Florida developer enhances Brenau art collection with gift of 17th-century painting

Jacksonville, Florida, businessman David Gonzales has enhanced the Brenau University Permanent Art Collection with the gift of a 1647 preliminary painting that led to the creation of one of the most famous works by the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age artist, Paulus Potter.

Titled Landscape with Cows, it reflects the pastoral images incorporated in the finished work The Young Bull (The Dutch version of the name is De jonge stier), which hangs in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands.

The Baroque-period painting with its appraised value of $275,000 is one of the oldest and most valuable additions to the university’s permanent collection of more than 6,500 paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures and other art works. A print by the Flemish baroque portraitist Sir Anthony van Dyck that hangs in the university library, dating from the 1630s, is slightly older than the Potter piece.

“This wonderful painting by a renowned Dutch Golden Age painter is an excellent example of an artist’s working method and how a smaller study may contribute to a larger, more formal work,” said Nichole Rawlings, Brenau Galleries director and manager of the permanent art collection. “Paulus Potter’s famous painting beautifully reflects a direct link between the subject and character of our newly acquired study and the finished masterpiece.”

Gonzales is president of Acorn Property Holdings, a commercial real estate venture in Jacksonville with holdings of about a million square feet of prime office property. Brenau leases space for its Jacksonville campus from Acorn.

Brenau President Ed Schrader said the school plans to display Landscape with Cows on its Gainesville campus in the executive suite, which has become a sort of mini-gallery featuring prints and paintings by other artists in the permanent collection including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Eugene Delacroix, Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella.

“Landscape with Cows,” a study for Potter’s famous “The Bull,” which hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, was donated to Brenau by Dave Gonzales of Jacksonville, Fla. (Courtesy AJ Reynolds/Brenau University)

http://accesswdun.com/article/2017/11/600608/florida-developer-enhances-brenau-art-collection-with-gift-of-17-century-painting