Period Copies After the Old Masters
To view our paintings after the Old Masters
Part of our Collecting Guides series.
A period copy is a painting made after a known composition by an Old Master, executed by a trained professional of a later generation for a client who wanted the image and could never own the original. It is a hand-painted canvas of its own date, and the word after is what says so.
Three ways to have a great composition on a wall. The hand: the master's own · a later painter's · no hand at all. The canvas: of the master's time · aged and often relined · new, or a print. Where it is: in a museum · in private hands · printed to order.
A Trade, Not a Shortcut
Copying a famous painting was ordinary professional work for three centuries. It was how a young painter learned, and it was how the images that mattered reached the people who wanted them. A parish that wanted the altarpiece everyone was talking about had one option: pay a painter to go and make it.
The scale of it was considerable. In nineteenth-century Paris, the Louvre issued copyist permits in large numbers, and the great rooms were worked in daily by professionals at their easels. Churches, private chapels, seminaries and provincial museums all commissioned repetitions of celebrated compositions. Some copyists were students; many were established painters who took the work between commissions.
Engravings did the rest. A composition that had been engraved could be studied anywhere, and a painter in a provincial town might work all his life from prints of pictures he would never see. This continued long after photography arrived, for a reason worth stating: a photograph reproduces an image, a copy reproduces a painting. A parish that needed an Assumption above its altar could do nothing with a small print. It needed a canvas, at scale, in oil.
What You Are Actually Buying
The diagram above sets out the choice plainly, and the honest answer is in its middle column. A period copy is not the master's picture and does not pretend to be. What it is, is the architecture of a great composition, at the scale of a room rather than a chapel, on a support that has genuinely lived through its own century.
That last point is the one collectors underrate. The copy is an antique in its own right. It has been relined or it has moved and split as panels do, it carries craquelure, its stretcher and frame have their own history, and it has hung somewhere for a hundred years or more. None of that is borrowed from the original: it belongs to the object in front of you.
And the hand matters. A good copyist does not trace, he rebuilds. The palette follows the model and so does the drawing, but the touch belongs to his own century, and it shows. That is what separates a period copy from a facsimile, and it is why these pictures reward looking at rather than merely recognising.
What the Word After Actually Means
Attribution language is precise, and after sits at one clear end of it. It means a copy of a known composition by the named artist, made by another hand. It claims nothing about who that hand was, and it makes no suggestion that the master was involved.
It also has a threshold. A picture merely painted in a master's manner is not after him: without an identifiable composition behind it, the term does not apply, and we do not use it.
The full ladder, from signed and studio of down to after, is set out in our guide to Reading Attribution.
Period Copies in Our Collection
After Nicolas Poussin, The Assumption of the Virgin. Oil on canvas, 28 x 20 inches, dated 1881 lower left, framed.
The Virgin rises in a white gown and a heavy blue mantle, arms thrown wide, her veil caught in the updraft. Five angels wheel around her, all in motion, their drapery in yellow, rose and dull red pulling in different directions, and the whole group is lifted on a bank of grey cloud. Below, the earth she is leaving is painted almost in monochrome. The upper half is a warm brown-pink that makes the blue and white of the Virgin the only cold note in the picture.
It is a rigorously symmetrical design, two angels to each side and the Virgin on the axis, and holding that symmetry while giving six bodies genuine movement is difficult. The copyist of 1881 managed it. Poussin died in 1665; this canvas was painted more than two centuries later, and it carries its own date to say so.
After Nicolas Poussin, Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well. Oil on canvas, 19 x 14 1/2 inches, late 18th to early 19th century, unframed.
The second Poussin here, and its opposite. Where the Assumption is vertical and almost empty, this is a crowded frieze: Eliezer at the centre in a turban and ochre robe, both hands raised as he speaks, Rebecca facing him in blue and green, and a dozen young women pressing round the well with their jars. A pale classical town climbs the left side; a single pillar carrying a stone sphere closes the right.
What identifies the model is what is missing. Every other painter of this subject shows Eliezer's camels, the exotic note that makes the story legible at a glance. Poussin refused them, and so does this canvas. The copyist was working from the Louvre picture itself, which entered public view in 1793, and the date of this copy sits exactly where that opening would put it.
After Correggio, Ecce Homo. Oil on canvas, 17th century, Italian Baroque, framed.
The oldest copy in our collection, and the closest in time to its model. Correggio's Ecce Homo was among the most reproduced devotional images in Europe, and a seventeenth-century Italian painter working after it stood at no great distance from the source, either in years or in method. This is the copy as contemporary practice rather than as later homage.
After Anthony van Dyck, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. Oil on wood panel, 8 x 6 inches, Dutch School, early 19th century, antique wood frame.
Eight inches by six, and that is the first thing to say about it. A bearded man at half length in black under a wide falling ruff, a gold chain across his chest with its medallion held between finger and thumb, a folded paper in the other hand, and behind him a ground so dark the shoulders dissolve into it. The whole state portrait, reduced to the size of a small book.
The model is Van Dyck's portrait of Arundel, painted in London about 1620 and now in the J. Paul Getty Museum. The medallion is the jewel of the Lesser George, badge of the Order of the Garter, and the paper is a letter. Arundel was the greatest English collector of his age, and it was he who brought Van Dyck to England: that picture marks the beginning of the career which would change English portraiture.
And the composition travelled, as these compositions did. An engraving after it by William Sharp was published in 1823, and a Dutch painter of the early nineteenth century is far more likely to have worked from that sheet than from the picture itself. Which is precisely how a face reaches a wall two centuries and a sea away from where it was painted.
After Raphael Sanzio, Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist. Oil on canvas, 19th century, framed.
Raphael's Madonnas were the most copied compositions in the history of European painting, and every academy in Europe set them as exercises. A nineteenth-century painter taking one on was doing what his teachers had done, and their teachers before them. The subject is what a private chapel or a family oratory would have asked for.
After Hyacinthe Rigaud, Royal Portrait, 18th century. Oil on canvas, carved gilt frame.
A man in middle life under an enormous full-bottomed wig that takes up nearly half the canvas, a crimson velvet cloak, a deep fall of white lace at the throat. The state portrait is the copy's natural home: Rigaud kept account books recording which pictures left his studio by his own hand and which were replicas, because the demand for royal images was industrial.
That system is a subject in itself, and we have set it out in Royal Portraits, Made to Be Copied.
Alongside these, our collection holds works catalogued circle of and follower of, which describe a different relationship altogether: painters who worked beside a master in his own lifetime rather than after him. Where each of these terms sits, and what it claims, is set out in Reading Attribution.
Browse our paintings after the Old Masters →
Historical information on the Van Dyck composition and its engraved circulation compiled from published museum sources, including the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Diagram, photographs and descriptions of the paintings in our collection: GalerieClub Fine Art.
