ART MUSEUM GETS 2 OILS AS GIFT FROM AHMANSON

As if to emphasize that life goes on as usual at an institution that has just opened a grand new building, reinstalled its collection of modern art and launched a provocative exhibition, the County Museum of Art has announced its annual year-end gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

This year’s gift has arrived in two separate packages: “Apollo and Phaethon,” a 1731 modello for a fresco by Venetian master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and “Pastoral Landscape With a Mill,” a 1634 painting by French landscapist Claude Gellee (also called Le Lorrain or Claude Lorraine). Both oils-on-canvas were purchased from private collections at undisclosed prices, and both are the first paintings by the artists to be added to the museum’s collection.

Tiepolo’s 25x18 3/4-inch modello (a small presentation painting executed as a proposal for a larger work) was prepared for the approval of the Archinto family in Milan, according to Scott Schaefer, curator of European paintings and sculpture. Tiepolo was commissioned by the prominent Milanese family to paint this scene and three others as ceiling frescoes in four rooms of the Palazzo Archinto.

A fresco called “The Triumph of the Arts” decorated the ceiling of the central room of the family’s grand residence, while the mythical themes of “Apollo and Phaethon,” “Perseus and Andromeda” and “Juno With Portuna and Venus” were painted in three smaller chambers.

All of them perished during World War II when the palace was destroyed by bombs. A modello of “Perseus and Andromeda,” in the Frick Collection in New York, and the County Museum of Art’s new “Apollo and Phaethon” are the only painted records of the four ceilings, Schaefer said.

The oval-shaped “Apollo and Phaethon” is a swirling composition centering on two mythological characters, illuminated by a sunburst. Phaethon is pleading with his father, the sun god Apollo, to let him drive the chariot of the sun. A flurry of activity goes on around the lower edges of the painting, as cupids prepare the horses in a celestial atmosphere.

According to Greek mythology, Phaethon drove the chariot so close to the Earth that it scorched Africa, transforming its luxuriant fields into deserts and blackening its inhabitants. Punishing this demonstration of youthful recklessness, Zeus turned him into a thunderbolt.

Tiepolo’s flamboyant frescoes made him the most sought-after Italian painter of his era. Working in Venice, Tiepolo (1696-1770) revived the glories of his Venetian predecessors, Veronese and Tintoretto, while drawing on such sources as Rubens and Rembrandt.

While the complex Tiepolo is “a challenge” to interpret, according to Schaefer, the peaceful Claude so completely fits “our idea of landscape” that the artist’s innovative accomplishment tends to be taken for granted. “It’s a perfect painting,” he said. “If you had to imagine the perfect Claude, this would be it.”

Claude (1600-1682) was born in the Lorraine area of France but went to work for a Roman painter as a youth, later traveled to Naples and eventually settled in Rome. He is credited with revolutionizing landscape painting during the 1630s in graceful pictures that unify all elements instead of setting forth a series of separate incidents.

According to Schaefer, Claude sketched from nature in the Italian countryside but rarely painted actual buildings or settings. He was more interested in studying light and atmosphere, which led him to represent the sun itself in his later paintings.

The 23x32 5/8-inch “Landscape With a Mill” depicts a tiny pair of peasants and a flock of goats nestled in the foreground of a poetic landscape. Using dramatic effects to achieve serenity, Claude blended a rustic mill into a bank of dark trees that contrast with a light sky and distant hills.

The scene is an idyllic “invention,” Schaefer said, depicting “perfect, happy people in a perfect landscape.” The man who appears to be playing a flute for a seated woman probably portrays “the harmony of music expressed amid the harmony of nature,” he added.

The two paintings are on view in the museum’s Baroque and 18th-Century European galleries.