Jacques Bellange - Paintings

Paintings

No firmly attributed painting by Bellange survives; all the palace decorations that were his major commissions have been destroyed. A number of easel paintings have been attributed to him, but there is little consensus among art historians on the correctness of these attributions, and the works have varying degrees of relation to the idiosyncratic style of Bellange's etchings. A Lamentation of Christ in the Hermitage Museum has been attributed to Bellange since the 1970s, and a related drawing is probably by Bellange, but the Hermitage canvas itself is described by Griffiths and Hartley as "a rather nasty object, with lurid flesh tones, and many have refused to believe that it could be from Bellange's hand". Other leading candidates are Saint Francis in Ecstasy Supported by Two Angels in Nancy, and a pair of panels of the Virgin and Angel of the Annunciation in Karlsruhe.

To his Nancy contemporaries, Bellange must have been known mainly as a painter, but no very useful descriptions of his work survive. He is recorded as painting a number of portraits, but none are known to have survived. A Beggar Looking Through His Hat in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, which they attribute to Bellange, was donated by the former Soviet spy Michael Straight (1931-2004): "Given the secretive character of the man depicted, peering at us through a hole in his hat, the painting may have had a particular appeal for its previous owner", the museum suggests. It has been speculated that some of his prints are versions of his paintings, but there is no evidence for this, and the evidence of compositional changes made during the etching process in some prints goes against the theory.