We are delighted to announce our latest partnership with up-and-coming artist Lucas Console-Verma, as part of The Lanesborough Art Programme.

"Lost In Time" will be first solo exhibition by British artist, Lucas. Hosted within The Lanesborough Grill, the exhibition reimagines the lost works of The Old Masters in a major series of new oil paintings. Drawing upon what fragments and images remain, Console-Verma seeks to question: Where are the lost paintings of history?

Undoubtedly, some are preserved in public galleries or private collections, stashed away in safes or bank vaults, hidden from public sight. Others lie quietly in conservation labs, waiting to be repaired or [CUT]reconstructed. Many, however, are lost. Sometimes due to degradation, neglect or the passing of time, but on occasion, they are stolen, or vanish in transit as they pass from one gallery or collection to another. Where do these lost paintings exist today? Do they survive as numbers in an inventory or as blurry analogue photographs? Do they live on as stories, or memories, or rumours? What is it from these works that remains?

Console-Verma draws upon the materials and stories of these lost paintings, using digital collage and AI to reconstruct and reimagine these works through the lens of the present. This process of reconstruction goes beyond mere replication, instead capturing the glitches, inconsistencies and impacts of these digital technologies on the paintings themselves. Much as AI draws upon the image database, Lucas’ oil paintings bring together the materials and techniques of the past with the technologies of the future to challenge the quest to reconstruct or reclaim the authentic.

Lucas has taken inspiration from masterpiece works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne, read on below to discover more.

All exhibited works are available to purchase, along with bespoke commissions.

Eternal Cycle is an oil painting inspired by Gustav Klimt’s “Medicine,” originally presented at the tenth Secession Exhibition in 1901. “Medicine” was met with controversy and ultimately destroyed during World War II. “Medicine” depicted the complex, ambiguous relationship between life and death. Klimt’s work was radical for its time. Instead of celebrating medical advancements, “Medicine” presented the inevitability of death, portraying the futility of human efforts against nature’s eternal cycle. This bold vision was condemned by university officials and physicians, who found its nudity and message offensive, resulting in the paintings being banned from public display.

Solitude is an oil painting inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s “Painter on His Way to Work”, also known as “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon”, painted in 1888. This painting, thought to be the first self-portrait Van Gogh created during his time in Arles, captures the artist walking under the hot sun, burdened with his painting supplies. In a letter to his brother Theo, dated August 13, 1888, Van Gogh described the scene as a “quick sketch” of himself “laden with boxes, sticks, [and] a canvas on the sunny Tarascon road.”

The painting entered the public sphere in 1912 when it was purchased by the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Germany (now the Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg). It was one of the first Van Gogh paintings to be acquired by a public institution. Remarkably, it was photographed in colour during the 1930s, an expensive and rare
process at the time. During World War II, the museum’s collection was hidden in a salt mine near Stassfurt to protect it from Allied bombing. However, after American forces reached the area in April 1945, fires broke out at the site. While some of the collection was salvaged, Painter on His Way to Work was presumed lost, with some reports suggesting arson to cover up potential looting.

Beyond The Tempest is an AI interpretation of Rembrandt Van Rijn's masterpiece “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” dated 1633. The painting is the only seascape that Rembrandt is known to have painted in his long career.  Painted in 1633, the large-scale oil painting shows Christ together with his disciples on a fishing boat.   Caught in a heavy storm on the Sea of Galilee and its towering waves, they try to bring the boat back under control to save their lives.  Christ who can be seen on the rear of the boat, is the only point of tranquillity in this dramatically lit composition.

This is one of the most famous paintings of ships at sea which was in the collection of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until 1990 when it was snatched along with twelve stolen paintings by other famous masters.  This theft of paintings, drawings, and decorative art with an estimated value of hundreds of millions of dollars is considered the largest art heist in US history.

Until today the identity of the two robbers, who gained access to the museum disguised as policemen and pretending to attend to a disturbance call, remains unknown.  None of the stolen artworks have been found.

Stillness Within Flow is an AI interpretation of Henri Matisse's masterpiece "Pastoral" dated 1906. Henri Émile Benoît Matisse is a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.  Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the beginning of the 20^th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

The intense colourism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Many of his finest works were created around a decade after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasised flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.

His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Pastroral painted in 1906 - is one of five paintings stolen by Vjeran Tomic in 2010. Collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Investigators are dubious of this claim, the Washington Post reports, and believe instead that the works may have been spirited out of the county.

The burglar nicknamed “Spider-Man” and his two accomplices in one of the biggest art heists Paris has ever known were sentenced to prison and ordered to pay the city a whopping £85 million fine. The sum corresponds to the estimated value of the stolen artworks, which are still missing since the 2010 theft.

Fractured Harmony is an AI interpretation of Pablo Picasso's masterpiece "Le Pigeon aux Petits Pois" (The Pigeon with Green Peas) dated 1911. The painting became the target for a large art robbery in May of 2010. Swiped alongside four other masterpieces, Picasso’s painting was stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. All five works have an estimated value of €100 million. What was unusual about this theft was that it was carried out by one person instead of a gang of thieves, and all that was found at the crime scene was a broken padlock and a single smashed window.

Ethereal Blooms is an AI interpretation of Vincent Van Gogh's masterpiece "Poppy Flowers" dated 1887. The painting was stolen from the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum, Cairo, in August 2010. Valued at $50 million, it was thought to have been painted in 1887, three years before Van Gogh’s death, and was heavily influenced by the work of Adolphe Monticelli. After the theft was discovered, Egyptian officials believed they had found the culprits — two Italian men who were stopped boarding a plane to Italy from Cairo — but this proved a false lead. The painting had previously been stolen from the same museum on June 4, 1977; it was recovered 10 years later in Kuwait. It still remains missing.

Luminous Depths is an AI interpretation of Gustav Klimt's masterpiece "Philosophy" dated 1899. The painting had been lost in a fire in 1945. It recently hit the headlines as Google Arts & Culture used predictive AI to predict a colourised digital version. The only image that existed was a black and white photo taken of the painting.

In 1900, at the seventh Secession exhibition, Klimt exhibited the first version of Philosophy, one of his three University of Vienna Ceiling Paintings. Klimt was wary of showing the preparatory version (the final work was not completed until 1907), however, the Secession committee had announced its inclusion in the show and had reserved a prominent place for it in the first room of the exhibition. The painting shows a group of figures on the left, ranging from children at the top to a decrepit old man at the bottom. On the right is a sphinx-like head, suggesting that only with the aid of philosophy or knowledge, represented by the female head at the bottom of the picture, can one make sense of the world.

Philosophy was immediately criticized for its mysterious, allegorical imagery, which was at odds with the academics' perception of themselves as rational beings. Not only do the figures have no recognizable aim, worse, the painting illustrates a widely held idea of the period (although it was unpalatable to the academics): that the purposeful progress of history was ultimately governed by incomprehensible and uncontrollable cyclical forces of nature. An open protest letter was signed by 11 professors, while the Rector of the University issued a press statement saying that philosophy was based on the exact sciences. Even when the painting was taken to the World Fair in Paris later that year, where it was awarded a prize, the furore continued.

Entwined Judgements is an AI interpretation of Gustav Klimt's masterpiece "Jurisprudence" dated 1907. At the eighteenth Secession exhibition, Klimt showed the last of his three University of Vienna Ceiling Paintings, Jurisprudence. At the top of the canvas in the background are three female figures representing Justice, Law, and Truth, while behind them are the seemingly decapitated heads of judges. The old man in the foreground, head bowed and entwined by an octopus's tentacles, represents the victim, accused by the three naked females. It is conceivable that Klimt was thinking of his own position while creating this work.

Not surprisingly, the critics hated it as much as Philosophy and Medicine. These first two paintings were stylistically related but the later one looked entirely different, with its simpler and bolder colours and technique, thus giving Klimt's detractors additional cause for complaint. Furthermore, Klimt's representation of Jurisprudence is plainly not optimistic; rather, he sees the law as vengeful, focusing on crime and punishment. The debate raged on. The Ministry refused to cancel the commission but offered to hang the paintings in a museum rather than install them in the Great Hall. However, they did refuse to lend them for the World Fair exhibition in St Louis in the United States. Finally, in 1904, Klimt announced that since his artistic freedom was being constrained by an undeserving public, he was returning all advance payments and that he was keeping the works still in his possession. In view of the amount of official patronage Klimt had received earlier in his career, such a break was all the more dramatic. The painting was lost in the fire of 1945 and was part of a recent Google AI project to predict the colours used by Klimt when painting it.

Auvers in Bloom is an AI interpretation of Paul Cezanne's masterpiece "View of Auvers-sur-Oise" dated 1879. View of Auvers-sur-Oise is the common English name for a Paul Cézanne painting known by various French names, usually Paysage d'Auvers-sur-Oise, or in the artist's catalogue raisonné - Groupe de maisons, paysage d'île de France. It is believed to have been painted between 1879 and 1880, several years after Cézanne's residence in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small village northwest of Paris. The painting depicts a landscape of Northern France; the exact location has not been determined.

Victor Chocquet bought the painting from the artist, and it remained in his family's collection until the early 20th century. Later it came into the possession of Bruno Cassirer, who loaned it to the Kunsthaus Zürich. It was inherited by Cassirer's daughter Sophie, and after her death in 1979 it was accepted in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.

Shortly after midnight on New Year's Day in 2000, guards at the Ashmolean, responding to a fire alarm, discovered the painting was missing. Police believe the thief or thieves used a smoke bomb and that night's millennium celebrations as a cover for the theft of the museum's only Cézanne and the only painting taken. It has not been recovered.

Radiant Nativity is an AI interpretation of Caravaggio's masterpiece "Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence" dated 1609. Caravaggio’s work, which measures almost six square metres, was stolen from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, on October 16, 1969. It was removed from its frame by the thieves — police suspected two — and taken from the church, which was then ransacked of other artworks and items, including benches inlaid with mother of pearl. Valued at $20 million, the main suspects remain the local Sicilian mafia, and one informant told police that mob boss Salvatore Riina used it as a floor mat. A replica commissioned in 2015 hangs in its place and art historians have theorised the original was destroyed during the Irpinia earthquake in southern Italy in 1980.

“Mirage” is an AI interpretation of French artist Claude Monet - Charing Cross Bridge - which is a series of oil paintings created between the period of 1899 to 1905, during Monet’s exile during the Franco-Prussian War. During this time, Monet travelled to London for the first time in 1870 and became enthralled with the city, and vowed to return to it someday. Monet's fascination with London lay primarily in its fogs, a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. Writers hypothesize that Monet was also inspired by contemporaries J.M.W. Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who were similarly fascinated by London's atmosphere. The paintings depict a misty, impressionist Charing Cross Bridge in London, England. Monet worked on the series from 1899 to 1905, creating a total of 37 paintings depicting the bridge.

This painting, was among a series of artworks stolen from Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum in October 2013. The missing works include Monet's Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge, Picasso's Harlequin Head, Matisse's Reading Girl in White and Yellow and Lucien Freud's Woman with Eyes Closed. Romanian investigators found the remains of paint, canvas and nails in the oven of a woman whose son was charged with stealing masterpieces from a Dutch gallery in October last year. Olga Dogaru admitted to torching the artwork to "destroy evidence" after her son's arrest. The painting is valued at €100 to €200 million.

The ‘Resonant Bathers’

Oil on canvas | 270cm x 160cm

Private Enquiry to enquiries@profimaarts.com

The ‘Resonant Bathers’ is an AI interpretation of Paul Cézanne's masterpiece "The Bathers" or "Les Grandes Baigneuses" dated 1885. "The Bathers" kept in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is considered to be one of the finest works of Cézanne. He worked on this large painting for almost seven years and actually never finished it. The artist created many similar scenes during his career, but this last painting, because of its size sometimes also called Large Bathers, seems to be the quintessence of Cézanne’s painting abilities and talent. With each version of his bathers, Cézanne moved away from the traditional presentation of paintings by simplifying forms and geometricizing the composition, lying a strong foundation for cubism and abstract art.

All exhibited works are available to purchase, along with bespoke commissions subject to discussion with the artists agent. For more information please email jo.stevenson@oetkercollection.com