2007 Catalogue - Colnaghi

COLNAGHI
ESTABLISHED 1760
2007

COLNAGHI
ESTABLISHED 1760
OLD MASTER PAINTINGS
2007
COLNAGHI
15 Old Bond Street
London W1S 4AX
United Kingdom
T. +44-20-7491-7408 F. +44-20-7491-8851
www.colnaghi.co.uk

FOREWORD
It has been two years since our last review catalogue, during which time we have continued to build on our traditional strengths
in Old Master paintings and drawings, and have managed to buy some works of the highest quality, some of which, I am very
proud to say, have ended up in great museums, such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and others, in important
private collections in Europe and America. At the same time we have also undertaken some exciting new initiatives through
our recent cooperation with the contemporary art dealers Hauser and Wirth and our continuing involvement in photography,
an area in which Colnaghi played a pioneering role as dealers in the nineteenth century.
The beginning of the twenty-first century is a particularly challenging time for the Old Master dealer. Every year the search
for high-quality paintings and drawings becomes more difficult with a diminishing supply of top-quality works of art available
on the market. At the same time we are operating in a world, which seems at first glance, to have become increasingly
dominated by contemporary art; by the worship of the new at the expense of the old. However, there are signs that more and
more younger people are beginning to look again at the Old Masters and that contemporary art collectors are realising that
the art of the past and the art of the present can coexist in exciting ways. Although it sometimes seems as though the supply
of pictures by the Old Masters must be drying up, I am encouraged by the fact that we can still manage to put together a
catalogue containing excellent works by artists of the calibre of Boucher, Cranach the Elder and Jan Brueghel the Younger and
that, in the last two years, we have sold important paintings by Watteau, Luca Giordano, Ribera and Honthorst. I am
extremely proud of the links that we have established and maintained over the years with some of the world’s great museums,
but I am also delighted to have been able to forge new friendships with several young collectors who have become clients of
Colnaghi since I took over the ownership of the Gallery in 2002 with my colleague and business partner Katrin Bellinger.
While our core business continues to be centred on Old Master paintings and drawings, our exhibitions over the last two years
have ranged widely from Victorian photography and German nineteenth-century art to the paintings of Edward Seago and,
on the drawings side, from botanical watercolours of the Anglo - Indian School, to the contemporary drawings of John
Sergeant. We continue to participate actively in international art fairs, including the International Fine Art Fair in New
York, the Paris Biennale, Palm Beach and the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht and this summer we will be returning to
the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair in London. Our colleagues in the Drawings department have also been very busy
exhibiting at the Salon du Dessin in Paris and at Old Master Drawings Week in London. In addition, this year we will be
launching some new educational initiatives with study weekends at the Hotel Schloss Fuschl in collaboration with the
Bernheimer Gallery in Munich as well as an active exhibition programme.
I am grateful to Jeremy Howard, who recently rejoined Colnaghi after fourteen years in the academic world, for editing the
catalogue and to Sarah Gallagher who researched many of the entries. I am also grateful to the following for their help: Colin
Bailey, Matthew Burke, David Chesterman, Patrick Corbett, John Davis, Simon Folkes, Claus Grimm, Matthew Hollow,
Michael Howes, Leon Krempel, Anthony Ley, Fred Meijer, Luuk Pijl, Marcel Rothlisberger, Anne van de Sandt, Mary Tavener
Holmes, Johanna Tran Dubreuil and Luisa Wood-Ruby. In addition I would like to thank Katrin Bellinger, Georgina Duits,
Maeve Cosgrove, Florian Haerb, Peter Iaquinandi and Livia Schaafsma in London and the colleagues of the Bernheimer
Gallery in Munich for all their hard work over the past year.
I hope you will enjoy the catalogue and we look forward to seeing you either in the gallery or at one of the international art
fairs that we will be attending in 2007.
Konrad Bernheimer, February 2007
4

CONTENTS
2005/6: TWO YEARS IN REVIEW AT COLNAGHI
By Jeremy Howard
PAINTINGS
1. PAUL BRIL
An extensive mountainous coastal Landscape
with Brigands abducting Theagenese and
Chariclea 18
2. FRANS FRANCKEN THE YOUNGER
Virgil in a Basket 20
3. JAN BRUEGHEL THE YOUNDGER
Still-Life of a Crown Imperial Lily, a Peony,
Roses, Tulips and other Flowers in a Wooden Tub 22
4. DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER
Monkeys drinking and smoking and
Monkeys playing Cards 24
5. NICHOLAS MAES
Group Portrait of a Family in an Italianate
Garden with a Fountain 26
6. JOHANNES VAN BRONCHORST
A Lady playing a Guitar on a Balcony 30
7. ABRAHAM BRUEGHEL
Still-Life of a Watermelon, Cherries, Peaches, Apricots,
Plums, Pomegranate and Figs with Lilies, Roses,
Morning Glory and other Flowers on an Acanthus
Stone Relief, a mountainous Landscape beyond 32
8. RACHEL RUYSCH
Roses, Tulips and other Flowers in a Glass Vase
on a Stone Ledge 34
9. JAN VAN HUYSUM
Still-Life of Grapes and a Peach
on a Table-Top 36
10. JEAN-LOUIS DEMARNE, CALLED
DEMARNETTE
The Horse Market 38
11. LUCAS CRANACH THE ELDER
AND STUDIO
The Ill-matched Lovers 40
12. ROBERT GRIFFIER
Summer: An extensive Rhenish Landscape with Boats
at a Quayside and Peasants by an Inn and
Winter: A frozen Winter Landscape with Peasants 42
6
13. PHILIP MERCIER
A Young Girl reading by Candlelight 44
14. CARLO DOLCI
Christ carrying the Cross and Madonna 46
15. Attr. to GIOVANNI MARIA BOTTALLA,
CALLED IL RAFFAELLINO
Bacchus, Temperance and Cupid 50
16. JEAN-FRANÇOIS DE TROY
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
andVenus and Adonis 52
17. NICOLAS LANCRET
Le Menuet 56
18. FRANÇOIS BOUCHER
Une Dame à sa Toilette: A Lady applying
a Beauty-Spot 58
19. CLAUDE-JOSEPH VERNET
Storm in the Port of Livorno 62
20. JEAN HUBER
Voltaire narrating a Fable 64
21. HUBERT ROBERT
A Capriccio with Troubadours and Washerwomen by
a Basin amongst Roman Ruins, a Pyramid beyond 66
22. LOUIS-ROLLAND TRINQUESSE
Portrait of Charles Grant, Vicomte de Vaux, in
uniform as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Garde du
Roi, attended by his Groom with their Horses, a
Fortress beyond 68
23. JACQUES SABLET
La Tarantelle: An evening coastal Landscape with
Neapolitan Peasants dancing the Tarantella 70
24. MARGUERITE GÉRARD
La Bonne Nouvelle 74
25. MARGUERITE GÉRARD
Le Petit Messager 76
FOOTNOTES 78

2005/6
TWO YEARS IN REVIEW AT COLNAGHI
During the last two years since our 2004 review,
Colnaghi have sold a number of important Old Master
pictures to private collectors and museum clients on
both sides of the Atlantic. These range in date from
the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and have been
drawn from both the Northern and the Italian and
Spanish schools. Our London and Munich galleries
have also become involved in new areas, hosting
exhibitions ranging from Victorian photography to
contemporary art. What follows is just a selection of
highlights from some of our recent sales.
Earliest in date is the wonderful painting of Christ
Blessing the Children [fig 1] by the German Renaissance
master, Lucas Cranach the Elder, which was sold to a
private collection. Although there are a number of
repetitions of the subject in Cranach’s oeuvre, such as
the painting of 1538 now in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg,
this is considered to be the earliest version of the
subject and is particularly notable for the psychological
power and vivid characterisation seen in the vigorously
painted heads of the Apostles, whose disapproving
reactions are contrasted with the feelings of adoration
Fig. 1
Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472 – 1553) and studio
Christ Blessing the Children
Acquired by a private collector
7
visible on the faces of the children and their mothers.
This subject was particularly popular with the
Protestant reformers because of the fact that it was
taken to endorse the idea of infant baptism and also
the Lutheran concept of salvation through faith rather
than ecclesiastical intercession. Since Cranach’s
patrons, the Electors of Saxony, were at the centre of
the Protestant Reformation and Cranach himself was
a close friend of Martin Luther and godfather to his
children, the subject had particular resonance for both
the artist and his patrons.
Very different in character and religious sensibility
is the powerful painting of St Andrew [fig 2] by
Jusepe de Ribera, the Spanish follower of Caravaggio,
who spent most of his working life in Naples: a picture
redolent of the art produced in Italy in the wake of the
Counter Reformation.
OPPOSITE: Fig. 2
Jusepe de Ribera, detto Lo Spagnoletto (1591 – 1652)
Saint Andrew
Acquired by a private collector

Fig. 4
Gerrit van Honthorst (1595 – 1656)
Diana and her Attendants with two Greyhounds
Acquired by a private collector
This rare early painting, datable between 1616 and
1618, which was sold to a French private collector, was
painted shortly after the artist’s move from Rome to
Naples, when Ribera was still working strongly under
the influence of Caravaggio. Particularly remarkable is
the sharp chiaroscuro with which the fish, held by the
saint in his right hand, is painted: a pictorial tour de
force of light and shadow which underscores Christ’s
charge to saints Andrew and Peter - “Follow me and I
will make you fishers of men”. It is this which gives the
painting its quality of tactile realism, which, together
with the carefully controlled lighting, finds parallels in
the work of the northern caravaggesque masters.
Another great Neapolitan painting is Luca Giordano’s
Entombment [fig 3] sold to the Memorial Art Gallery
Rochester, New York. Although Giordano was later to
acquire a reputation for bravura brushwork and a light
tonality which looks forward to the Rococo, his early
works of the 1650s, such as this monumental
altarpiece, show him to have been strongly influenced
by the sombre, gritty realism of Ribera, who may have
taught him. The tragic intensity of the work of that
other great Neapolitan master, Mattia Preti, whose
Burial of St Andrew (Sant’Andrea della Valle) also
probably inspired him.
The influence of Caravaggio was also felt north of the
Alps, particularly among the artists of the Utrecht
OPPOSITE Fig. 3
Luca Giordano (1634 – 1705)
The Entombment
Acquired by Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, New York
10
caravaggesque school such as Gerrit van Honthorst.
Honthorst spent his early years, between 1610 and
1615, working in Rome, where he acquired the
nickname Gherardo della Notte, because of his
celebrated candlelit scenes. However, his style changed
when he moved back to the north and, during the
later 1620s, he gradually abandoned his earlier
caravaggesque style in favour of a more evenly lit, suave
classicism and mythological subject matter, which
appealed to the courtly tastes of patrons such as
Charles I and the Stadholder Prince Frederik Henry of
Orange. It was while working for Prince Frederik,
either just before, or shortly after his sojourn at
the English Court in 1628, that Honthorst painted
Diana and her Attendants with two Greyhounds, [fig 4]
which was acquired last year by a British private
collecter. Like many of the pictures painted for
Charles I, such as Mercury presenting the Liberal
Arts to Apollo and Diana (Royal Collection, Hampton
Court), this grand, and exquisitely painted
mythological picture, recorded in the 1632 inventory
of the Stadholder’s collection in Noordeinde, probably
contains portraits of ladies of the Stadholder’s court in
the pastoral fancy dress which became fashionable in
court circles in Holland during the second quarter of
the seventeenth century.

Fig. 5
Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601 – 1678) and Hendrick van Balen (1575 – 1632)
Virgin and Child seated in a Garden with Putti, Birds and Animals
Acquired by a private collector
Like Honthorst, Jan Brueghel the Younger also visited
Italy as a young man, and, shortly after his return in
1625, following his father’s unexpected death, he took
over the running of the family studio. In the years
following his return from Italy. Brueghel produced, in
collaboration with Hendrick van Balen, a number of
paintings of the Virgin and Child set in a garden
landscape, one of the earliest and finest of which
is the Virgin and Child seated in a Garden
with Putti, Birds and Animals, [fig 5] dateable to circa
1626-7, sold last year to a German private collection.
This picture, which has an extremely important British
provenance, having belonged successively to Lord
Landsdowne, William Beckford and the Duke of
Hamilton, draws its inspiration partly from the
paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder of putti with
garlands presenting the fruits of the earth to the Virgin
and Child, but it also perhaps harks back to the earlier
mediaeval tradition of the Virgin in an enclosed
garden, symbolising her virginity. Jan Brueghel and
his father played a pioneering role in the emergence of
still-life as an independent genre, which was to be
taken up enthusiastically in the Netherlands by artists
such as Ambrosius Bosschaert, Balthasar van de Ast
and Jan Davidz de Heem. One of de Heem’s most
gifted pupils was Abraham Mignon, who was born in
11
Frankfurt, but spent most of his working life in Utrecht.
His Still Life with Roses, Poppies, a Parrot Tulip and other
Flowers, [fig 6] painted in the 1660s, was sold last year
to a Swiss private collector, and is a particularly exquisite
example of his abilities to marry colour and line. It is a
successful combination of attention to detail and
sensitivity to the individual qualities of flowers found in
the best Dutch still-life painting, with the powerful
compositional sense and vibrant arrangements of
Flemish masters such as Jan Brueghel the Elder.
The arrangement of strong colours against a dark
background is typical of the work of de Heem and the
Utrecht School, but, although this picture can be
enjoyed on a purely aesthetic level, it can also be
interpreted symbolically as a meditation on the vanity of
human life, which perhaps explains the inclusion of
dying flowers, such as the dropping poppy, and also of
the dew drops, which disappear at sunrise.
The Mignon came from the celebrated eighteenthcentury
collection of Count Schonborn, who
also owned another Colnaghi picture sold last year:
the exquisitely-painted Woman Weaving a Crown of
Flowers [fig 7] by the Leiden-trained fijnschilder
Gottfried Schalken, acquired by the National Gallery
of Art, Washington.

Fig. 6
Abraham Mignon (1640 – 1679)
Still-Life of Roses, Poppies, a Parrot Tulip, a Carnation, Redcurrants,
Blackberries, Morning Glories and other Flowers in a Glass Vase on
a Stone Ledge, with a Snail, Caterpillar, Butterfly, Spider and
other Insects
Acquired by a private collector
Here the flowers appear to symbolise love, as well as
the passing of time, and there is a poignant contrast
between the meticulously painted spring flowers in her
bouquet and the moving portrait of the seated middleaged
woman reflecting on past loves. She is seated in
front of a parapet wall surmounted by a statue of
Cupid, while in the background, painted indistinctly
as if in a dream, a young man pays court to his lady in
a grassy glade. Courtship and reverie are also the
leitmotifs of La Promenade [fig 8] by the great
French eighteenth-century master, Antoine Watteau.
Here the relationship between the courting couple is
observed with great psychological subtlety: the man,
all empty-handed bravado, and the woman, cool and
self-possessed. This picture, which was engraved by
Philip Mercier and enjoyed great contemporary fame,
was very probably painted during Watteau’s visit to
England between 1719 and 1720 and was in an
English private collection until the early twentieth
century. Given the enormous enthusiasm that
Frederick the Great of Prussia had for Watteau’s work
in the eighteenth century, it is appropriate that this late
masterpiece by the artist should have been sold to a
German private collection.
12
Fig. 7
Godfried Schalcken (1643 – 1706)
Woman weaving a Crown of Flowers
Acquired by The National Gallery of Art, Washington
Fig. 8
Antoine Watteau (1684 – 1721)
La Promenade
Acquired by a private collector

Fig. 9
Johann Georg Platzer (1704 – 1761)
The Artist’s Studio
Acquired by the Schloss Fuschl collection, Austria
Watteau’s work not only found favour in England, but
was also a powerful source of inspiration for Johann
Georg Platzer, the leading artist of the Austrian
Rococo, whose work can be seen as a fusion of
elements derived from the French fête champêtre, from
Rubens, from Jan Bruegel and Jan van Kessel and from
the Dutch seventeenth-century finschilders. The Artist’s
Studio [fig 9] is one of a group of works now in the
Schloss Fuschl collection, which boasts the most
extensive private collection of his works in Austria.
Painted, as is typical of Platzer, on copper, this
exquisitely-painted cabinet picture shows various stages
in the production of a painting. In the background is
a life-drawing class, in the foreground a woman crushes
pigments, on the left is a young artist is seated at an
easel where he has been working on a painting of
David and Bathsheba, while the elegant young man
13
standing next to the artist is probably a collector,
representing the final stages of the process: the sale of
the work.
If Platzer’s paintings on copper hark back to the
seventeenth century, the portraits of Perroneau celebrate
la vie moderne. Perroneau was, after Maurice Quentin
de Latour, the foremost French eighteenth-century artist
working in the medium of pastel, a technique which had
been introduced and popularised in France by Rosalba
Carriera. The medium has a peculiar immediacy and
informality. This comes out in the delightfully fresh and
vibrant portraits of M et Mme Olivier [figs 10 and 11]
of 1748 which were sold to a British private collection,
having been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century in the famous Parisian collection of Camille
Groult, who also owned notable portraits by Chardin,
Maurice Quentin de Latour and Greuze.
Perroneau was obliged to travel quite widely to find
commissions, journeying all over northern Europe
from 1755 and eventually dying in Amsterdam. Other
French artists travelled south to Italy where the
popularity of the Grand Tour ensured a ready market
for landscape painting and the lure of the rediscovered
cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and fascination
with the wilder aspects of nature made Naples an
increasingly fashionable destination. The volcanic
eruptions of Vesuvius were particularly admired in the
later eighteenth century for their sublime qualities,
brilliantly captured by Pierre Jacques Volaire, a pupil of
Vernet’s from Toulon.
Fig. 10 and Fig. 11
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1715 – 1783)
Portrait of M. Olivier and Portrait of his Wife, Mme. Olivier
Acquired by a private collector

Fig. 12
Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729 – 1799)
The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius
Acquired by a private collector
Volaire settled in Naples in 1769 and developed an
international reputation as painter of volcanoes.
Unlike his English contemporary Joseph Wright of
Derby, who also painted views of Vesuvius, Volaire
prided himself on his ability to paint from first-hand
observation of eruptions, which is underscored by the
fact that the artist sometimes included himself in the
painting seated at his easel. He also inscribed some of
his paintings “sur le lieu”, to indicate that they were
painted on the spot. In the case of Eruption of Vesuvius,
[fig 12] sold to a French private collector, Volaire has
recorded, with a mixture of scientific accuracy and
undoubted theatricality, the eruption of 14 May 1771.
The volcano is observed from above the lava-filled
Atrio del Cavallo and in the foreground stand a group
of observers, among them, wearing a red coat, is
possibly Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to
Naples, husband of Emma Hamilton and a noted
vulcanologist.
Very different in character from this turbulent
romantic landscape painting, is the suave Empire
portrait style of François-Joseph Kinson, a Belgian
follower of Gérard. His Portrait of Christine Pauline
Charlotte de MacMahon, [fig 13] wife of Comte Jules
de Resseguier, sold to a Swiss private collector, was,
until the end of the nineteenth century, the centrepiece
for the decoration of the family’s newly completed
chateâu in the Pyrenees, for which the picture was
painted in 1827, the year that building work was
completed. With its combination of elegance,
meticulous rendering of fabrics and surfaces and
grandeur in the overall composition, the portrait recalls
the work of David and Gérard.
14
Fig. 13
François-Joseph Kinson (1771 – 1839)
Portrait of Christine Pauline Charlotte de MacMahon, Wife of Comte
Jules de Rességuier (1788 – 1862), and her Son Charles (1820 – 1902)
Acquired by a private collector

Fig. 15
Installation view of In the Company of Old Masters Exhibition, Colnaghi
“Today painting is dead” was the verdict of Delaroche
on the invention of photography in 1839, just over ten
years after the portrait by Kinson was painted. In the
event painting continued to flourish in the nineteenthcentury
alongside the newer medium and Colnaghi
was among the first dealers to recognise its artistic
significance, giving pioneering exhibitions of the work
of photographers such as Roger Fenton and Julia
Margaret Cameron. Since 1990, when Colnaghi put
on a major retrospective of the work of Julia Margaret
Cameron, photography has been one of the fastest
growing areas in the art market and, as a reflection of
this, as well as in homage to the gallery’s nineteenthcentury
history, Colnaghi mounted an exhibition of
Victorian photography in partnership with New Yorkbased
dealer Hans Kraus, which included a masterly
Orientalist Study [fig 14] by Roger Fenton sold to an
American private collector. This was followed by an
exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work at the
Bernheimer Gallery in Munich and there are plans for
further photography exhibitions in coming years at
both galleries. The Mapplethorpe show explored
juxtapositions between the work of the great twentieth-
OPPOSITE Fig. 14
Roger Fenton (1819 – 1869)
Orientalist Study
Acquired by a private collector
16
century photographer and the art of the past.
In a similar vein, the show In the Company of
the Old Masters [fig 15] mounted in collaboration with
New York dealer, Mitchell Innes and Nash, brought
together three American contemporary artists - Julian
Schnabel, Tina Barney and Eve Sussman; it explored
the interrelationships between their work and a
selection of Old Master paintings which had inspired
them. The relationship between contemporary art
and the art of the past is, we believe, an ongoing
dialogue and this explains Colnaghi’s most recent
collaboration with the contemporary art dealers
Hauser and Wirth, who, since October, have occupied
the top three floors of the building above Colnaghi.
Hauser and Wirth will be mounting a series of
contemporary art exhibitions in the Colnaghi Gallery
which, it is hoped, will encourage new collectors to
explore aspects of this relationship between
contemporary art and the art of the past and, hopefully
find inspiration, like so many artists, in the work of
the Old Masters.
Jeremy Howard, December 2006

CATALOGUE OF PAINTINGS

Literature: To be included (and reproduced in colour)
in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of works by Paul
Bril currently being prepared by Dr. Luuk Pijl .
Recently discovered, this painting is an important
addition to the oeuvre of Paul Bril. 1 The subject
depicted comes from the late ancient Greek novel
Historiae Aethiopicae by the Syrian Heliodorus. The
story tells of the love affair of the Greek Theagenes and
the Ethiopian Chariclea, a princess and priestess of
Apollo. Theagenes has abducted Chariclea but while
fleeing, the couple are taken captive by pirates, whose
chief wants to take Chariclea for himself. However, at
a feast on the Nile delta, the pirates end up quarrelling
and kill each other (which is the scene depicted in the
middle distance). Theagenes is wounded in the fight,
and when a band of brigands comes upon them, the
couple are taken captive, once again, while the robbers
plunder the ship. A second group of brigands appear
and, having driven the first band away, take the young
lovers to their nearby village, which is the main scene
in this work. After numerous vicissitudes, the story
ends happily with the marriage of the couple.
Although virtually unknown today, the Historiae
Aethiopicae was popular in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. A French translation appeared
from 1547 onwards in several editions, and an
important edition with engravings by Crispijn van de
Passe appeared in Paris in 1624. The subject was
thought to be suitable for palace decorations; in the
King’s apartment at Fontainebleau the story was
depicted by Ambroise Dubois in 1609/10, and in
1625 Abraham Bloemaert was commissioned by
Frederik Hendrik of Nassau, Prince of Orange, to
paint the story on the occasion of his marriage with
Amalia van Solms. Bloemaert’s Theagenes and
Chariclea among the Slain Sailors, now in Potsdam,
Sanssouci, shows the scene on the beach, which is
rendered in Bril’s painting in the middle distance. 2
01
Paul Bril
(Breda 1553/54 – 1626 Rome)
An extensive mountainous coastal Landscape
with Brigands abducting Theagenes and Chariclea
Oil on canvas
41 3 /8 x 58 1 /4 in. (105 x 148 cm.)
19
Noting stylistic similarities with works Bril painted
during the last years of his prolific life, such as the fine
Landscape with Nymphs and Satyrs in Oberlin, dated
1623, and the Landscape with the Temptation of Christ
in Birmingham, dated 1626, we can date our painting
to around 1625. 3 As Dr. Pijl notes, the Colnaghi
picture demonstrates that Bril was a master of
observation. Many details are meticulously rendered,
from the plants and trees to the sunset and harbour in
the distance. The alternating zones of dark and light
give the landscape a clear structure and also provide a
convincing suggestion of depth. Although Bril often
relied on Northern and Italian figure painters for the
staffage in his landscapes, 4 the figures in the present
work are stylistically in keeping with his own way of
figure painting. They are unusually large in size: no
other painting with figures of this scale is extant, which
makes our painting even more important among Bril’s
late works.
Paul Bril was born in Antwerp in 1554. After his
training there he left for Lyon (1574) and settled in
Rome by 1582, where he spent the rest of his life. In
Rome from 1590 on, Paul Bril created small landscapes
on copper which are a synthesis of the late mannerist
landscapes invented by Gillis III van Coninxloo and
continued by Martin de Vos, Jan Brueghel the Elder’s
velvet adoption of the same source, Saedeleer’s
engravings, and Joos de Momper’s alpine landscapes.
Most figures in Bril’s landscapes were painted by fellow
artists who were also often northern residents in Rome:
Elsheimer, Rottenhamer and Rubens. These small
landscapes were, for Bril, a huge artistic and
commercial success both in Italy and in Flanders. He
worked in Rome for important patrons, including
Popes Gregory XIII, Sixtus V and Clement VIII and
Cardinals Sfondrato, Borromée, Scipione Borghese,
del Nero and Matei and members of their respective
families.

02
Frans Francken the Younger
(Antwerp 1581 – 1642 Antwerp)
Provenance: Private collection, Germany; Cologne, Sale
Kunsthaus am Museum; Carola van Ham, March 1982
Literature: U. Härting, Frans Francken de Jüngere
(1581 – 1642), Luca Verlag Frefem,1989, p. 364, no. 424
In the Middle Ages, the poet Virgil acquired an
apocryphal reputation as a Sorcerer. According to one
of the mediaeval legends, Virgil fell in love with the
Roman Emperor's daughter. One night a tryst was
arranged and she promised to raise the poet to her
bedroom in a basket; however instead she left him
dangling halfway up the wall to be mocked by passers
by the following day. Virgil took his revenge by using
his magical powers to extinguish every fire in the town
and the only way for the townsfolk to relight their fires
was through the “fiery tail” of the young lady, which
explains the bawdy scene with the candles in the
background.
The tale of the poet Virgil in a basket belongs to a
popular fifteenth- and sixteenth-century theme: the
power of women. The subject, which was depicted in
two celebrated series of woodcuts by Lucas van Leyden,
was seen as illustrating women's ability to make fools
of even the wisest of men, though here, interestingly, it
is Virgil who gets the last laugh. In a characteristic
narrative strategy of the artist, van Leyden placed the
main subject in the background, inviting the viewer to
join the onlookers in the foreground as they discuss
the event. It was a theme which was to appear
frequently in the fifteenth- and sixteenth- centuries in
the graphic work of artists such as Altdorfer, van
Leyden and Pencz. There is also a drawing of this
subject by Lambert Lombard currently with Colnaghi.
In this finely painted copper of 1610 Francken draws
upon these earlier traditions, like van Leyden, focusing
our attention on the reactions of the onlookers in the
Virgil in a Basket
Signed and dated on the front lower left: D.j.F. FRANC. IN Ao 1610.
Verso: Shield mark of the St.Luke’s Guild of Antwerp, stamp of Peter Stas, dated 1609.
Oil on copper
19 1 /2 x 25 1 /2 in. (49 x 65 cm.)
21
foreground. Although the building in the foreground
is less elaborate, the overall lines of the composition
echo that of van Leyden’s engraving of 1525. 1 But,
significantly, whereas the van Leyden engravings show
only the episode of the mocking of Virgil, which
figures very prominently in the composition, Francken
conflates the two episodes in the story, so as to show,
simultaneously, Virgil in the basket, a scene which is
effectively marginalised, and the poet’s revenge, which
is given much greater prominence. The main thrust
of the story is therefore less about the ability of women
to make fools of men, than of men to turn the tables
on women. The Colnaghi picture is painted in
Francken’s typical glowing early palette of olive green,
wine red and highlights picked out in shell gold. The
subject was repeated in an almost identical, but slightly
later picture painted on wood in a Swiss private
collection. 2
The most important member of a family of artists,
Frans Francken the Younger specialised in small
cabinet pictures. Essentially a figurative artist, he often
collaborated with specialist landscape and architectural
artists such as Joos de Momper the Younger and Pieter
Neeffs. He was presumably a student of his father, but
probably also trained in Paris with his uncle,
Hieronymous I. In 1605 Francken became a master of
in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. He soon showed
the innovative approach to subject matter that was to
characterise his oeuvre, inventing the theme of the
‘monkey’s kitchen’ and developing the genre of
Kunstkammern and picture galleries. In the 1620s his
early palette of green, olives and red-brown tones was
replaced by a brighter, cooler spectrum, and the
following decade his use of thick impasto gave way to
a preference for more liquid, translucent glazes.

03
Jan Brueghel the Younger
(Antwerp 1601 – 1678 Antwerp)
Still-Life of a Crown Imperial Lily, a Peony, Roses,
Tulips and other Flowers in a Wooden Tub
Provenance: Private collection, France
Born in Antwerp in 1601, Jan Brueghel the Younger
probably trained in the studio of his father, Jan
Brueghel the Elder, before travelling to Milan in 1622
to meet his father’s patron, Cardinal Federico
Borromeo, and then, two years later, to Palermo with
his childhood friend, Anthony van Dyck. Following
the unexpected death of Jan the Elder during a cholera
epidemic in 1625, the young painter returned to
Antwerp and took over his father’s studio. As might be
expected, his artistic output was to a large degree based
on the models and prototypes of his father and, both
before and after the trip to Italy, Jan the Younger
continued to draw inspiration directly from his
father’s work.
This hitherto unpublished still-life by Jan Brueghel the
Younger, is one of around half a dozen very high
quality versions by Jan Brueghel the Younger
of a famous composition painted by the artist’s
father, circa 1606-7, known as the Wiener
Kaiserkronenstrauss (Vienna Imperial Crown Bouquet)
in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. Other
versions by Brueghel the Younger are in the
Altepinakothek, Munich and the Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam. The prototype for these still-lives, the
Wiener Kaiserkronenstrauss, is one of the earliest and
most celebrated still life paintings by Jan Brueghel the
Elder. According to Ertz1 the Vienna picture was
probably painted very shortly after Jan Brueghel the
Elder’s earliest documented still-life painting, the
so-called Grosser Mailänder Strauss (Large Milan
Bouquet), which was commissioned by Cardinal
Federico Borromeo from the artist in 1606. The
Wiener Kaiserkronenstrauss was painted for the
Archduke Albrecht VII, the Hapsburg Governor of the
Netherlands, a great patron of artists, such as Rubens,
and a notable lover of flowers. 2 Ertz suggests that the
Archduke may have seen Brueghel at work on the
Grosser Mailänder Strauss and decided to commission
a similar painting from the artist. This would explain
the fact that, while the Vienna “bouquet” is arranged
in a wooden tub as opposed to a porcelain vase, there
are otherwise very close compositional links between
the two paintings.
Oil on canvas
42 1 /2 x 36 in. (118 x 91 cm.)
23
The fame and popularity of the Wiener
Kaiserkronenstrauss inspired a number of known
versions (six are listed by Ertz) some of which,
notably the painting in the Altepinakothek, Munich, 3
are of such high quality that were traditionally
attributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder. In re-attributing
the Munich picture to Jan Brueghel the Younger,
Ertz, 4 acknowledged the close stylistic affinities
between the work of the father and son and suggested
that the Munich painting might have been
“produced in the father’s studio, (perhaps with his
assistance), before the Italian journey, about 1620”.
Of the six versions published by Ertz, five are dated
by him circa 1620, that is before the Italian journey,
when the artist was still working under the direction
of his father. These early versions, which include
the paintings in the Altepinakothek and the
Rijksmuseum, are characterised by a fineness of detail
in the painting of the flowers and a sense of volume
which disappears in his later still-lifes, such as the
version of the Wiener Kaiserkronenstrauss published
by Ertz as in a French private collection, which Ertz
dates to the late 1630s.
While the overall composition of the Colnaghi
picture derives from the famous still-life in Vienna,
there are significant differences in the choice and
arrangement of flowers and such details as the
substitution of wild-flowers for the butterflies which
appear in the Vienna prototype, which demonstrate
that this is a free variation on a well-known theme,
rather than a copy. Of the versions published by Ertz,
the Colnaghi picture is closest in both size and
composition to a painting in a Zurich private
collection dated by Ertz circa 1620, 5 from which it
differs in small details and in the fact that the
Colnaghi picture is painted on canvas rather than
panel. The very high quality of the painting of the
flowers, the sense of volume created by the “haloes”
around the petals, and the masterful detail suggest
that this painting, like the Zurich version, may be an
early work by Brueghel the Younger painted, like the
majority of the versions published by Ertz, shortly
before his visit to Italy when the artist was still working
in his father’s studio and possibly under his direction.

04
David Teniers the Younger
(Antwerp 1610 – 1690 Brussels)
Monkeys drinking and smoking and Monkeys playing Cards
Provenance: Jacques Guerlain collection.
Literature: M. Klinge, in the exhibition catalogue,
David Teniers the Younger. Paintings and Drawings,
Antwerp, 1991, p. 331, as a lost work (referring to the
Monkeys drinking and smoking).
Engraved: Monkeys drinking and smoking by
Caldwall, 1769.
The first of these beautifully painted and preserved
compositions, Monkeys drinking and smoking, is a
newly discovered work that had hitherto been known
only through a preparatory drawing (Cabinet des
dessins, Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 20527) and an
engraving by Caldwall published in 1770. The Louvre
drawing can be dated to the the artist’s Brussels period
– the 1660s – and this pair should be dated similarly.
Pictures of monkeys had been popular from the
sixteenth century and it was Teniers who developed the
theme in the seventeenth century. He depicted them in
various settings such as Monkeys in a Kitchen
(Hermitage, St Petersburg, inv. no. 568), School for
Monkeys (Prado, Madrid, no. 1808), or, as in our pair,
smoking and playing cards. The title page to Het
Apenspel inde Werelt, a set of engravings after designs
by David Teniers, shows monkeys dancing, drinking,
playing cards, smoking and merrymaking. Monkeys at
the time were seen a stupid animals, who merely aped
the wasteful activities of man. Thus in the present
works, Teniers parodies human life, reinforcing the
satire by dressing the animals in fashionable garb.
Indeed Calder’s engraving is accompanied by a caption
giving a satirical interpretation of the scene:
Both signed lower right: D.TENIERS.F.
Oil on panel, a pair
6 3 /4 x 8 5 /8 in. (17 x 22 cm.)
25
‘Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis’
(Do Chattering Monkies mimick men, or we turn’d
Apes outmonkie them?)
The son of David Teniers the Elder, David the Younger
became a master of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in
1632 - 33 after an apprenticeship to his father, with
whom he also collaborated. In 1637 he married Anna,
the daughter and heiress of Jan Brueghel the Elder.
Teniers produced small scale religious scenes as well as
genre pieces, for which he was famous. He quickly
became one of Antwerp’s pace-setting and most
successful painters, which probably accounts for his
assumption of functions that carried a degree of social
prominence, such as the office of Master of the Chapel
of the Holy Sacrament in the St Jacobskerk between
1637 and 1639, and Dean of the Guild of St Luke in
1644 – 5. He also received extremely prestigious
commissions such as the large group portrait of the
Arquebusiers’ Company (1641, Hermitage, St.
Petersburg). During this same Antwerp period he also
executed commissions for Antoine Triest (1576 –
1657), Bishop of Bruges, one of the most prominent
patrons of the arts in the southern Netherlands. By
1647 Teniers was working in Brussels for Archduke
Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Southern
Netherlands from 1646, and in 1651 he became the
Archduke’s court painter. He consequently moved
from Antwerp to the court at Brussels, and in 1656 he
bought a building near the archducal palace. Teniers
was granted noble status in 1663 and, through his
influence at court, succeeded in establishing an
academy at Antwerp in 1665.

Provenance: Sir Francis Cook, 1st Bt., Viscount
de Monserrate (1817-1901), Doughty House,
Richmond, Surrey (hung in the Long Gallery); by
descent to Sir Francis Cook, 4th Bt. (1907-1978), the
late husband of Lady Brenda Cook.
Exhibited: Included in a touring exhibition of English
museums organised by the Art Exhibitions Bureau as
part of the Cook Collection Group, Old Master
portraits from the Cook collection: Brighton Art Gallery;
Dudley Art Gallery; Mansfield Museum and Art
Gallery; Doncaster Art Gallery and Museum;
Northampton Art Gallery; Southampton Art Gallery;
the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield; Darlington Public
Library, January 1947 - January 1948; To be included
in the forthcoming exhibition Masterpieces of
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portrait Painting, National
Gallery, London, 27th June – 16th October 2007 and
Royal Picture Gallery Mauristshuis, Den Haag, 13th
October 2007 – 13th January 2008.
Literature: M. Brockwell, H. Cook and F. Cook,
An Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at Doughty House,
Richmond, belonging to Sir Frederick Cook Bart.,
Visconde de Monserrate, 1914, p. 22, no. 102, in the
Long Gallery; J.O. Kronig, A Catalogue of the Paintings
at Doughty House, Richmond, and Elsewhere in the
Collection of Sir Frederick Cook Bt., vol. II, Dutch and
Flemish Schools, London 1914, p. 53, no. 278,
illustrated; C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue
Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch
Painters of the Seventeenth Century, London 1916
(English edn.), vol. VI, p. 597, no. 556 (size wrongly
given as 211 /
2 x 27 in.); M.W. Brockwell, ‘The Cook
Collection Part II – The Flemish and Dutch Schools’,
Connoisseur, vol. XLVIII, May 1917, p. 28; [M.W.
Brockwell], Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at
Doughty House, Richmond, Surrey, in the Collection of
Sir Herbert Cook Bt., London 1932, p.41, no. 278;
F.W. Robinson, Dutch Life in the Golden Century,
New York 1975, p. 47, no. 32; W. Sumowski, Gemälde
der Rembrandt-Schüler, vol. III, London 1983, p. 2037,
no. 1444.
05
Nicolaes Maes
(Dordrecht 1623 – 1693 Amsterdam)
Group Portrait of a Family in an Italianate Garden with a Fountain
Oil on canvas
60 7 /8 x 67 in. (153.1 x 170.2 cm.)
26
This family portrait provides us with an impressive
example of Nicolaes Maes’s artistic skill. He was for a
time the most sought-after portraitist in Holland and
is regarded today as one of the most gifted of
Rembrandt’s pupils. From the nineteenth century until
recently the Colnaghi picture formed part of the Cook
Collection originally displayed in Doughty House,
Richmond, from which have come such famous works
as van Eyck’s Three Maries at the Open Sepulchre in the
Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam. A
black-and-white illustration in Werner Sumowski’s
Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler gave only an
inadequate impression of the colourful composition,
especially as the wrong dimensions were constantly
handed down in error in the catalogues. 1 The
imposing painting is in fact one of the largest known
canvases by Maes.
The six family members are depicted against the
backdrop of a picturesque park containing the
fragment of an antique relief, a dolphin fountain, vases
and trees with dense foliage. The costumes of the two
sons are suggestive of mythological figures such as
Meleager. At the beginning of the 1660s Maes had
already created a series of historicizing portraits of
young ‘huntsmen’, still at that time closely imitating
pictures by Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp and Jan Mijtens. 2 By
comparison with these early, schematic examples which
had a stiff effect, the pose of both boys, especially that
of the elder, is more relaxed, almost bordering on a
dance. The pose of the latter is only echoed in Maes’
work on one other occasion, namely in the Portrait of
a Young Man in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 3 The
source is to be found neither in portraits by his
contemporaries nor in the sculpture of antiquity but
in the graphic works of Hubert Goltzius. 4 The
agreement of the pose with the (mirror-inverted)
engraving The Standard Swinger, 1587 is too striking
to have occurred by chance. 5

The younger of the two sons, in a garment copying the
style of the lorica worn by Roman soldiers, presents his
kill in the form of a hare held by its hind legs, 6 as a
little spaniel jumps around near him. On the right of
the picture, the pose of one of the two daughters, who
has also similarly slipped into a mythological role,
corresponds to that of her two brothers, turned
inwards towards the picture plane. The shell with
which she draws water from the Renaissance fountain
is a motif familiar from the imagery of Granida and
Daifilo, one of the pastoral literary works by P.C.
Hooft, popular at that time and frequently seized upon
by history- as well as portrait-painters. 7 Water as a
symbol of purity in conjunction with the motif of
Cupid surmounting the fountain, raising its arms to
Heaven as if wishing to flee all earthly things, gave the
contemporary viewer a clear understanding of the
morally sound nature of this allegory of Love. The
second daughter, obviously a little younger, wears a
dress and hairstyle in the fashion of the day. Her
smooth, parted hairstyle appears in works by Dutch
portraitists from 1668. 8 The oranges in her left hand
signified marital concepts such as love, chastity and
fertility. 9
The parents seated at the base of the fountain gaze out
towards the viewer (as do two of their children)
creating a source of tranquility in the lively
‘choreography’ of the figures. With the father’s right
hand, so to speak, he introduces his family to the
viewer with pride, while at the same time linking arms
with his wife in wedded bliss. The latter is depicted
wearing a wine-coloured dress over a white silk
underskirt, pearls at her throat, ears and in her hair,
with a bonnet and veil. Arnold Houbroken, the
Netherlandish writer of biographies on artists, draws
attention to Maes’s ‘flattering brush’ (vleijend penceel)
and tells many an interesting anecdote in this respect
about particularly vain female clients. 10
The obvious blend of elements from contemporary
fashion and mythological costume is on the whole
typical of the Dutch historicising portraits of the
second half of the seventeenth century. That having
been said, probably no other portraitist has been as
bold in his accessorising as Maes or, to be more exact,
the Maes of the years from 1670 onwards. The crossover
of motifs from the world of huntsman and
shepherd has also been widespread. 11 It is interesting
that even the neoclassical painter and theoretician
Gerard de Lairesse recommended a coexistence of the
Antique and the Modern. 12
The Colnaghi painting is neither signed nor dated but
stylistic grounds allow the date to be set within the
years circa 1675/76. The reasons for this are the
brightly gleaming colours and the fluidity of the
brushstrokes of hair and dress that are characteristic of
Maes’s brushwork during these two years, the most
successful of his career. 13 As, by a very conservative
estimate, of the 900 portraits painted by Maes in
28
roughly four decades, over 250 with dates survive, his
stylistic development can be plotted with exactitude,
a rare occurrence with seventeenth century artists. 14
After his apprenticeship with Rembrandt in
Amsterdam was completed, Maes returned to his
birthplace, Dordrecht, opened his own studio and
started a family. In the initial years of independence he
painted mainly interiors with mothers, children and
eavesdropping maidservants, but also turned very early
(1655) to the portrait, devoting himself entirely to this
art from 1660. Following the death of Jacob Cuyp,
Maes immediately became the leading portraitist in
Dordrecht, receiving in addition more and more
commissions from outside it during the 1660s. In the
year 1673 Maes and his family settled in Amsterdam
where he enjoyed overwhelming success. Even though
his production rate slowed as he became older, he yet
remained unchallenged as No.1 until circa 1680. No
fewer than thirty-two dated portraits survive from the
year 1675 alone. At the time Maes was painting an
estimated one to two portraits a week for patrons
belonging to the wealthy bourgeoisie: burgomasters,
merchants, senior officials and clergymen. Amazingly,
the quality of Maes’ work was not at all affected by the
large increase in output, quite the opposite. In the
very few years of greatest output circa 1675-1680 and
without the help of assistants, the most surprising, upto-date
painterly solutions were worked out.
Maes at any rate reacted to the strong demand by
painting an increasing number of small-format halflength
portraits, often without hands, since these took
up less time. Consequently the group portrait we have
here must have been the result of an exceptional
commission, particularly as the painting of family
portraits was not the type of work favoured by
successful portraitists. The fact is that the majority of
Dutch family portraits are by lesser-known or even
unknown artists. 15 In a similar manner Maes too
painted the portraits of far more families at the
beginning of his career than he did in later years. From
these years in Amsterdam only one other family
portrait is known. This is in the Fogg Art Museum,
Cambridge, Massachussetts and can be dated to the
later years of the 1680s. 16
Unfortunately the identity of the sitters remains
elusive. There is no painted coat-of-arms, no dusty
monogram, nothing that could help us further.
Following a suggestion by Susan Morris that perhaps
the prominently displayed hare might provide proof of
the family name, investigations took place in the
Bureau of Iconography in The Hague and in the
Municipal Archive in Amsterdam. They failed to yield
a positive result, the only suitable candidate, Anthonij
de Haes, having died without issue. 17
Report by Dr Léon Krempel, Curator, Haus der Kunst,
Munich, and author of Studien zu den datierten Gemälden
des Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693), Petersberg 2000.

06
Johannes van Bronchorst
(Utrecht 1627 – 1656 Italy)
Provenance: Charles le Grelle, Brussels, circa 1930;
thence by descent to the present owners.
The subject and compositional style of A Lady playing
a Guitar on a Balcony stems from the early seventeenth
century Utrecht Caravaggisti tradition of musical
companies arranged on balconies. These motifs can
be seen widely in works by Gerrit van Honthorst and
Jan van Bijlert1 and this tradition was subsequently
popularised by Jan Gerritsz van Bronchorst and his
son, Johannes (or Jansz). Jan Gerritsz van Bronchorst
was a very productive painter of di sotto in su
decorations where the perspective is adjusted to take
into account a viewer looking up at the painting from
below. 2 Very probably these paintings would originally
have been hung high up in dining or banqueting
rooms to give the illusion of a minstrel’s gallery full of
serenading musicians. The majority of these balcony
scenes are composed of musical or drinking companies,
however some are composed with a single figure either
with or without a balustrade. 3 Partly because of this
reason and certain similarities in style, the oeuvre of
Johannes van Bronchorst was all but forgotten by the
eighteenth-century, and until the 1980s, many of his
works were wrongly attributed to his father, Jan
Gerritsz. van Bronchorst. 4 The paintings that can be
unquestionably attributed to Johannes van Bronchorst,
can be provisionally only put at four of five in total,
little, but enough to allow us to learn something of the
personality and style of the painter. It is clear that his
style and the compositional elements were influenced
by his father, yet the details of his paintings show him
to have a precocious talent that overtakes that of his
father and mentor.
The compositional and subject matter similarities
between the work of father and son are undeniable and
have created much confusion over past centuries.
Among the works most recently reattributed from
father to son are Young Woman in the Centraal
Museum, Utrecht and Aurora in The Wadsworth
Atheneum, Connecticut. 5 Nevertheless comparing our
A Lady playing a Guitar on a Balcony
Oil on canvas
49 7 /8 x 41 1 /2 in. (126.8 x 105.4 cm.)
30
work with Jan Gerritsz van Bronchorst’s A Lady playing
a Guitar (formerly with Rafael Vals, London and
signed JvBronchorst 1650) one can see that the father’s
painterly technique is less refined, despite the strong
similarities in terms of the overall composition. When
comparing The Young Woman in the Centraal Museum
in Utrecht with the Colnaghi portrait there are distinct
similarities between the smooth brush strokes and the
elegant refinement of the sitters hands and
physiognomy. Also, in both works the brushwork of
the cloth is elaborately rendered and the figures more
smoothly and firmly modelled.
Johannes can be seen as a link between the first
generation of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, which involved,
among others, his father and also his teacher, Gerrit
van Honthorst, and the following generation of Dutch
Classicists, such as Gérard de Lairesse. The influence of
these artists can be seen in the Colnaghi picture, where
van Bronchorst has depicted a life-size representation
of a guitar player, with a heightened contrast between
light and dark. Although we are not aware of the exact
date of the death of Johannes van Bronchorst, we do
know that, like his father before him, Bronchorst
travelled to Italy in the late 1640s, staying and working
in both Rome and Venice. It is assumed that it was
during his stay in Italy that he died at no more than
thirty years old, a victim of the epidemics that were
sweeping the whole country between the years of 1652
and 1660. 6 No doubt, looking at the superiority of the
works that we know by him, were he to have lived on,
his reputation might have eclipsed that of his father.
Dr Albert Blankert proposed and confirmed the
attribution to Johannes van Bronchorst which is
supported by Peter van den Brink. 7

Of all the European artists who made their way to Italy
during the seventeenth century to study at the
fountainhead of art, the still-life and the landscape
painters of Flanders demonstrated the greatest capacity
to assimilate the native culture and to enter the
mainstream of Italian society. This phenomenon was
exemplified in its every detail by the career of the
still-life painter Abraham Brueghel.
Abraham Brueghel was the most talented and
successful son of Jan Brueghel the Younger. Trained
by his father, he had already sold a small flower
painting by his son when Abraham was just fifteen
years old. Like his grandfather Jan Brueghel the Elder,
also known as the Velvet Brueghel, Abraham travelled
to Italy. It was the preference for many young aspiring
artists to complete their training and gain invaluable
experience before returning home, however Brueghel
never returned. He settled in Rome where he quickly
established a reputation for his still-lifes. Already in
1649 an inventory of his patron Prince Antonio Ruffo
records nine flower paintings by the eighteen-year-old
artist. During the 1670s Brueghel moved to Naples,
where he remained for the rest of his life.
07
Abraham Brueghel
(Antwerp 1631 – 1697 Naples)
Still-Life of a Watermelon, Cherries, Peaches, Apricots, Plums, Pomegranate
and Figs with Lilies, Roses, Morning Glory and other Flowers on an Acanthus Stone Relief,
a mountainous Landscape beyond
Signed lower left: ABrughel. Fe (AB linked)
Oil on canvas
53 3 /8 x 69 1 /2 in. (135.6 x 176.5 cm.)
32
His native predilection for decorative profusion and
anecdote, Brueghel seamlessly grafted the sweeping
movement of the High Baroque style of his Italian
contemporaries, such as Michelangelo Campidoglio
and Michelangelo Cerquozzi and the result can be
found in compositions that appear to have been
conceived with remarkable casualness, but which still
maintain the firmness of composition and clarity of
detail associated with the artist’s Northern heritage.
Due to the relative constancy of the artist’s mature style
and the scarcity of dated works, it has proved difficult
to trace the chronology of the Brueghel’s artistic
development. Generally it would appear that his
brushstrokes were slightly more painterly during his
Roman period, while his colouring became brighter
and stronger during his later years. Our picture can
be dated to the second half of the 1670s where
the crispness of detail, the smooth handling and
the strength of colour are all characteristic of his
later style. 1

Provenance: Commissioned by Elector-Palatine,
Johann Wilhelm, Düsseldorf; Mannheim, Kunsthalle,
1780, no. 295; Munich, Hogarten Galerie, 1805, no.
924; with Galerie Schleissheim, Munich, 1810; Alte
pinakothek, Munich, 1836 ; deaccessioned policy from
the Alte Pinakothek in 1937; with John Mitchell,
London, 1937; Private collection, England, 1937;
George L. Lazarus, by 1956.
Literature: C. Hofstede de Groot, Catalogue of Dutch
Painters, Teaneck and Cambridge, 1928, vol. X, no.
16; M. H. Grant, Rachel Ruysch, Leigh-on-Sea, 1956,
p. 30, no. 58; P. Mitchell, European Flower Painters,
London, p. 203, pl. 205; Francesco Solinas, ed. Fiori:
Cinque secoli di pittura floreale, exhibition catalogue,
Rome, 2004, p. 299, illustrated; To be included in the
forthcoming catalogue raisonné by Marianne Berardi.
Exhibited: Royal Academy, London, Dutch Painters,
winter 1952/53, no. 553; John Mitchell & Son,
Inspiration of Nature, 1976; Dulwich Picture Gallery,
London, Dutch Flower Painting 1600-1750, 1996,
no. 27; Biella, Italy, Fiori: Cinque secoli di pittura
floreale, 2004.
Ruysch’s composition of curves and smooth shapes is
one of elegance, sophistication and femininity.
Abundance, exemplified by these elegant lines and
rounded forms, had become the purpose of flower stilllife
by the turn of the eighteenth century. The vanitas
theme that was so popular in early examples of the
genre had receded and, with the works of Ruysch and
her contemporary Jan van Huysum an interest in the
decorative overtook the earlier emphasis on moralizing
iconography. Ruysch increasingly favoured diagonals
and often oriented her compositions around them, as
she has in this painting of 1709 and Flowers in a Vase
from the same period (National Gallery, London). The
tulip at the top of the bouquet that inclines towards
the right is balanced by the weight of the peony at the
lower left, while the broken stem of the carnation
extends the line of the tulip to form an elegant S shape,
in almost perfect accordance with Hogarth's later 'line
of beauty'.
08
Rachel Ruysch
(The Hague 1664 – 1750 Amsterdam)
Roses, Tulips and other Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Stone Ledge
Signed and dated lower right: Rachel Ruysch 1709
Oil on canvas
30 3 /4 x 25 1 /4 in. (78 x 64 cm.)
34
Rachel Ruysch was a favourite among contemporary
poets. Hieronymus Sweerts dedicated a poem to her
in which he declared that:
‘Zeuxis' illustrious progeny
will crown your youthful person
as their Flower Goddess
for your beautifully variegated festoons, bouquets,
and wreaths, painted with a brilliance
that few can match.
If Mistress Oosterwyk
sat here in bridal splendor,
you would outshine her.
De Heem would rise from his grave,
with van der Ast and van Aelst, upon whose works
the world has showered its praise.’
(Alle de gedichten, Amsterdam, 1697)
No less than eleven contemporary poets paid tribute
to her after her death in an anthology published in
1750 devoted to “de uitmuntende schilderesse
mejuffrouwe Rachel Ruysch” (the excellent painter
Miss Rachel Ruysch). More recent admirers have
described her as “the small snowy dome which crowns
the Everest of this particular art” and advised the
potential buyer that “with Rachel Ruysch there are no
poor pieces, and a man might with perfect safety send
in his bid for a "lot" which he had never seen”. 1
Rachel Ruysch was born into an artistic family in
The Hague in 1664. Her father was the renowned
anatomist and botanist, Frederick Ruysch (1638 -
1731), and her mother was the daughter of the
architect Pieter Post. She became a pupil of Willem
van Aelst in 1679, at the age of fifteen, and remained
in his studio until the painter's death in 1683. In 1693
she married the portrait painter Juriaen Pool, with
whom she had ten children. In 1709 the family moved
to The Hague where both entered the city's St. Luke's
Guild. From 1708 to 1713 both Ruysch and Pool
served in Düsseldorf as court painters to the Elector
Palatine, Johann Wilhelm. Ruysch’s Fruit and Flowers
in a Forest (Städtische Kunstsammlungen, Chemnitz,
Germany) was commissioned by the Elector and hung
in his bedroom, together with Vase of Flowers (now in
(Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich).

Provenance: Probably Defer-Dumesnil collection, Sale
5 October 1900, no. 12; Private collection, Limoges.
Jan van Huysum lived and worked in Amsterdam all of
his life. He was the son of still-life painter, Justus van
Huysum I who became his teacher until his death in
1716 after which his son’s reputation soared. By 1722
van Huysum had succeeded in developing a popular
style, however, he was obsessively secretive about his
methods, allowing no one to see him at work, not even
his own brothers. It is not surprising therefore that he
was very reluctant to take on pupils. The only one he
did accept was Margareta Haverman (c.1716 - 1730),
thanks to the persuasiveness of her persistent father.
Van Huysum’s technique was painstaking; every
brushstroke was applied with meticulous care. He
insisted on working directly from nature, once writing
to a patron to explain that her painting would be
delayed a year because, unable to obtain a real yellow
rose, he could not finish the picture. This extraordinary
attention to detail, combined with the unprecedented
use of lighter backgrounds and a brighter palette,
created works of astonishing realism.
09
Jan van Huysum
(Amsterdam 1682 – 1749 Amsterdam)
Still-Life of Grapes and a Peach on a Table-Top
Signed lower centre: Jan van Huysum Fecit
Oil on canvas
15 1 /2 x 12 1 /2 in. (39.5 x 32 cm.)
36
Van Huysum’s influence was to last into the nineteenth
century and can be seen in the work of Jan van Os,
Wybrand Hendriks and Gerard van Spaendonck. Van
Huysum’s works were greatly sought after in his
lifetime; he received commissions from, among others,
the Duc d’Orleans, Prince William of Hesse-Kassel,
Frederick-Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of
Poland, and Frederick William I, King of Prussia.
Most of van Huysum’s two hundred and forty-one
known still-lifes consist of luxuriantly composed
flowers in a classicising vase, standing on a stone plinth
or a stone table, often with a bird’s nest. In his early
works he uses a traditional and symmetrical
composition bearing strong resemblance to the work of
Cornelis de Heem and Abraham Mignon. His latter
works, which show no apparent symmetry in their
arrangements, are instead presented in S-shaped or
diagonal compositions hence one can date the
Colnaghi painting to the latter part of his oeuvre. Our
work is comparable in composition to Fruit and Flower
Still-Life in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

10
Jean-Louis Demarne, called Demarnette
(Brussels 1744 – 1829 Paris)
In its evocation of rural life The Horse Market looks
back to Dutch art of the seventeenth-century, which
was to be a lifelong source of inspiration for Demarne.
The merriment of the scene and the grey piebald horse
recalls the works of the van Ostade brothers and
Philips Wouwerman. As with Wouwerman’s A Horse
Fair in Front of a Town in the English Royal
Collection, 1 the viewers attention is drawn to the
centre of our work where the light is focused. There is
also an echo of Salomon von Ruysdael in the open
river landscape in the distance. A possible pendant
to our picture The Village Fête, with the same
measurements and a similar composition was in the
collection of Henry Say and sold, together with
twenty-one other pictures, by the George Petit Galerie
on 30 Nov 1908 in Paris.
At the age of twelve Demarne left his native Brussels
for Paris, where he studied history painting under
Gabriel Briard (1729 - 77). Having failed to win the
Prix de Rome in 1772 and 1774, he concentrated on
landscape and genre painting, in which he was heavily
influenced by such Dutch seventeenth-century masters
as Aelbert Cuyp, the van Ostade brothers, Adriaen van
de Velde and Karel Dujardin. In this respect, Demarne
pursued a Northern tradition of landscape painting,
while his contemporaries, such as Achille-Etna
Michallon, adhered to the Southern tradition of the
The Horse Market
Oil on canvas
21 1 /2 x 32 1 /4 in. (55 x 82cm.)
38
classical landscape which had been recently revived by
Valenciennes in the guise of the paysage historique.
Works by Dutch artists were highly sought after in
Paris at the time, and, in reviving their art and
transposing it to a contemporary setting, Demarne
won a strong following among leading connoisseurs
and artist-collectors of the time: Josephine Bonaparte
(who owned four paintings), Carle Vernet, the Baron
Gros and M. Thomas Henry. He was also popular in
Russia, and many of his best works were bought by
Russian aristocrats (for example, Prince Youssoupoff).
Arguably his biggest supporter was the Comte de
Nape, who owned thirty-one pictures by the artist and
published a short biography of him in 1817.
In 1783 Demarne was made an associate of the
Académie but he did not become a full member.
Seemingly uninterested in official honours, he was a
very commercially minded artist, exhibiting in the
Paris Salons from 1783 to 1827. Largely apolitical, he
did not participate in the French Revolution and was
only a very peripheral figure in Napoleon’s patronage
of the arts. Demarne was a prolific artist and the
repetitious nature of his works makes it difficult to
establish a chronology for his oeuvre. His principal
subjects were the village or town fair and road scenes.

11
Lucas Cranach the Elder and studio
(Wittenberg 1515 – 1586 Weimar)
Provenance: with François Heim; from whom
acquired by René Küss in 1968.
The subject, the pairing of a somewhat grotesque old
man and a knowing, youthful beauty, was very popular
in sixteenth century art; presenting as it did a rather
lascivious image under the guise of a morality lesson,
it afforded the artist an opportunity of depicting a
degree of licentiousness that might not otherwise have
been acceptable. A theme of unimpeachable antiquity,
its introduction to northern art is generally credited to
Quinten Metsys, who would have been familiar with it
from contemporary literature, including most
famously Erasmus' reference to it in his Praise of Folly. 1
The popularity of the theme in German art was further
enhanced by its inclusion amongst the pictorial
representations on the theme of 'Weibermacht' or the
power of women over man. In the late Middle Ages, a
large body of literature, including sermons, romantic
poems, troubadour songs and plays concerning this
theme had appeared. The depictions could be
portrayed as either a mild, humorous satire on the war
between the sexes or as a strong indictment against all
involvement with women. The early sixteenth century
saw a considerable burst of interest in the theme
amongst printmakers, probably stimulated by the
satirical warnings against folly common to much
contemporary writing, for example Brant's Ship of
Fools (first published in 1494), Erasmus' abovementioned
In Praise of Folly (1511) and Thomas
Murner's Exorcism of Fools and Guild of Rogues (1512).
It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that from about
1512-1520 Cranach and most of his contemporaries -
including Ambrosius Holbein, Urs Graf and Lucas van
Leyden - explored various aspects of the topic in
woodcuts and engravings. It is, however, Cranach who
is credited with introducing the theme to painting,
probably due to various court commissions: he was
commissioned to represent the theme of 'dass einst die
Frauen alles vermochten' from Cranach in 1513 for
the marital bed of Duke Johann of Saxony. 2
It is possible that Cranach was, like Metsys, following
Italian prototypes. Leonardo treated the subject and
his influence had spread widely: Metsys himself used
The Ill-matched Lovers
Oil on panel
15 3 /8 x 9 5 /8 in. (39 x 25 cm.)
40
another drawing of his for one of the heads in his
version of the subject in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. The most direct source, however,
might have been Lucas the Elder’s predecessor as
painter to the Saxon court, Jacopo de' Barbari, who
addressed the subject in a painting of 1503
(Philadelpia, John G. Johnson collection). Whatever
his influence, Cranach returned to the subject on
several occasions. The earliest example dated example
is the Ill-Matched Lovers in Budapest which bears the
date 1522, 3 though this date is considered by
Rosenberg and Friedlander to be about five years too
early and another version, probably the earliest, also in
Budapest, which has been dated to 1520-22. 4 There
are later examples in the Akademie der bildenden
Künste, Vienna (1531), the Rudolfinum, Prague
(circa 1530) and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum,
Nuremberg (circa 1530). 5 The closest of these versions
to the Colnaghi painting is the Vienna picture of 1531 6
where the young lady also has her hand around the old
man’s neck and is removing money from his purse with
her other hand while he clutches her in a tight
embrace. The physiognomy of the man is broadly
similar, though he has a longer beard in the Vienna
picture and is wearing a hat. Despite some differences
in costume, the figure of the courtesan is also almost
identical and is clearly taken from the same model who
recurs in other paintings by Cranach of the 1530s,
such as the Salome in the Wadsworth Atheneum and
the Venus in the Venus with Cupid Stealing Honey of
1531 in the Staten Museum, Copenhagen. The
Colnaghi picture, however, carries a greater erotic
charge. Whereas the old man in the Vienna painting
has a distracted, love-sick air and his hand is placed
over the outside of the young woman’s corsage, the
Colnaghi old man is fondling her breast and his face
expresses a lascivious intensity of purpose. The
vigorousness of the characterisation, the quality of such
details as the painting of the dress and the features and
hair of the old man, which have been revealed through
recent cleaning, and the similarities with other works
of the 1530s, suggest that this painting is a fine
autograph work of the early 1530s, whose attribution
has been endorsed by Prof. Dr. Claus Grimm. 7

Provenance: Anon. Sale; Christie's, London, 25
October 1958, lot 146, as Robert Griffier; With
Leonard Koetser; Anon. Sale; Sotheby's, London, 4
July 1990, lot 30, as Jan Griffier the Elder; With
Richard Green, where acquired by a collector; by
descent to the previous owner.
Robert Griffier was the son of Jan Griffier, whom
Arnold Houbraken called ‘a burgher of the world’. 1
Jan came to England around 1632 and became such a
successful painter of Italianate and Rhenish scenes that
he was able to spend 3000 guilders on a yacht, on
which he lived in on the Thames. It would appear that
Robert was born after Jan's third marriage. Soon after
the family sailed back to the Low Countries they were
shipwrecked off Rotterdam and were left with only a
few coins that one of the girls had stored away in her
belt. By 1704 the Griffier family returned to London
where Robert established a reputation for himself.
What little is known of Robert includes an interesting
anecdote taken from the archives held in the Public
Record Office, which notes that in 1753 Robert was
12
Robert Griffier
(London 1688 – 1750 Great Britain)
Summer: An extensive Rhenish Landscape with Boats at a Quayside and Peasants by an Inn
and Winter: A frozen Winter Landscape with Peasants
Oil on canvas, a pair
20 x 24 3 /8 in. (50.8 x 61.9 cm.)
42
sued by his own mother, Mary Griffier, who stated that
in 1731 she had lent her son, Robert the painter, the
considerable sum of £100 to set up as a victualler. She
had never been repaid, and now, aged eighty-five and
impoverished, she wanted her money back.
Both Robert and his brother Jan Griffier the Younger
were pupils of their father, Jan Griffier the Elder.
Indeed, the present pair of pictures were for a long time
mistaken as fine examples of Jan Griffier the Elder's
oeuvre. The Colnaghi pair emotively portray a verdant,
zig-zagging summer landscape with warm skies that is
contrasted with the cold blue and white hues of winter,
each picture set against fantastical turreted castles
nestled in mountainous landscapes and peopled with
tiny bustling figures going about their daily lives.
Robert Griffier's masterpiece is the ambitious Regatta
on the Thames, signed and dated R.Griffier/1748, in the
collection of the Duke of Buccleuch.

This newly discovered work by Philip Mercier can be
added to the small number of known candlelight
pictures executed by the artist in England. The
depiction of a single figure by candlelight, often a
young woman in an erotically-charged interior, had
been popularized by seventeenth century Dutch artists,
in particular Godfried Schalcken. The medium of
mezzotint engraving lent itself to the depiction of these
celebrated images and, through the dissemination of
prints, the genre of candlelight scenes gained
widespread popularity. Mercier's candlelight subjects
certainly influenced those of the next generation of
English artists, including Henry Robert Morland and
Joseph Wright of Derby. Amongst Mercier’s oeuvre
there are a small number of candlelight subjects
depicting young women at a variety of nocturnal tasks
including Bon Soir (formerly collection of Sir Albert
Richardson), which also depicts a young girl reading a
book by candlelight, and Woman threading a Needle by
Candlelight (Earl of Wemyss, Gosford House). The
same girl in the Colnaghi picture appears as the model
in a number of Mercier's fancy pictures from this date.
She is identified as 'Hannah, the artist's maid' on a
print after the work, Portrait of a Young Woman holding
a Tea Tray (formerly with Christie's, London).
Mercier, the son of a Huguenot tapestry-worker, was
born, and subsequently studied, in Berlin under the
tutelage of Antoine Pesne before arriving in London
around 1716. He was familiar with the work of
Watteau, after whom he etched a number of plates,
and although there is no firm evidence to support the
assertion that he hosted Watteau during the latter's
trip to London in 1719-20, Mercier was pivotal in
introducing the fashion for Rococo art to London. By
1726 he had painted two small-scale group portraits,
13
Philip Mercier
(Berlin 1689/1691 – 1760 London))
A Young Girl reading by Candlelight
Signed lower left with monogram: PM
Oil on canvas
30 1 /4 x 25 1 /4 in. (76.8 x 64.1 cm.)
44
The Shultz Family (Tate Britain, London) and Viscount
Tyrconnel with his Family (private collection, England),
which were the first conversation pieces painted in
England, a genre that quickly gained popularity with
other English-born artists including Hogarth.
In 1729 Mercier was made Principal Painter to
Frederick, Prince of Wales who had arrived from
Hanover the previous year, and in 1730 he was made
the Keeper of his library. Mercier painted a set of four
full-length state portraits of Frederick and his sisters
(Shire Hall, Hertford) but was more successful on a
smaller, more informal scale in works such as the Music
Party, which depicts the Prince and his sisters playing
a concert before Kew Palace (National Portrait Gallery,
London). He also taught the young Princesses to draw
but he seems to have fallen out of Royal favour by the
late 1730s when he was replaced as Principal Painter
and Librarian. He subsequently retired to the country
where he worked extensively for the Sanwell family of
Upton, Northamptonshire and the Hesilriges of
Noseley, Warwickshire.
A move to York in 1739 re-invigorated the artist's
career, and there he established a successful practice,
being widely patronized as a portrait painter by the
Yorkshire gentry. During this period he also painted a
number of fancy pictures, influenced by Chardin and
seventeenth century Dutch genre paintings. These
works were frequently engraved in London by John
Faber, Richard Houston and James McArdell,
suggesting that they were executed for commercial
purposes.

Provenance: Provenance: Marchesi de Mari, Genoa,
from whom traditionally believed to have been
acquired by the great-grandmother of the present
owner some time before 1884; thence by family
descent to the previous owner.
These two, exquisitely painted devotional pictures,
unpublished but recently accepteded by Baldassari as
autograph works, were painted in 1678 according to
the date on the reverse of one of the stretchers. 1 The
Madonna, and presumably its pendant the Christ
Carrying the Cross, was conceived on 13th May 1678
and the old handwriting on the reverse of the stretcher
may well be Dolci’s own. The form of the date with
interlocking initials - A[nno] S[alutatis] - may be
compared to Dolci’s date and inscription on Patience,
datable to the previous year. 2 The inscriptions on the
reverse of the paintings may also be interpreted as
prayers of redemption with invocations to Christ and
the Madonna to intercede on the artist or patron’s
behalf. This, together with their intimate scale, would
suggest that the paintings were intended for private
devotion. The pairing of Christ with the Madonna is
by no means unique in Dolci’s œuvre: a very
comparable small-scale ‘diptych’ showing Christ and
the Madonna, also inscribed on the reverse and dating
from three years later, 1681, is in the Statens Museum
for Kunst, Copenhagen, though there the figure of
Christ is shown with his eyes to Heaven rather than
carrying the Cross and confronting the viewer. 3
Both of the Colnaghi compositions exist in other
versions within Dolci’s œuvre but no other variant was
executed on such a small scale. The Christ carrying the
cross is an almost exact replica of a larger work, dated
by Baldassari to the second half of the 1660s in a
private collection in Rome. 4 The Colnaghi Christ
repeats its earlier prototype almost exactly, with the
same choice of colours and an identical composition
(the latter being equally suited to a rectangular and an
14
Carlo Dolci
(Florence 1616 – 1687 Florence)
Christ Carrying the Cross and Madonna
Both inscribed on the reverse of the original stretcher in an old hand, possibly the artist's own, the first: IHS/ Amore/ et/ nostra/ redenzio/ Desiderium
and the second AS/ 1678 à 13/ di maggio princi/ piata/ Satisma:/ Maria Ora/ pro nobis pechato/ ribus
Oil on canvas, a pair
12 3 /4 x 10 5 /8 in. (32.3 x 27 cm.)
46
octagonal-shaped canvas). The reddish highlights in
Christ’s hair have been replicated exactly and Dolci has
used gold paint not only for Christ’s halo in our work,
but also for his hair, lashes and irises. However there
are minor variations which give an added pathos to the
Colnaghi version: Christ’s eyes have been brought
slightly closer together and Dolci has delicately painted
a teary edge along the lower lids, absent from the larger
variant. In both versions Christ’s lips are parted, as if he
is about speak, and the directness of his gaze underlines
the pathos of the scene. Both versions are remarkable
for the meticulousness with which the artist has
painted the details of Christs’s hair and beard, the
Crown of Thorns, and the grain of the wood of the
Cross which heighten the emotional impact and
spiritual intensity of the image.

The Madonna is similar in composition to a number of
works by Dolci, variously identified as the Madonna
addolorata or the Madonna del dito; the former when
her clasped hands are also included in the composition,
the latter when her finger emerges from her drapery
(as in our picture). It was arguably Dolci’s most
popular composition and several autograph, studio and
later replicas exist. The prime original of both
Madonna types is generally considered to be the
painting formerly at Stowe, dated by Baldassari to circa
1655, which shows the Madonna with clasped hands. 5
The particular representation of the Madonna seen in
our picture, with the finger protruding from the
drapery is, however, almost identical to that in the
1681 ‘diptych’ in Copenhagen mentioned above,
which was painted three years later than our picture.
Her drapery falls in identical folds, her expression is
similar, as is the porcelain-like rendering of her face
and the golden aureole behind the crown of her head.
The only difference between the two works is the
inclusion of her finger which, given its slightly weaker
execution, might have been an afterthought. There are
also another versions of this subject in the Corsini
Gallery, Rome6 and a copy in the Borghese Gallery in
Rome7 which attest to the contemporary popularity of
this powerful devotional image.
Our pair of paintings originally hung alongside a third
canvas, of similar dimensions and also octagonal,
representing The Archangel Gabriel. That work is of
inferior quality and was probably painted by an artist
active in Dolci’s studio, perhaps commissioned by
a patron who wished to own a ‘triptych’ rather than
a ‘diptych’.
48
Carlo Dolci was a pupil of Jacopo Vignali, and
although he painted numerous portraits, he is perhaps
best known for his religious scenes, many of which
were copied by his pupils Loma Mancini and his
daughter Agnese. Dolci’s use of soft, delicate colours,
his great attention to detail, and his passion in the
rendering of his subject’s devout facial expression all
contribute to the sensitivity and emotional
expressiveness of his paintings.

Provenance: Possibly in the collection of Don Miguel
Martinez de Pinillos y Saenz de Velasco during the
early 19th century, but probably acquired by his son
Don Antonio Martinez de Pinillos (1865 - 1923),
Cadiz by direct descent to his daughter Doña Carmen
Martinez de Pinillos, Cadiz; thence by family descent
to the previous owners.
In Rome Bottalla came into contact with cardinals
Francesco Barberini and Giulio Sachetti, the last of
whom became his patron and gave him the nickname
Il Raffaellino and the important opportunity of
studying under Pietro da Cortona. Bottalla worked as
an assistant to da Cortona, probably with Romanelli,
on the frescoes in the Villa Sachetti at Castel Fusano,
Rome and on the ceiling of the salone of the Palazzo
Barberini, Florence. According to Baldinucci’s highly
coloured account, 1 Bottalla and Romanelli attempted
to take advantage of Da Cortona’s absence in Florence,
and tried to oust him from the Palazzo Barberini
commission and take his place, but were thwarted
when Da Cortona suddenly returned and destroyed all
the cartoons. Though this story is probably
apochryphal, it is quite possible, as Manzitti has
suggested2 that the two assistants were responsible for
making certain changes in Da Cortona’s absence which
led to a rift and may account for Bottalla’s subsequent
departure for Naples. There were other, aesthetic
reasons, why Bottalla may have quarrelled with Pietro
da Cortona, Bottalla was a much more classicising
painter than Da Cortona, influenced by the work of
contemporaries in Rome such as Poussin, by the art of
the High Renaissance, above all Raphael, and also by
Annibale Carracci’s Farnese Ceiling. 3
In the early 1640s, after a brief sojourn in Rome,
Bottalla moved to Genoa. There he painted a
Deucallian and Pirra (Museu Nacional de Bellas Artes,
Rio de Janiero) and, probably around the same
moment, a recently published painting of Bacchus and
Ariadne on the Island of Naxos, 4 which was included in
an exhibition in 2005 at the Maison d’ Art,
Montecarlo. 5
The Colnaghi painting, with its frieze-like
composition and bright colouring, has much in
common with these late classicising works which hark
15
Attributed to Giovanni Maria Bottalla,
called Il Raffaellino
(Savona 1613 – 1644 Milan)
Bacchus, Temperance and Cupid
Oil on canvas
45 7 /8 x 63 3 /8 in. (116.5 x 161 cm.)
50
back to the High Renaissance. Moreover the strong
affinities between our picture and, in particular, the
Montecarlo Bacchus and Ariadne, support an
attribution to Bottalla and a dating to the early 1640s.
The almost caricatural painting of Bacchus’s panther
with the rather “hang-dog” expression in its eyes is very
similar to that of the panther nearest the viewer in the
Montecarlo painting, and the facial type of the figure
of Temperance, with her long straight nose and pursed
lips, is similar to that of the left hand bacchante in the
Montecarlo picture, while the muscular anatomy and
slightly, almost Strozzi-esque physiognomy of Bacchus,
is comparable with that of the figure of Deucallian in
the Deucallian and Pirra (Museu Nacional de Bellas
Artes, Rio de Janiero) and the heavily muscular figure
of Bacchus also has some affinities with Bottalla’s
ignudi in the Palazzo Ayrolo Negrone. The fact that
both the Colnaghi picture and the Montecarlo
painting have a Spanish provenance, are the same
width and are connected iconographically may just be
coincidental, but there is a possibility that they may
have been commissioned at the same time along with
five other pictures from the de Velasco Collection
illustrating Hercules with Justice, Peace Crowning
Learning, The Head of Argus Presented to Juno and Juno
Appearing to Io and Argus, themes that would have
been appropriate for a dining-room or a library. The
iconography of our painting is intriguing and very
unusual. It was formerly thought to represent
Bacchus and Ariadne and Cupid in a Landscape.
Representations of Ariadne filling Bacchus’s wine cup
are not uncommon, 6 the subject being connected with
the marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, but here it
would seem to be water rather than wine that is being
poured into his cup from a jug that has been filled
from a Roman Vase depicting the suitably watery
theme of Pan chasing Syrinx. The iconography of the
boy remains mysterious, but the figure of the woman,
who is clothed, rather than naked and more
demure than in traditional depictions of the marriage
of Bacchus and Ariadne, probably represents
Temperance. 7 The meaning of the painting would
seem to be an encouragement to water down one’s
wine, a theme consistent with the high-minded
iconography of the other paintings formerly in the de
Velasco Collection.

Provenance: Commissioned as a pair by the Comte de
Saint-Maure in 1729; Madame G. Neris; Hôtel
Drouot, Paris, 18-19 December 1933, lot 9, as
'attributed to François Lemoyne'; with Galerie Georges
Wildenstein, Paris; confiscated during World War II;
Restituted to Wildenstein Gallery after World War II;
with Wildenstein, until 2001.
Literature: Chévalier de Valory, Mémoires inédits sur la
vie et les ouvrages des membres de l'académie Royale,
Paris, 1854, vol. II, p. 276; C. Blanc, Histoire des
peintures de toutes les écoles: Ecole français, Paris, 1862,
vol. II, p. 12; L. Dimier, Les peintres français du
XVIIIème siècle: histoire des vies et catalogue des oeuvres,
Paris, 1930, vol. II, p. 43; Répertoire des biens spoliés en
France durant la guerre, 1939-1945, Berlin, 1948, vol.
II, pp. 141, 152, no. 3243; 'Without Benefit of
Labels', Art News, LXVI, no. 8, December 1968, p. 58;
A. Burisi Vici, 'Opere romane di Jean de Troy',
Antichità viva, vol. IX, no. 2, March-April 1970, p. 5;
P. Rosenberg, 'Musée du Louvre, Départements de
Peintures: La Donation Herbette', Revue du Louvre et
des Musées de France, 1976, no. 2, pp. 94, 98, notes 6
and 8; (Venus and Adonis) J.-L. Bordeaux, François Le
Moyne et sa Génération, 1688-1737, Neuilly-sur-Seine,
1984, pp. 43-4 and 50, note 56, fig. 396; (Salmacis
and Hermaphroditus) J. Dornberg, 'The Mounting
Embarrassment of Germany's Nazi Treasures', Art
News, LXXXVII, no. 7, September 1988, illustrated p.
138; J.-L. Bordeaux, 'Jean-François de Troy, still an
artistic enigma: Some observations on his early works',
Artibus et Historiae, no. 20, 1989, pp. 153-4, 169, note
18, fig. 21; A. Busiri Vici, Scritti d'Arte, Rome,
1990, p. 258, illustrated; (Venus and Adonis)
C. Bailey ed., The Loves of the Gods: Mythological
painting from Watteau to David, Exhibition catalogue,
16
Jean-François de Troy
(Paris 1679 – 1752 Rome)
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
and
Venus and Adonis
Oil on canvas
The first; 61 1 /2 x 76 3 /4 in. (156.2 x 195 cm.)
The second; 61 3 /4 x 77 in. (157 x 195.5 cm.)
52
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1992, p. 241, fig.
5; J.D. Reid, et al., The Oxford Guide to classical
mythology in the arts, 1300-1900s, New York, 1993, I,
p. 35; C. Leribault, Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres de
Jean-François de Troy, Paris, 2002, pp. 86-7, 308, nos.
184a and 185a.
Exhibited: New York, Wildenstein, Benefit Exhibition
for the Arthritis Foundation, 9 October 1968 as
'François Lemoyne'.
De Troy's magnificent pair of paintings depicts two
erotic episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, one
familiar, one obscure. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
represents a less well-known tale that Ovid seems to
have adapted from a Hellenistic myth of Asian origin
(Metamorphosis 4:285-388). Hermaphroditus was the
child of Venus and Mercury. As a youth, he bathed in
a lake where Salmacis, one of Diana's nymphs, dwelt.
She fell in love with him at first sight and clung to him
with such passion that their two bodies became -
literally - one, uniting both male and female sexual
traits. In our painting, Hermaphroditus, sitting by the
pool's edge, pulls backward violently as he tries to resist
Salmacis' inescapable embrace. The pose of Salmacis
is echoed in various compositions by de Troy, for
example Pan and Syrinx (The Cleveland Museum of
Art) and Zephr and Flora (private collection).
A comparative work to Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
was acquired in 1976 by the Musée Bosseut, Meaux, 1
and numerous copies of the painting are known,
indicating that it enjoyed considerable fame in the
eighteenth century.

Venus and Adonis depicts a passionate encounter
between Venus, the goddess of Love, and her mortal
lover, the beautiful young hunter Adonis. Although the
story had been a favourite of visual artists from the
time of Titian, de Troy's work is notable for its frank
sensuality - Colin Bailey2 describes it as “exceedingly
immodest” - and for its casual relationship to Ovid's
text; no particular episode from the story appears to
have been in de Troy's mind when he painted our
composition and the protagonists would be
unidentifiable were it not for the presence of Adonis'
hunting dogs and Venus' swans. Largely unconcerned
with textual fidelity or demonstrations of classical
erudition, de Troy's painting is an unrestrained paean
to pagan carnality of a sort that would rarely be found
again in the artist's oeuvre. It is interesting to note that
Venus shares the same gesture as Diana in Diana
Surprised by Actaeon (Öffentliche Kunstsammlung,
Basel), with her arms open and legs outstretched.
However, their intended emotions could not be more
different3 - Venus welcomes Adonis whereas Diana
expresses her sadness and regret rather than her initial
anger. De Troy’s beautiful and fluid rendition of the
drapery on which Venus and Adonis sit is used as a
sensual decorative device however the viewers’
attention is not wholly drawn away from the central
composition of the entwined lovers. A comparative
work to Venus and Adonis is in a French private
collection4 and there are also numerous copies of the
painting, indicating that it had also achieved a
considerable degree of fame in the eighteenth century.
The Colnaghi pair are remarkable not just for their
large scale, sophisticated handling and the boldness of
their eroticism, but also for the artist's decision to
depict two subjects in which beautiful young men are
54
made the object of overwhelming – even slightly
unhinged – feminine passion. The paintings' original
owner and the year in which they were painted are
securely established in a contemporary document,
although their subjects were slightly confused. The
Extrait de la vie de M. de Troy 5 mentions, under the year
1729: “Pour M. le comte de Saint-Maure, deux
tableaux grands comme nature; l'un Mars et Venus,
l'autre Salmacis et Hermaphrodite”. Although the
author understandably confused Mars for Adonis, it
has always been accepted that he was referring to the
Colnaghi pair.
Along with his father François, under whom he
trained, Jean-François de Troy was the most important
member of the family of painters. He studied in Italy
from 1699 to 1706, and in 1708 he was approved by
the Académie Royale and received as a history painter.
Although he was officially a history painter, he worked
successfully in a number of genres, including
portraiture, tapestry designs (for the Gobelins), and
tableaux de modes (depictions of fashionable life and
amorous encounters), a type of painting with whose
invention he has been credited. Works such as the
Plague at Marseilles (1726, Musée des Beaux-Arts,
Marseilles) established his reputation as one of France’s
finest history painters. He also found great favour
among the Parisian élite for his erotically charged
Biblical scenes. In 1724, he was commissioned by the
Bâtiments du Roi to paint two decorative paintings,
Zephyr and Flora and Acis and Galatea, for the Hôtel
du Grand Mâitre, Versailles. This led to numerous
other commissions for similar mythological works. In
1738, de Troy was nominated Director of the French
Academy in Rome, an appointment he held until his
death in 1752.

Provenance: Reginald Vaile, Esq.; Christie's, London,
23 May 1903, lot 37 (£2,625 to Agnew's); Charles
Fairfax Murray; Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 15 June
1914, lot 18; Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Williams,
Cincinnati and thence by descent until 2005.
Literature: G. Wildenstein, Lancret, Paris, 1924,
p. 81, no. 145, fig. 207.
Exhibited: London, Guildhall Art Gallery, Catalogue
of the Exhibition of a Selection of Works by French and
English Painters of the Eighteenth Century, 1902, p. 40,
no. 35; Glasgow, 1902; San Francisco, The California
Palace of the Legion of Honor, Exhibition of French
Painting, from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day,
1934, p. 38, no. 35.
This delightful duet by Nicolas Lancret had been lost
to public view for the better part of a century. It was
recorded (under cat. 145, fig. 207) among paintings
he had not seen by Georges Wildenstein in his 1924
catalogue raisonné of this artist. 1
The composition is beautifully arranged, a classic fête
galante. The five elegant figures are arranged with
Lancret's trademark grasp of composition - the five
figures rise and fall in a graceful rhythm across the
front plane, with the main female dancer silhouetted
against the sky, the lovers' graceful curve carving out
the right side and the hurdy-gurdy player carefully
framed by the menuet. The inscription on the back is
in a nineteenth-century hand, but must be based on
an earlier inscription, as the information therein seems
entirely correct. That inscription dates this work to
1732. The 1730s was a decade of great maturity in
Lancret's work. The composition of Le Menuet, with
the reduced number of figures pushed forward to the
picture plane and all large within the space of the
painting, is typical of this period. This painting invites
comparison with other fine examples of the artist's
work of this time, such as Les Amours de Bocage (Alte
Pinakothek, Munich) or Le Jeu de Quilles (owned by
Frederick the Great, one of Lancret's most ardent
admirers, and today in Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin).
The subject, a beautiful dance, is characteristic of
Lancret at his best. The dancing girl bears close
17
Nicolas Lancret
(Paris 1690 – 1743 Paris)
Le Menuet
Inscribed by a nineteenth century hand on the reverse: ‘Danse Champêtrê… peint par m’ Lancret peintre du roy en 1732
la tête du jour et de l’academie de vielle est le portrait de M’Mestais avocat au parlement.’
Oil on canvas
29 x 34 1 /4 in. (73.7 x 87 cm.)
56
resemblance to the two seminal portraits of dancers
made by Lancret just a few years prior, those of
La Camargo (for example the elaborate version in the
National Gallery, Washington D.C., and the simpler
version in The Wallace Collection, London) and Mlle
Sallé (Schloss Rheinsburg). She, like they, testify to the
importance of the female dancer in Lancret's work,
and, indeed, of dance at the time. She is a fine example
of the use of his favourite source material, the
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French print
tradition, especially the fashion plates and
theatre/dance role images. Lancret drew from that well
repeatedly, and this dancer with castagnets is based
firmly on images such as Mlle. Du Fort dansant à
l'Opera, published by André Trouvain in 1702. The
dancing man is dressed in the ribbons of an actor, a
device often used by Lancret to create a tension
between the real world and the world of the stage in his
paintings.
One captivating aspect of the subject is the inclusion of
the portrait of an existing person among these fictional
creations. The initial head of the hurdy-gurdy player
has been painted over and replaced with a portrait, a
very distinct likeness. Lancret experimented with
placing portraits within fêtes throughout his career,
certainly inspired by the example of Watteau, who
included portraits of members of his circle in some of
his fêtes; the figure of Crispin, for example, to the far
right of Love in the French Theatre (Gemäldegalerie,
Berlin) is certainly a portrait, probably of the great
actor Paul Poisson. 2 Lancret's concept here is actually
closer to the Watteau work, the insertion of a true
likeness within a theme that is not itself a work of
portraiture. The idea must have come to Lancret late in
the conception of this work, as the portrait appears to
have been added over an existing head. One wonders
if the painting might have been intended as a gift to
the owner of that head, who is identified in the
inscription as one M. Mestais, designated by the
inscription on the back as an avocat au parlement.
Report by Mary Tavener Holmes, who confirms the likely
date of 1732.

Provenance: Possibly Count Tessin, Akerö Sweden, his
Sale, February 4-16, 1771; Cornet de Ways Ruart the
Younger (or Count Cremer), Sale, Brussels, 22-23
April 1868, no. 7; Bought by Sanford; Sale, Brussels,
15 February 1873, no. 76; American private collection;
Harari & Johns, London; Gallery Koller, Zurich, Sale,
14-17 September, 1994; Private collection, Monaco
Literature: A. Laing ‘Boucher in Search of an Idiom’,
in François Boucher, exhibition catalogue, 1986-87,
p. 62, fig. 43 and p. 195 under catalogue no. 38; J-P.
Marandel ‘Boucher and Europe’, in François Boucher,
exhibition catalogue, New York-Paris-Detroit, 1986-
1987 p. 76.
Exhibited: Old Master Paintings and Drawings,
Agnews, London, 1980, no. 28, label on reverse;
An Exhibition of French Paintings 1600 - 1800, Gallery
Ida, Tokyo, 1988 no. 18; Three Masters of French
Rococo: Boucher, Fragonard, Lancret, Tokyo, Osaka,
Hakodate, Yokohana, 1990, no. 14.
Rediscovered in the 1980s and therefore not included
in Ananoff’s 1976 catalogue raisonné , 1 this charming
portrait of a young woman at her toilette relates to a
series of paintings engraved by Gilles Edmé Petit,
where the times of day were represented through the
activities of a fashionable young lady. Only three of
these are recorded by Ananoff as surviving: Morning,
(no. 111) showing the young lady at her toilette, Noon
(no. 112) showing a lady with a parasol winding her
watch and Evening, (no. 113) showing the lady
holding a mask and preparing to go out to a ball. This
painting, which is an oval variant of Morning,
represents the toilet of a young lady wearing a peignoir,
a type of negligeé used to protect clothes during the
toilette, about to apply a beauty spot, or mouche, to
her cheek. On the table is a powder box and in her
left hand she holds a boite à mouches, a box containing
the beauty spots: small discs of taffeta or black velvet,
which were applied to the skin in order to emphasise
the whiteness of the skin or to hide some defect.
18
François Boucher
(Paris 1703 – 1770 Paris)
Une Dame à sa Toilette: A Lady Applying a Beauty-Spot
Oil on canvas
34 x 30 in. (86.3 x 76.2 cm.)
58
On the underside of its hinged lid is a portrait of a
young gentleman, presumably her lover, which was
revealed when the picture was cleaned. This can be
compared with the portrait of Mme de Pompadour
now in the Fogg Art Museum where a miniature on
her bracelet contains a portrait of Louis XV. Like the
fan, the beauty spot had its own well-defined language
of love, which would have been understood by the
contemporary viewer.
Laing and Marandel2 consider that our picture
probably belonged to Boucher’s friend and patron,
Count Carl Gustaf Tessin, the Swedish Envoy to
France. Tessin was instrumental in bringing to Sweden
some of Boucher’s finest paintings, many of which are
now in the National Museum, Stockholm, having been
sold by Tessin to Queen Lovisa Ulrica of Sweden in
1751. He also commissioned the Lady Fastening her
Garter (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid).
According to Marandel, 3 the inventory of his
collection, drawn up on his death, included
descriptions of two paintings: one “a bust picture of a
woman sitting in a chair, with a portrait in her hands”,
possibly our picture, and another “a large bust picture
of a woman at her toilet with a parrot on the arm of
her chair”, almost certainly the preparatory grisaille
(now lost) for the engraving by Gilles Edmé Petit
entitled Le Matin. 4
There are some significant differences between the
composition engraved by Petit and the present picture.
In the engraved version, 5 the young lady about to apply
the beauty-spot looks out directly and rather brazenly
at the viewer, gesturing with her forefinger. On the
arm of her chair is perched a parrot and some
admonitory verses below warn fashionable ladies that
“these artificial patches convey an increased liveliness to
the eyes and skin, but when not applied properly they
prove harmful to beauty”. The engraving could almost
be interpreted as a warning against vanity. By contrast,
the Colnaghi painting gives us a much more intimate

sense of being unseen onlookers into the rituals of the
female toilette and the pose of the lady, seen in full
profile, rather than straight on, is much more
meditative and romantic. Its sideways half-length
composition and fluid handling link it closely with the
subject of Evening, which survives both in painted
form in a picture dated 1734 in a New York private
collection 6 and in the form of two engravings: one, part
of the series by Petit and the other, an English
mezzotint. 7
Our picture belongs to a group of almost life-sized
genre paintings executed during the 1730s, a period in
which Boucher was capitalizing on the French taste for
seventeenth century Dutch genre paintings and the
interest in La Vie Moderne which had been successfully
exploited by de Troy. Stylistically, the dense clear
handling and firm structure of the image in which a
few large forms are clearly delineated and contrasted,
points to a dating in the mid 1730s, contemporary
with Evening. If, as seems probable, it is the painting
recorded in Tessin’s inventory, it may well have been
acquired around 1739, when he is first recorded as
having visited Boucher’s studio. The group of intimate
60
half-length depictions of fashionable ladies seen in
close up to which our picture belongs, heralds the more
elaborate depictions of fashionable ladies in interiors
such as Le Dejeuner of 1739 (The Louvre, Paris) and
the Woman fastening her Garter with her Maid of 1742
(Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid) the last of
which was commissioned by Tessin. Even more
directly, the series to which this painting relates, looks
forward to another projected series of paintings of the
Times of Day, commissioned in 1745 by Tessin for
Crown Princess Lovisa Ulrica of Sweden, for which
only the The Milliner/The Morning (National museum,
Stockholm), of 1746, was ever executed. There,
however, the young lady who is also seated at her
dressing table, is portrayed in a much more elaborate
interior, turning towards the viewer to examine some
ribbons brought to her by a young milliner.

Provenance: Anon. Sale, Paris, Drouot, Feb 23, 1922
(Me Baudouin), no. 126; Anon. Sale, Paris, Drouot, 2
December, 1933, (Me Ader), no. 32; Anon. Sale, Paris,
Palais Galliera, March 9, 1972, (Mes Ader, Picard and
Tajan), no. 18, reproduced; Anon. Sale, April 9, 1991,
Paris, George V, (Mes Ader, Paicard, Tajan), no. 51,
reproduced; Private collection, Monaco.
Literature: F. Ingersolt-Smouse, Joseph Vernet, Peintre
de Marine, Paris, 1926, no. 200
Claude-Joseph Vernet, one of the most respected and
successful painters of his day, was a specialist in
seascapes. He moved to Rome at the age of twenty,
making it his home for the next ten years. He then
settled in Paris, where he was to remain until his death
many years later. His work seems to have been inspired
by seventeeth-century masters such as Gaspard
Dughet, Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa.
This powerful stormy landscape is a version of a
painting on copper, one of a pair of landscapes
commissioned by Cardinal Valenti Gonzaga in 1748
and now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague. 1 Here, Vernet
19
Claude-Joseph Vernet
(Avignon 1714 – 1789 Paris)
Storm in the Port of Livorno
Traces of the monogram and date lower left on the rock: J.V.1750
Oil on canvas
35 x 49 in. (97 x 135 cm.)
62
has captured a dramatic view of towering cliffs with a
ship that seems to have run aground. The flag on the
vessel looks as though it could be Dutch and the group
of sailors in the foreground are hauling a rowing boat
onto the rocky shore. A tall lighthouse looms out of
the sea behind the ship, and a town can be seen in the
distance on the left. In a sale catalogue of 1763 the
Mauritshuis picture was described as a view of the
harbour of Livorno, but by 1807 the painting was
simply entitled La Tempête (The storm). Though some
of Vernet’s paintings, such as the celebrated series of
the Harbours of France, are topographically accurate,
most of his paintings are imaginary scenes which bear
only a remote resemblance to recognisable places.
This composition, and that of its pendant, obviously
appealed strongly to contemporary tastes because
Vernet painted at least one other slightly smaller
version of The Hague picture, (54 x 64 cm.), which in
1926 was in the Kramer Collection in Paris2 and copies
were also made by Charles François de la Croix, called
Lacroix de Marseilles, one of which, dated 1775, was
sold by Sotheby’s in 1984.

Provenance: (Possibly) by descent from Sir William
Ponsonby, (1704-1793), 2nd Earl of Bessborough
(Liotard's patron) to: Claude A. C. Ponsonby, by
whom sold, Christie's, London, 28 March 1908, lot
77, (as J.-E. Liotard); Private collection, Switzerland.
Literature: A. Graves, Art Sales Index from Early in the
Eighteenth Century to Early in the Twentieth Century
(Mostly Old Master and Early English Pictures), vol. I,
Bath, 1973, p. 178; E. Deuber-Pauli and J. D.
Candaux, Voltaire chez lui, Genève et Ferney, Geneva,
1994, pp. 108-110, 132, reproduced p. 110, fig. 5 (as
probably by Liotard after Huber); G. Apgar, L'Art
singulier de Jean Huber, voir Voltaire, Paris, 1995, pp.
94-98, p. 229, no. 101 (as by Huber, or after him,
possibly by Liotard); To be included in Prof. Marcel
Rothlisberger forthcoming book on Liotard as by
Huber.
Our picture relates to Huber’s most important
commission, the Voltairiade, a series of paintings
depicting scenes from Voltaire’s everyday life executed
for Catherine II of Russia circa 1770 to 1775. Huber
was a friend and neighbour of Voltaire, and, perhaps
inspired by the realism that characterised Voltaire’s
philosophy and writings, he depicts the great thinker,
often humorously, in everyday situations. Of the series,
his wife Mary writes: Mon mary [sic] travaille a present
a une Voltairiade...sera une vintaine de petits tableaux
en huille qui representeront diverses scènes de la vie
domestique de Voltaire...Mon mary les a chargé d’un
present pr. Dame Catherine pour la remercier…c’est une
vüe des Alpes où est Voltaire comme hors d’oeuvre avec un
jeste d’entousiasme en voyant un groupe de villageoix. 1
Huber planned in fact to produce four groups of four
paintings, each on a particular theme – domestic life,
the theatre, country life and ‘la vie cavaliere.’ 2 It seems,
however, that the series was never completed and
Huber appears to have stopped working on it in c.
1775. Nine works have survived (the majority c.55 x
20
Jean Huber
(Geneva 1721 – 1786 Bellevue, near Lausanne)
Voltaire narrating a Fable
Oil on panel
13 x 9 in. (33 x 22.7 cm.)
64
45 cm; Hermitage, St. Petersburg), 3 and Huber made
several versions of some from the cycle, the best known
being Voltaire’s Morning Levée. While the Hermitage
pictures are on canvas, our painting is on panel and of
slightly smaller dimensions.
In 1771 Liotard produced a version of Huber’s Voltaire
narrating a Fable in enamel (now lost) which was
almost identical to our panel, with the exception of the
fact that the peasants are shown eating and drinking.
This enamel, which was offered unsuccessfully to the
Comte D’Angiviller for proposed inclusion in the
French Royal collection, was exhibited twice for sale
in London in 1773 and 1785. With the exception of
Liotard’s lost enamel none of the extant versions of this
subject are by Liotard. Rothlisberger4 notes that
previous catalogue citations are incorrect and, in fact,
what was being referred in past literature was
Liotard’s enamel which he copied from our painting. 5
Interestingly, our painting was the only work by Huber
of which Liotard copied – an indication of the
particular esteem in which he held it.
Although Huber was to become an important
founding figure of the Geneva school, he received no
formal training. From a young age, however, he cut out
of paper and card profiles of a kind that later became
known as silhouettes. He also invented what he called
tableaux en découpures, which were depictions of a
range of subjects cut in vellum or parchment. Thanks
to his association from 1759 with Melchior Grimm,
who promoted his art among the readership of his
cultural newsletter the Correspondence litéraire, such
works enjoyed great popularity - George III, for
example, bought a set of découpures. In the 1760s
Huber began to paint landscapes in the style of Philips
Wouwerman, while in the following decade he focused
on the Voltairiade and training his son, Jean-Daniel.

Provenance: Comte de Castellane; Vicomte Chabert
de Brack; E. Cuvier (officer of the Banque de France);
with J. Seligmann, Paris, by 1930; Private collection;
with Wildenstein, New York.
Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Heim-Gairac, L'eau dans la
peinture ancienne, 21 May - 20 June 1968, no. 34.
Literature: This work, dated to circa 1780, will be
included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the
paintings by Hubert Robert being prepared by The
Wildenstein Institute.
The Colnaghi painting is a classic example of Hubert
Robert's notion of the picturesque in painting. At the
centre of an architectural capriccio, Robert recreates the
commanding bronze equestrian statue of Cosimo I de'
Medici, which had been unveiled in the Piazza della
Signoria in Florence in 1594. Rather than depict it in
its recognizable setting, Robert creates an entirely
fantastical site in which he surrounds the statue with
vestiges of ancient Roman architecture, notably the
famous pyramidal Temple of Cestius and the
colonnaded Temple of Saturn. A multitude of figures
inhabit the scene, chatting, climbing stairs, washing
clothes, and tending children, dressed in a bewildering
array of costumes that includes contemporary dress on
the washerwomen and children; capes, plumed hats
and ruffled collars reminiscent of Renaissance style on
the conversing men; and the occasional toga from the
ancient world. Painted in a warm chromatic tones, the
gracefully arranged figures and monuments of different
cities, regions and eras all harmoniously coexist in a
timeless world beneath a broad sheltering sky.
21
Hubert Robert
(Paris 1733 – 1808 Paris)
A Capriccio with Troubadours and Washerwomen by a Basin
among Roman Ruins, a Pyramid beyond
Oil on canvas
26 1 /2 x 32 in. (67.3 x 81.3 cm.)
66
One of the most prolific and engaging landscape
painters of the eighteenth century, Hubert Robert
specialised in architectural scenes, often of the
monuments of ancient and modern Italy and France,
in landscape settings. Robert’s classical education in
Paris was inspired a youthful fascination with the
ancient world, but it was his journey to Rome in 1754
in the entourage of the newly-appointed French
Ambassador to the Holy See, the Comte de Stainville,
later Duc de Choiseul that introduced him to the
monuments of the past that would become his lifelong
artistic preoccupation and earn him the sobriquet
‘Robert des Ruines.’ During his eleven year stay in the
Eternal City, he met important collectors and artists
such as Fragonard, Piranesi and Panini. Robert
returned to Paris in 1765, taking with him the
drawings of Italian buildings and landscapes that were
a source for his paintings for many years after.
Following his appointment as a full member of the
Académie Royale in 1766, he exhibited regularly at the
Salon from 1767 to 1798. Appointed Dessinateur des
Jardins du Roi in 1778 he designed new gardens for
Louis XVI at the château of Rambouillet and for the
Marquise de La Borde de Méréville at Méréville. In
1784 he was made Garde des Tableaux for the Musée
Royal, a post he held until his imprisonment in 1793.
Immensely popular in his lifetime, he was also
successful in Russia thanks largely to his association
with Count Stroganov, whom he had met in Rome
and who had since become Chamberlain to Catherine
II and was thus able to introduce him to Russian
patrons.

22
Louis-Rolland Trinquesse
(Dijon 1745 – 1800 Paris)
Portrait of Charles Grant, Vicomte de Vaux, in Uniform as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Garde du Roi,
attended by his Groom with their Horses, a Fortress beyond
Provenance: Painted for presentation by the sitter to
Sir James Grant of Grant, 8th Bt. (1738-1811), in
1781-2 and by descent at Castle Grant, Aberdeenshire,
and Cullen House, Banffshire, through his sons, Lewis
Alexander, 5th Earl of Seafield and Francis William,
6th Earl of Seafield, to Ian, 13th Earl of Seafield;
Christie's sale on the premises, Cullen House, 23
September 1974, lot 530.
Literature: [Sir] W. Fraser, The Chiefs of Grant,
Edinburgh, 1883, I, p. 536, no. 68, II, pp. 541, 544,
and 546-50.
Charles Grant, Vicomte de Vaux (1749 - circa 1818),
was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Scots Company of the
French Garde du Roi. Despite his French upbringing,
the Vicomte claimed descent from the Scottish Grant
family and this striking portrait is linked with his
successful endeavours to secure recognition of his claim.
The background of the present portrait is detailed in a
series of letters to Sir James Grant, head of the Grant
family in Scotland, from his kinsman, Baron Grant de
Blairfindy, a catholic in the service of King Louis XVI,
who was Colonel of the Légion Royale. On 30 January
1781 Blairfindy wrote to Sir James Grant, enclosing a
'memorial', setting out the Vicomte de Vaux’s descent
from his ancestor Sir John Grant - who had served
under Wallace and had been imprisoned in London in
1297. “His future fortune depends on his being
acknowledg'd [by] you as chief of the family, which
act, authentically documented and sign'd by you and
three or four peers of the realm, will be sufficient in
this country...”. 1 Sir James referred the matter to James
Cummyng at the Lyon Office in Edinburgh, who
recommended on that Sir James Grant “certify in
general terms that the Viscount is an ancient cadet of
[his] family”, and that the document be authenticated
by the “seal and subscription” of the Lord Lyon. On
the basis of this, Blairfindy presented the Vicomte de
Vaux - as M. de Grant, Vicomte de Vaux - to Louis
XVI. The Vicomte, whose first wife had died, wished
to marry the daughter of the President of the States of
Brittany, who would only permit the marriage if his
Oil on canvas
113 7 /8 x 81 1 /4 in. (289.3 x 206.4 cm.)
68
descent was acknowledged by Sir James and the Herald
Office of Scotland.
In order to convince Sir James of the Vicomte de
Vaux’s merits, Blairfindy wrote extolling his virtues and
“as to his figure”, in March 1782, referring for the first
time to the Colnaghi picture, “you are to have his
portrait... It is a very fine piece, ten feet high, etc. and
represents himself, groom and horses as they are in full
life and hight. This he intends you should putt up in
Castle Grant.” 2
In return Sir James offered to send highland dress to
the Vicomte and discussed an exchange of portraits
with Blairfindy who recommended, that if Sir James
sent his portrait, it should be :“En tableau ordinaire”
and not of such a prodigious size as his is of 10 feet
high. Had he consulted me before to get it made I
would have given him the same advice. It is done by
the King's first painter and of the same size as those
the King sends of himself to the foreign courts”. 3
As a result of this reference to “the King's first painter”,
our picture was at one time attributed to Jean-Baptiste-
Marie Pierre but the attribution to Louis-Rolland
Trinquesse proposed by Colin Bailey4 is much more
plausible stylistically. The slightly bibulous nose of the
sitter can be compared with that of the Portrait of
Jacques-Denis Antoine of 1744 (private collection,
France) and there are close parallels between the
physiognomy and the hands of the young man
presenting the boot and the pose of the young gallant
in the Interior Scene with two Women and a Gentleman
of 1776 (recently with Maurice Segoura Gallery, New
York). The closest parallel, though, is with the Portrait
of the Duc de Cossé-Brissac, 5 a similarly flamboyant
portrait where the Duke’s grandeur is emphasised by
the attentions of a courtly young man. While
Trinquesse’s portraits of female sitters are gentle and
straightforward depictions in pastel colours (Young
Girl, 1777, Louvre, Paris), his male portraits, of which
the Colnaghi picture is a superb example, display a
sombre grandeur and flamboyant dynamism.

Provenance: Cardinal Joseph Fesch, by whom
acquired from the artist in 1802, for 6000 francs (see
J.B. Vanel, ‘Deux livres de comptes du cardinal Fesch’,
Bulletin historique du diocèse de Lyon, January 1929,
p. 76, no. 1); (†) sale, Rome, 26 March 1844 ff., lot
820; Private collection, Portugal.
Exhibited: Paris, Salon, 1799, no. 280 (‘Un tableau
représentant la Tarentelle, danse napolitaine. Larg.
2m., haut. 1m 30 c.’).
Literature: Salon, ‘Arlequin au Muséum ou les
Tableaux en vaudeville’, Coll. Deloynes, 1799, XXI, pp.
109-110, no. 561; ‘La Revue du Muséum’, Coll.
Deloynes, 1799, XXI, p. 159, no. 562; ‘Exposition de
tableaux au Salon du Louvre. Journal d'indications’,
Coll. Deloynes, 1799, XXI, pp. 361-362, no. 579;
‘Exposition des ouvrages de peinture...insérée dans le
Journal de la Décade par le C.Chaussard’, Coll.
Deloynes, 1799, XXI, pp. 455-456, no. 580; 25
fructidor/11 septembre, 1799, Journal des Arts, de
littérature et de commerce, p. 2, no. 11; J.B. Vanel,
‘Deux livres de comptes du cardinal Fesch, archevêque
de Lyon’, Bulletin historique du diocèse de Lyon, 1802,
January 1923, p. 76, no. 1 ('la Tarentelle de Sablet
6.000 fr.'); 7 vendémiaire/30 septembre, 1803, Arch.
nat., Minutier central, Etude LXIX, 870, Inventaire J.
Sablet, 23 fructidor an XI/10 September, folio 19
(tableau appartenant à Lucien Bonaparte, ‘La
Tarentaine’); Fiorillo, Geschichte der Künste..., 1805, II,
p. 520; (George), Catalogue des tableaux composant la
Galerie de feu son éminence le cardinal Fesch, 1841,
Rome, no. 1751 ('Une fête de matelots'); 26 mars ff,
Rome, vente du cardinal Fesch, 1844, no. 820 ('Une
fête napolitaine'); A. van de Sandt, Jacques Sablet
(1749-1803). Biographie et catalogue raisonné,
Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne, 1983, no. X. 29, as
‘localisation inconnue’.
23
Jacques Sablet
(Morges 1749 – 1803 Paris)
La Tarantelle: An evening coastal Landscape
with Neapolitan Peasants dancing the Tarantella
With indistinct traces of a signature centre left: SABL
and an inventory number ‘No 665.d.C.’ (painted in black on the reverse)
Oil on canvas
61 x 83 1 /2 in. (154.9 x 212.1 cm.)
70
The whereabouts of this magnificent picture was
unknown for over 150 years until its recent rediscovery
in a private collection in Portugal. Exhibited to much
acclaim in the 1799 Paris Salon, the work was last seen
in the collection of Cardinal Joseph Fesch whence it
was sold in 1844. Anne van de Sandt, who, in her
1983 catalogue raisonné, describes the painting as
“certainement l’un des chefs-d'oeuvre de Jacques
Sablet”, 1 has confirmed the attribution on the basis of
colour transparencies and has kindly provided
information for the following catalogue note. 2
This monumental work depicts an idyllic scene of
Neapolitan peasants dancing the Tarantella before a
harbour with a castle reminiscent of the Castel Nuovo,
Naples, to the left and the fortress of Gaeta beyond. 3
The Tarantella was a lively dance, performed to the
accompaniment of tambourines, a guitar, or
sometimes, as here, a lute. It is commonly believed to
be named after the tarantula spider which was
(incorrectly) thought to cause tarantism, a form of
hysteria that was at one time endemic to the southern
Italian town of Taranto, and the cure for which was
thought to involve wild dancing. The same dance is
surely being performed in Sablet's Danse Napolitaine,
(99 x 137 cm.), commissioned by Gustav III of
Sweden in 1784 (now in Drottningholm Castle,
Sweden). From this composition the three main groups
of musicians to the right the dancing couple in the
centre, and the drinking couple to the left, have clearly
evolved and can be found in the present work.

Jacques-Henri Sablet came from a French family of
artists of Swiss origin. Both he and his elder brother
Jean-François (1745-1819) studied at the Académie
Royale in Paris as pupils of Joseph-Marie Vien.
Thanks to a grant from the State of Berne, Jacques
travelled to Italy, where, in 1778, he received a first
prize for his Death of Pallas at the concorso of the
Academy of Parma. He was soon however to abandon
history painting for informal portraits and genre
scenes, where he displayed strong sensibilité, no doubt
inspired by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Salomon Gessner. He collaborated with Abraham-
Louis-Rodolphe Ducros on the publication of a series
of Italian costumes in aquatint, providing the drawings
from which Ducros made the plates, and himself
executed in 1786 a series of etchings of popular
characters. 4 Such pictures as the Drottningholm Danse
Napolitaine, and to a greater extent, the masterly
Colin-maillard (exhibited in the Salon of 1796, and
now in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts,
Lausanne), as well as our work, with their lifelike
expression, luminosity and vivacious colouring, show
Sablet’s interest in the newly-developing taste for such
subjects.
Such works, as well as his ability to paint portraits,
caught the attention of some of the foremost collectors
and patrons of the day, including François Cacault,
Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino as well as the
latter’s uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch. Van de Sandt5 notes that this picture was presumably La Tarentaine in
the posthumous inventory of 1803 of pictures in
Sablet’s atelier, then listed as belonging to Lucien
Bonaparte (see literature.) If so, perhaps Lucien had
been acting for his uncle, as it is certain that the picture
had in fact been acquired by Fesch in 1802 for the then
enormous sum of 6,000 francs and that it also figured
in the posthumous sale of his collection in Rome in
1844.
Born in Ajaccio in Corsica, Cardinal Joseph Fesch was
of Swiss-Italian origin. The half-brother of Letizia
72
Ramolino Bonaparte (1750-1836), mother of the
future Emperor Napoleon I, he formed, between about
1796 and his death in 1839, one of the largest private
collections of paintings in the early nineteenth century.
The inventory drawn up at his death in 1841 listed
nearly 16,000 works, drawn from most periods of art
history. The finest pieces were displayed in Fesch’s
Roman residence, the Palazzo Falconieri in the Via
Giulia, with the remainder kept in other dwellings
rented for storage. The collection contained many
masterpieces, including Mantegna’s Agony in the
Garden (National Gallery, London); Poussin’s Dance
to the Music of Time (Wallace Collection, London); and
Giotto’s Dormition of the Virgin, Fra Angelico's Last
Judgement, and Rembrandt's Preaching of John the
Baptist (all Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). Upon his death,
the collection was left in part to the Institut des Etudes,
Ajaccio, that he had founded (now mostly Musée
Fesch, Ajaccio); most of the rest - including this picture
- were sold off at auction in Rome between 1843 and
1845.
La Tarantelle was exhibited in the 1799 Salon generally
to much acclaim. Chaussard noted: “...Toujours grand
peintre dans la scène familière et animée. Au fond du
tableau la mer. Sur le devant des groupes, qui vont, qui
viennent, se croisent, se quittent, se reprennent. Ils
dansent véritabalement et leur joie est bruyante... Les
peintres n’obtiennent cet effet qu’en forçant en gris les
derniers plans. Ici tout est argentin et clair; la lumière
est répandue avec profusion. Qu’elle est donc cette
magie et par quel secret de l’art...? C’est celui de Sablet,
il l’a gardé pour lui seul. Comme il est supérieur à
Vateau [sic]. La manière de Vateau était monotone et
de convention; celle de Sablet est toujours brillante et
vraie.”. The 1844 sale catalogue points to the variety in
the depiction of the figures and the majesty of the
setting: “La diversité d’action entre les différens
groupes donne à cette composition un charme et un
agrément que la variété des costumes et l’aspect
grandiose du site ne fait qu’accrôitre encore...” 6

Provenance: Anon. Sale; Paris, 24 December 1821, lot
10, as 'Intérieur d'appartement offrant le sujet de deux
jeunes personnes occupées à la lecture d'une lettre',
(Possibly) Général Ribourt. Sale, Drouot, Paris, 25 -
26 March 1895, lot 21; Muhlbacher. Sale, Paris, 14
May 1907, lot 28, erroneously states that the painting
was exhibited in the Salon of 1806; Seligmann
collection, 1937; Anon. Sale, Galerie Charpentier,
Paris, 10 June 1954, lot 28; Bruni-Tedeschi collection.
Literature: S. Wells-Robertson, Marguerite Gérard,
unpublished dissertation, New York, 1978, II, pt. 2,
p. 846, no. 70a.
Exhibited: Salon du Louvre, 1806.
Born in 1761, Gérard moved to Paris in 1775 where
she lived with her sister Marie-Anne and her sister’s
husband Fragonard in their quarters in the Louvre. She
became his protégé and may well have collaborated
with him in the 1780s (see First Steps of Childhood,
circa 1780-83; The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge,
MA). She lived for the next 30 years in the Louvre,
where she was able to study masterpieces of art – an
important factor given that, as a woman, she was
deprived of an academic training. While Fragonard's
tutelage was important to her technical development,
it was her interest in Dutch masters of the 17th century
that truly characterized her work. It was from these
"conversation pieces" that she drew inspiration for her
sentimental themes and learned to indulge in
meticulous detail. While her canvases record the
privileged and secluded lives of educated women of her
own time, they also look forward to the domestic genre
scenes that became so popular later in the nineteenth
century. By 1785, she had become a respected genre
painter, the first French woman to do so, and,
alongside artists such as Vallayer-Coster and Vigée-
Lebrun, was one of the leading women artists in
France. An accomplished portrait painter, she was a
regular contributor to the Salon from 1799 to 1824,
after the restriction on women exhibitors was lifted.
Her work was further popularized through engravings.
24
Marguerite Gérard
(Grasse 1761 – 1837 Paris)
La Bonne Nouvelle
Signed lower left: Mle gérard
Oil on panel
25 5 /8 x 21 1 /8 in. (65.1 x 53.7 cm.)
74
This painting and indeed Le Petit Messager and
La Chat Angora, both presently with Colnaghi, are
typical of the types of paintings that the artist exhibited
around the nineteenth century depicting the idealized
private world of bourgeois women.
The Colnaghi painting is one of three known versions
of this subject painted by Marguerite Gérard. 1 Three
versions are recorded by Sarah Wells-Robertson: 2 a
painting on canvas that was exhibited at the Salon of
1804 (Robertson, no. 70, 62 x 51 cm.); the Colnaghi
version on panel (Robertson, no. 70a, 64 x 53 cm.);
and a smaller version on canvas (Robertson, no.70b,
26 x 20 cm.).
Our painting is unmistakably the second version of the
1804 Salon picture. It has the differentiating
characteristics mentioned by Robertson - the bow on
the bodice worn by the lady standing and the swept
back fringe of her hair. This painting also dates to
1804, at which time Robertson describes Gérard as,
"at the peak of her career, and the Grande dame of
French genre painting". She also notes that "La Bonne
Nouvelle is a quintessential example of the Gérardian
genre picture”. 3 La Bonne Nouvelle depicts two wealthy
young women reading a letter amidst sumptuous
surroundings of a boudoir, the viewer is left to
interpret the content, perhaps with romantic inuendos.
The restrained interior scene is enlivened by the
narcissistic spaniel admiring himself, and his blue
ribbon, in the mirror. While it is true that animals
often had an overt symbolic function in seventeenthcentury
works, in our picture the spaniel adds a jovial
touch to the scene. Gérard’s figures are enclosed in a
safe and sealed world. It is an environment, elegant and
refined, that she constructs from familiar motifs drawn
from earlier sources and yet rearranges quite uniquely
to create a world that is all her own.

Provenance: Sale Cardinal Fesch, Rome, 26 March,
1845, no. 786, p. 34 (Le fidèle messager); thence
acquired by Galerie Cailleux, Paris by the grandparents
of the previous owner.
Exhibited: Salon de 1810, Paris, no. 365 (Le petit
messager ou L'occupation interrompue); Les Époques,
Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 1933, no. 81, p. 43.
Literature: A. Bellier de la Chavignerie, Dictionnaire
Général des Artistes de l'école française, Paris, 1882,
p. 638; P. Marmottan, L'Ecole française de peinture,
1789-1830, Paris, 1886, p. 275; J. Doin, Marguerite
Gérard, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, December 1912,
p. 436; S. Wells-Robertson, Marguerite Gérard, New
York University, Ph.D., 1978, vol. II, no. 77,
reproduced.
The Colnaghi painting is a fine example of an intimate
interior genre scene by Marguerite Gérard that would
have appealed greatly to the public and the critics of
the period. Although Gérard studied, and may even
have collaborated, with her brother-in-law Jean-
Honoré Fragonard, she appears to have eschewed the
sensuality and eroticism that characterize many of his
later works in favour of a more domesticated and
idealised portrayal of bourgeois and upper-class life. It
is perhaps understandable, given her role as a female
artist, that she focused largely on depictions of women,
usually presented in romantic or maternal roles and
often, as in our picture, accompanied by pets. While
her canvases record the privileged and secluded lives of
educated women of her own time, they also look
forward to the domestic genre scenes that became
popular later in the nineteenth-century.
Le petit messager was part of the celebrated collection of
Cardinal Fesch sold in Rome between 1843 and 1845.
He was perhaps Marguerite Gérard’s greatest admirer,
owning around eleven paintings by her, including the
pendant of ours, A Young Girl arranging Flowers, 1
whose present location is unknown. There are
similarities between the two paintings seen in the
ladies’ hairstyles, the pensive pose of their heads and
25
Marguerite Gérard
(Grasse 1761 – 1837 Paris)
Le Petit Messager
Signed lower right: Mle Gérard
Oil on canvas
24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.5 cm.)
76
the size of the canvases, however it is likely that there
were ten to fifteen years separating these paintings,
with our painting being completed later.
In the Colnaghi painting Gerard uses some of her
favourite motifs, such as a young boy peering into the
room from behind a screen which dates to the 1780s, 2
the young woman with a knee on the stool is
reminiscent of an illustration in Les Liaisons
Dangereuses of 17963 and the emotive motif of the
reflective globe appears in Le Chat Angora, 4 currently
with Colnaghi. Globes such as this one were objects of
great rarity and value, and its inclusion in another
work by Gérard suggests it was a studio prop belonging
to the artist. 5 It is not clear what the source for this
motif is, although it recalls the interest in reflective
surfaces found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Dutch and Flemish genre scenes and still-lifes (which
probably derives ultimately from the convex mirror in
Van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini Marriage in the National
Gallery, London.)
The influence of such Dutch seventeenth-century
masters as Gerard ter Borch, Gabriel Metsu and Caspar
Netscher, is evident here in the interior setting and its
romantic undertones. Other elements also recall these
petits mâitres hollandaises: the presence of pets, the
elegant rug draped over the table and the meticulous
attention to texture and detail. In Le petit messager the
dog in the lower left corner provides an anecdotal side
to the painting presenting, with its left paw raised, a
rose and a billet doux from the lady’s admirer. It is not
known whether the petit messager belongs to the boy
peeking from behind the screen, the lady’s lover or
admirer or the lady herself. While it is true that such
animals often had an overt symbolic function in
seventeenth century works, it seems unlikely that they
should be interpreted in this way in our painting.
Although dogs often symbolize fidelity in works of this
type, the dog has a more anecdotal role, enlivening the
quiet, restrained mood of the scene that is so typical
of the artist’s oeuvre.

01 PAUL BRIL
An extensive mountainous coastal Landscape with
Brigands abducting Theagenes and Chariclea
1 Its attribution has been confirmed by Dr. Luuk Pijl, who,
having inspected it in the original, considers it “one of this
painter’s best works” and will include it in his forthcoming
catalogue raisonné of works by the artist. The attribution
has also been confirmed on the basis of a photograph by
Dr. Luisa Wood Ruby, curator in the Frick Collection,
New York, and author of the catalogue raisonné of Paul
Bril’s drawings - Private communication 31 January 2005
2 M. Roethlisberger and M.J. Bok, Abraham Bloemaert
and His Sons, Doornspijk, 1993, I, no. 424, and II, fig. 594
3 This date was suggested by Dr. Pijl
4 L. Pijl, ‘Collaborative paintings by Paul Bril’,
The Burlington Magazine, CXL, 1998, pp. 600-67
02 FRANS FRANCKEN THE YOUNGER
Virgil in a Basket
1 Van Dishoeck, Lucas van Leyden Studies, 1979,
p.253, figs. 16 and 17
2 Härting, Frans Francken de Jüngere (1581 - 1642), 1989, no. 425
03 JAN BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER
Still-Life of a Crown Imperial Lily, a Peony, Roses,
Tulips and other Flowers in a Wooden Tub
1
K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel Der Ältere: Die Gemälde, Cologne,
1979, p.58, cat. no. 144 and pp. 254 - 6
2
It hung in a prominent position in the Royal Palace in Brussels
until 1659, when it was recorded there in the collection of
the notable collector, the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, before
being transferred, later on that year, to Vienna, where
it has been among the imperial collections ever since.
3
K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel the Younger, 1984, cat. no. 266
4 K. Ertz, op. cit., p. 248
5 K. Ertz, op. cit., p. 427, p. 426 illustrated, no. 264
05 NICOLAES MAES
Group Portrait of a Family in an Italianate
Garden with a Fountain
1 Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler,
vol. III, Landau/Pfalz o.J. (1986), p. 2037, 2170, no.
14444, illus. (measured as 21 1/4 x 27 in. 54.3 x 68.3 cm.)
2 León Krempel, Studien zu den datierten Gemälden des
Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693), Petersberg 2000, p. 73
3 Canvas, 45 x 35 3/4 in / 114.7 x 90.9 cm. c. 1675/80.
Sumowski op. cit., p. 2034, 2154, no. 1428, illustrated
4 The type of portrait frequently occurring in Maes’s work,
Junge mit Hund and Vogel is likewise to be traced back to
Goltzius. Krempel, op. cit., p.79
5 F.W. H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings,
Engravings, and Woodcuts, c. 1459-1700, vol.VIII,
Amsterdam o.J., p.95, no. 255, illustrated
6 D de Marly, ‘The establishment of Roman dress in
seventeenth-century portraiture’, Burlington Magazine, 27
July 1975, pp. 442 - 451
FOOTNOTES
78
7
Alison McNeil Kettering, The Dutch Arcadia. Pastoral Art
and its Audience in the Golden Age, Montclair 1983,
pp. 103 - 107
8
Krempel, op. cit., p. 96
9
Portretten van echt en trouw. Huwelijk en gezin in de
Nederlandse kunst van de zeventiende eeuw, exhibition
catalogue, ed. by Eddy de Jongh, Haarlem, Frans
Halsmuseum, 1986, Zwolle 1986, p. 244; Krempel,
op. cit., p. 79
10
Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der
Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen. 2nd ed.,
Den Haag 1753, Reprint, Amsterdam 1976, vol. II,
pp. 273 - 277
11
Kettering, op. cit., p. 66
12
Krempel, op. cit., p. 92
13
The style of dress points, above all, to it having been
painted in the years c. 1675. Compare in this respect the
coat of the father of the family with the portrait of Everard
van Ruytenbeeck in the Instituut Collectie Nederland.
Krempel, op. cit., illustrated, no. 239
14
Krempel, op. cit., p. 38
15
Frauke K. Laarman Familie in beeld. De ontwikkeling van
het Noord-Nederlandse familieportret in de eerste helft van
de zeventiende eeuw. Hilversum 2002
16
109.2 x 108 cm. Seymour Slive, ‘A family portrait by
Nicolaes Maes’, The Annual Report of the Fogg Art
Museum 1957/58, pp. 32-39, illustrated
17
The writer wishes to express his sincerest thanks to Ms
Sabine Craft-Giepmans in The Hague and Mr Harmen
Snel in Amsterdam for their comprehensive investigations
and written communications
06 JOHANNES VAN BRONCHORST
A Lady playing a Guitar on a Balcony
1 Ceiling painting: Musicians behind a Balustrade,
J Paul Getty Museum and Concert, Ault collection,
Brooklyn (NY) respectively
2 Concert (formerly with Heim Gallery, Paris) and
A Young Man, three-quarter length, playing a lute
(sold at Christies, London, 1980)
3 Thomas Döring states that there are no less than nine.
See Döring, Studien zur Kunstlerfamilie van Bronchorst,
VDG Verlag, Alfter, Germany, 1993
4 Johannes van Bronchorst's Saint Bartholomew of 1652
(Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna) is the earliest attributed work.
5 A. Blankert and L.J. Slatkes (ed.), Nieuw Licht op de
Gouden Eeuw, Exhibition Catalogue, Centraal Museum,
Utrecht, 1987, p. 242
6 A theory put forward by J. G. Hoogewerff in his article
‘Jan Gerritsz. En Jan Jansz. van Bronchorst, schilders van
Utrecht’, in Oud Holland, vol. I-IV, 1959, p.160
7 Peter van den Brink, despite the similarities of the
composition of Johannes’ work to that of his father,
believes that the “porcelain-like refinement in the
clothing and the fingers” and his preference for a cooler
palette suggests that our work is attributable to Johannes.
Private communication January 2007
07 ABRAHAM BRUEGHEL
Still-Life of a Watermelon, Cherries, Peaches, Apricots,
Plums, Pomegranate and Figs with Lilies, Roses,
Morning Glory and other Flowers on an Acanthus
Stone Relief, a mountainous Landscape beyond
1
We are grateful to Fred Meijer of the RKD for dating
this painting

08 RACHEL RUYSCH
Roses, Tulips and other Flowers
in a Glass Vase on a Stone Ledge
1
M.H. Grant, Rachel Ruysch 1664 - 1750, Leigh-on-Sea,
1956, p. 20
10 JEAN-LOUIS DEMARNE,
CALLED DEMARNETTE
The Horse Market
1 B Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman
– The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, pl. 96
11 LUCAS CRANACH THE ELDER
AND STUDIO
The Ill-matched Lovers
1
Quoting Aristophanes' scorn for old men as “nasty,
crumpled, miserable, shrivelled, bald, toothless and
wanting their baubles”, who are so delighted with life
that they dye their grey hair, acquire false teeth and
propose to dowry-less young women
2
For an extensive discussion of this theme see Dieter
Koepplin, ‘Ein Cranach-Prinzip’ in Lukas Cranach.
Glaube, Mythologie und Moderne, Bucenius Kunst
Forum, Hamburg, 2003, pp. 144-165
3
In the Szépmüvészeti Muséum, Budapest, see M.
Friedlander and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas
Cranach,1978, no. 15513
4
Friedlander and Rosenberg, ibid., no. 154
5
Friedlander and Rosenberg, ibid
6
Friedlander and Rosenberg, ibid., p. 125, no. 282
7
We are most grateful to Prof. Dr. Claus Grimm for
confirming this attribution – private communication
January 2007
12 ROBERT GRIFFIER
Summer: An extensive Rhenish Landscape with
Boats at a Quayside and Peasants by an Inn and
Winter: A frozen Winter Landscape with Peasants
1 A. Houbraken, De groote Schouburgh der
Nederlandtsche konstschilders en schilderessen, III,
Amsterdam, 1721, p. 360 and K. Gibson, Griffier, Jan,
senior (c. 1645-1718), Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, VIII, Oxford, 2004, pp. 667-68
14 CARLO DOLCI
Christ carrying the cross and Madonna
1 The attribution of these two works to Carlo Dolci was
endorsed by Dott.ssa Francesca Baldassari, on the basis of
photographs and colour transparencies
2 Recently with Trinity Fine Art Ltd., London; see F.
Baldassari, Carlo Dolci, Turin 1995, pp. 172-3, cat. no.
146, reproduced p. 174, fig. 146. The inscription and date
on Patience reads: A[nno] S[alutis] 1677 C[arlo] D[olci]
3 Baldassari, op. cit., pp. 183-4, cat. nos. 158 & 159,
both reproduced on p. 183, figs. 158 & 159. The
Madonna in Copenhagen is similarly inscribed on the
reverse: A[nno] S[alutatis] 1681 festa dei suoi santissimi
dolori ultimo venerdí di marzo pagato(?)
79
4 Baldassari, ibid., p. 147, cat. no. 119, reproduced on
p. 146, fig. 119, and in colour plate XXXI
5 Formerly Duke of Buckingham and Chandos collection,
Stowe, and later with Trafalgar Galleries, London; for this
and the numerous variants see Baldassari, ibid., pp. 125-7,
cat. no. 99, reproduced
6 Baldassare, op. cit., p. 146, fig. 42W
7 Baldassare, op. cit., p. 127. fig. 43W
15 Attr. to GIOVANNI MARIA
BOTTALLA, CALLED IL RAFFAELLINO
Bacchus, Temperance and Cupid
1 F. Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da
Cimabue in qua, Florence 1681-1728, ed 1845-1847,
V, 1847, p. 418
2 Camillo Manzitti “Considerazione E Novita Su Raffaellino
Bottalla”, Paragone, no. 49, Maggio, 2003, pp. 55-56
3 During this period in Rome Bottalla also painted a number
of easel paintings, including two canvasses for the Sacchetti
Family of the Reconciliation of Jacob and Esau and Joseph
Sold into Slavery by his Brothers, both now in the Pinacoteca
Capitolina, Rome
4 First attributed to Bottalla on the basis of comparison with
the Deucallion in Rio de Janiero by Manzitti, op cit, p. 56,
plate 61 and Colour Plate IV
5 Le Meraviglie dell’Arte, Maison d’Art, Park Palace
Montecarlo, 25 March-25 July 2005
6 See for example the painting by Nicholas Bertin in the
Musee de L’Historie de l’Art et de l’Industrie, Sainte-Etienne
7 We are grateful to Professor Elizabeth McGrath from the
Warburg Institute for suggesting that the figure of the
woman may represent Temperance
16 JEAN-FRANÇOIS DE TROY
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus and
Venus and Adonis
1
C. Leribault, Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres de Jean-François
de Troy, 2002, p.185b
2
C. Bailey ed., The Love of the Gods: Mythological
painting from Watteau to David, 1992, p. 241, fig.5
3
C. Bailey, ibid., p. 237
4
C. Leribault, op. cit., p. 184b
5
Chevalier de Valory, published in L. Dussieux,
Memoires inédits, see lit
17 NICOLAS LANCRET
Le Menuet
1 Wildenstein knew the painting only from its illustration
in the catalogues of its two twentieth century sales, the
Reginald Vaile sale of 23 May 1903 in London, and the
Fairfax Murray sale of 15 June 1914 in Paris
2 Some of the most successful of Lancret's experiments in
this genre are the mentioned above portraits of Mlle Sallé
and La Camargo, and several conversation piece portraits
such as The Luxembourg Family in the Virginia Museum
of Fine Arts, Richmond

18 FRANÇOIS BOUCHER
Une Dame à sa Toilette: A Lady applying a Beauty-Spot
1 Ananoff, Boucher Peintures, 1976
2 A. Laing ‘Boucher in Search of an Idiom’, in François
Boucher, exhibition catalogue, 1986-87 and J-P. Marandel
‘Boucher and Europe’, in François Boucher, exhibition
catalogue New York-Paris-Detroit, 1986-1987
3 Marandel, ‘Boucher and Europe’, in François Boucher,
exhibition catalogue New York-Paris-Detroit, 1986-1987,
p. 75-76, fig. 55
4 A. Ananoff, op. cit., 1976, vol I, no. 111
and p. 241, fig. 430
5 Ananoff, op. cit. 1976, p. 241, no. 111, op. cit
6 Ananoff, op. cit, 1976, no. 113
7 A. Ananoff, op. cit, p. 243, figs. 433 and 434
19 CLAUDE-JOSEPH VERNET
Storm in the Port of Livorno
1
F. Ingersoll-Smouse, Joseph Vernet, Peintre de Marine,
1926, no. 200
2
F. Ingersoll-Smouse, ibid., no. 469
20 JEAN HUBER
Voltaire narrating a Fable
1
“My husband is currently working on a Voltairiade...it is
comprised of about twenty small paintings, in oil, that
depict different scenes from Voltiare's daily life…my
husband asked me to present one painting to Dame
Catherine to thank her… It is a view of the Alps where
Voltaire is depicted with joyous enthusiasm upon seeing
a group of villagers...”
2
G. Apgar, L'Art singulier de Jean Huber, voir Voltaire,
1995, p. 107
3
A number are illustrated in Agpar, op. cit., pp. 99-103.
4
Professor Marcel Rothlisberger has inspected the painting
in the original and confirms that our picture is definitely
by Huber, dating it to circa 1768-1771.
5
Apgar, loc cit., Deuber-Pauli and J. D. Candaux, loc cit.,
and Loche and Rothlisberger, L’Opera completa di Liotard,
Milan, 1978, p. 122
22 LOUIS-ROLLAND TRINQUESSE
Portrait of Charles Grant, Vicomte de Vaux, in
Uniform as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Garde
du Roi, attended by his Groom with their Horses,
a Fortress beyond
1
Fraser, The Chiefs of Grant, 1883, II, p.541
2
Fraser, ibid., pp. 546-7
3
Fraser, ibid., pp. 549-50
4
Private communication January 2007
5
Jacques Wilhelm, “Les portraits masculins dans l’oeuvre
de L.R. Trinquesse”, Revue de l’Art, 1974, p.63, no. 25
80
23 JACQUES SABLET
La Tarantelle: An evening coastal Landscape with
Neapolitan Peasants dancing the Tarantella
1
See Jacques Sablet (1749-1803). Biographie et catalogue
raisonné, Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne, 1983
2
In a recent cleaning the faint traces of a signature (‘SABL’)
have emerged on the wall below the fortress on the
centre left of the composition
3
Kindly identified by Ugo di Gropello
4
Van de Sandt, op. cit., pp. 100-113
5
Van de Sandt, op. cit., no. X-29
6
‘Exposition des ouvrages de peinture...insérée dans le
Journal de la Décade par le C.Chaussard’, Coll. Deloynes,
1799, XXI, pp. 455-456, no. 580
24 MARGUERITE GÉRARD
La Bonne Nouvelle
1 It must be noted that the label on the reverse of the
Colnaghi painting titles this work as ‘La lecture d’une lettre’,
however Robertson notes it as ‘La bonne nouvelle’
2 S. Wells-Robertson, Marguerite Gérard, unpublished
dissertation, New York, 1978, II, pt. 2, p. 846, no. 70a
3 S. Wells-Robertson, op.cit
25 MARGUERITE GÉRARD
Le Petit Messager
1 S. Wells-Robertson, Marguerite Gérard, 1978, no. 47
2 For example see S. Wells-Robertson, ibid., nos. 13, 14 and 20
3 S. Wells-Robertson, ibid., no. 44c
4 S. Wells-Robertson, ibid., no. 13
5 L’Elève Intéressante ibid., no. 17

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A View of the Colnaghi-Bernheimer stand at the Biennale des Antiquaires, Paris, September 2006
82

Designed by Arvan Williams, London. Printed by fastcolour, London.