Lot 86: Jaime Baco, called Jacomart (Valencia c. 1411-1461) and Juan Rexach (active Valencia 1431-1484)

The Agony in the Garden oil on panel 591/2 x 433/4 in. (151 x 111.1 cm.) in an integral tabernacle frame. PROVENANCE Art Institute, Chicago. LITERATURE C.R. Post, A History of Spanish Painting, Cambridge, 1935, VI, part I, p. 106, fig. 37, as Jacomart and Rexach. NOTES Post ( loc. cit. ) notes that the figure of Christ in this picture unmistakably suggests the manner of Rexach and that 'the heads of the three chosen Apostles sleeping in the foreground, especially of the St. James, and even of the rest of the Twelve behind a hedge at the back of Gethsemane have something of the unexpectedly virile characterization that distinguishes the retable in the episcopal palace at Segorbe. The drawing of the forms and draperies of Sts. Peter, John, and James also lies beyond the reach of Rexach's pencil. The necessity of depicting the Garden has been seized upon as the occasion for an unusually charming example of the childlike but delightful kind of landscape in which Jacomart's shop specialized, prettily framed in groves of the disproportionately dwarfed trees that had been a peculiarity of the Valencian school since the days of Pedro Nicol u and Andr‚s Marzal de Sas. Under the arch of the gate Judas points the way to a larger unit of soldiery than was ordinarily introduced into the iconography of the theme or even by Rexach in the panel of the Valencia Museum, completely filling a kind of viaduct that stretches from the distant Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives.'.