubens, who was not only unsurpassed as an artist, but was a thinker and scholar concerned with the deepest challenges to the intellect, both sacred and profane."

The Adolph Menzel drawing shows a three-quarter length figure of a standing woman. She wears a fur-lined jacket and glances downward over her shoulder. In the upper left corner of the sheet Menzel drew a separate study, on a larger scale, of the right side of her face. "The drawing is a fine example of the many graphite studies of figures and heads that Menzel executed during the 1870s and 1880s, William Robinson, the Fogg's Ian Woodner Curator of Drawings, stated. "It joins an outstanding group of twelve drawings by the artist already in the Fogg's permanent collection."

Other works from Mrs. Heinemann's collection of paintings and drawings have be allocated to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.