Sofonisba Anguissola Loan to Timken
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| Sofonisba Anguissola, Giovanni Battista Caselli, 1557-1558. Museo del Prado, Madrid |
The Prado has lent Sofonisba Anguissola's portrait of Giovanni Battista Caselli to the Timken Museum of Art, San Diego. It's featured in a focus exhibition, "Poetic Portraits: Allegory & Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe," that runs through Mar. 29, 2026. The showing reciprocates for the Timken's loan of its Veronese to the Prado's recent exhibition.
The Prado owns numerous works by Anguissola, court painter to Philip II and one of the best-known women artists of the Renaissance. Giovanni Battista Caselli is an early work, depicting a poet and sculptor of Anguissola's hometown, Cremona. In the past the key on the table and overpainting of the gown led to the man's misidentification as St. Peter. However, Caselli's name is plainly visible on the book.
The Timken's neighbor, the San Diego Museum of Art, owns Anguissola's Portrait of a Spanish Prince. Believed to show the middle-aged Philip II as a child, it may have been made for a gallery of child portraits. Compared to Giovanni Battista Caselli, it shows the more meticulous style Anguissola adopted for the Spanish court.
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| Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of a Spanish Prince (probably Philip II), about 1573. San Diego Museum of Art |
Comments
I was aware of the Putnam sisters, but I thought they were relatives of the Timkin family. But the 2 groups came from both separate wealth and history. The sisters did the collecting while the Timkins came later and enabled the Putnam's collection to be put on formal, non-traveling display.
timkenmuseum. org: The Timken was created through the generosity of two families: the Timken family of Canton, Ohio, who wintered in San Diego and were principal benefactors of the Fine Arts Society (now the San Diego Museum of Art), and Anne and Amy Putnam....In the 1930s and 40s, Anne and Amy Putnam began to purchase European paintings of distinction, which they anonymously donated to the Fine Arts Society.
In 1950, under the guidance of their attorney, Walter Ames, the Putnam sisters established a foundation whose sole purpose would be to acquire paintings of high quality.
In the early 1960s, Mr. Ames consulted with his client, Henry H. Timken, Jr., which resulted in the Timken Foundation offering to pay a substantial part of the cost of a new picture gallery for San Diego. The opening of the Timken in 1965 allowed for the return to San Diego of those Putnam paintings on loan to museums in the Midwest and East. [End quote]
^ A few days ago I leafed through an old article from the 1970s written by LA-based travelers who reviewed the art museums of Southern California. It was published when today's Simon Museum was still the Pasadena Art Museum and featured modern-contemporary art. The nearby Huntington was a more modest version of its current layout.
The article's author had to admit that LACMA (which was the main game in town back then) was fairly weak but also mentioned that San Diego at least could be happy about the Timken.
As a youngster, I recall being in the elevator of LACMA's Ahmanson building. A couple (presumably from out-of-town, or at least the woman was) mentioned how tired she was. She said it was tiring to look at a lot of mediocre art. Ouch.
I kind of winced and imagined my family felt the same way---the visitor wasn't inaccurate, however (particularly over 50 years ago), albeit a bit rude. Pereira's tract-house design versus, say, Beaux-Arts, didn't help.
I recall a SF-based resident over 20 years ago writing that one of the art museums of San Francisco had a great collection of second-rate art. Or something like that. Ouch, again.
But if old-time culture is a major barometer of the value and appeal of a community, lots of people should never have moved from Europe to North America. Or from the East Coast to the West. Humpff. lol.