Peruvian, Cuzco School, 17th Century

Portrait of a Lady with a Chiqueador

ca. 1680

Procaccini was born in Bologna, but his family moved to Milan when the artist was eleven years old. His artistic education was evidently familial— from his father Ercole and his elder brothers Camillo and Carlo Antonio, all painters—but his career began as a sculptor, and at an early age: his first known commission, a sculpted saint for the Duomo of Milan, came when he was only seventeen years old. Procaccini’s earliest documented painting, the Pietà for the Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso in Milan, was completed by 1604. By this time the artist had made the trip to Parma recorded by his biographers, where he studied Correggio, Mazzola Bedoli, and especially Parmigianino; reflections of their work are apparent throughout Procaccini's career. As Dr. Hugh Brigstocke has recently indicated, the present oil sketch is preparatory for the figure of the angel seen between the heads of the Virgin and St. Charles Borrommeo in Procaccini's altarpiece in the Church of Santa Afra in Brescia (ill. in Il Seicento Lombardo; Catalogo dei dipinti e delle sculture, exh. cat. Milan 1973, no. 98, pl. 113). As such it is the only known oil sketch of Procaccini's that can be directly connected with an extant altarpiece. The finished canvas, The Virgin and Child with Saints Charles Borrommeo and Latino with Angels, remains in the church for which it was painted; it is one of the most significant works of Procaccini's maturity and is generally dated after the artist's trip to Genoa in 1618. The Head of an Angel is an immediate study, no doubt taken from life, but one stylistically suffused with strong echoes of Correggio and Leonardo. Luigi Lanzi, writing of the completed altarpiece in 1796, specifically commented on Procaccini's indebtedness to Correggio (as well as the expressions of the angels) here: “Di Giulio Cesare...

Circle of Jacques-Louis David (French, 18th Century) Provenance: Private Collection, Buenos Aires Exhibited: “Art of Collecting,” Flint Institute of Art, Flint, Michigan, 23 November 2018 – 6 January 2019. This vibrant portrait of young man was traditionally considered a work by Jacques-Louis David, whose style it recalls, but to whom it cannot be convincingly attributed. Rather, it would appear to be by a painter in his immediate following—an artist likely working in France in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Several names have been proposed as the portrait’s author: François Gérard, Louis Hersent, Anne-Louis Girodet (Fig. 1), Theodore Gericault, and Jean-Baptiste Wicar, among others. Some have thought the artist Italian, and have proposed Andrea Appiani, Gaspare Landi...

Signed and dated, lower left: Louise Hersent/ 1823 Provenance: Private Collection, Chicago, by 1996 Private Collection, Florida This charming portrait of a young boy is the work of Louise-Marie-Jeanne Hersent, a little-known woman artist of the French Restoration often identified by her maiden name, Mauduit. While Hersent—as we will call her here following the signature on the painting—has been understudied, the known details of her life and career reveal that she held a privileged position in artistic life in the early nineteenth century in Paris. She exhibited at the Salon from 1810 until 1824, and in 1821 she married the painter Louis Hersent, a successful pupil of Jacques-Louis David who was patronized by Louis XVIII and Charles X. It is likely through her husband’s royal patronage that Hersent’s Louis XIV Visits Peter the Great was purchased for the Royal Collection in Versailles. In 1806, while still Louise Mauduit, she painted a portrait of Napoleon’s youngest sister, Pauline Bonaparte...

Provenance: Bradley Collection. Private Collection, Upperville, Virginia. Literature: Katlijne van der Stighelen and Hans Vlieghe, Rubens: Portraits of Unidentified and Newly Identified Sitters painted in Antwerp, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, vol. 19, pt. 3, London and Turnhout, 2021, under cat. no. 189, p. 161, and fig. 75. This painting had previously been considered to be by an anonymous Tuscan painter of the sixteenth century in the orbit of Agnolo Bronzino. While the painting does in fact demonstrate a striking formal and compositional similarity to Bronzino’s portraits—compare the nearly identical pose of Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig. 1)—its style is completely foreign to Italian works of the period. That it is painted on an oak panel is further indication of its non-Italian origin. This portrait can in fact be confidently attributed to the Antwerp artist Huybrecht Beuckelaer. Huybrecht, the brother of Joachim Beuckelaer, has only recently been identified as the author of a distinct body of work formerly grouped under the name of the “Monogrammist HB.” In recent studies by Kreidl, Wolters, and Bruyn his remarkable career has been delineated: from its beginnings with Joachim in the workshop of Pieter Aertsen; to his evident travels to Italy where, it has been suggested, he came into contact with Bronzino’s paintings; to his return to Antwerp, where he seems to have assisted Anthonis Mor in painting costume in portraits; to his independent work in Antwerp (where he entered the Guild of Saint Luke in 1579); and, later to his career in England where, known as “Master Hubberd,” he was patronized by the Earl of Leicester. Our painting was recently published by Dr. Katlijne van der Stighelen and Dr. Hans Vlieghe in a volume of the Corpus Rubenianum, in which they write that the painting “has a very Italian air about it and fits convincingly within [Beuckelaer’s] oeuvre.” Stighelen and Vlieghe compare the painting with Peter Paul Ruben’s early Portrait of a Man, Possibly an Architect or Geographer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which the sitter holds a compass and wears a similarly styled doublet (Fig. 2). Huybrecht both outlived and travelled further afield than his brother Joachim, who made his career primarily in Antwerp. Whereas Joachim was the main artistic inheritor of their uncle and teacher, Pieter Aertson, working in similar style and format as a specialist in large-scale genre and still-life paintings, Huybrecht clearly specialized as a painter of portraits and was greatly influenced by the foreign artists and works he encountered on his travels. His peripatetic life and his distinctly individual hand undoubtedly contributed to the fact his career and artistic output have only recently been rediscovered and reconstructed. His periods abroad seem to have overlapped with the mature phase of his brother Joachim’s career, who enrolled in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke much earlier than his brother, establishing himself as an independent painter in 1560. Joachim’s activity was confined to the following decade and half, and his latest work dates from the last year of his life, 1574. Our portrait was likely produced in the late 1560s, a dating supported by the dendrochronological investigation performed by Dr. Peter Klein, which established that it is painted on an oak panel with an earliest felling date of 1558 and with a fabrication date of ca. 1566. This painting presents a portrait of an artist, almost certainly Huybrecht’s self-portrait. The young sitter is confidently posed in a striking patterned white doublet with a wide collar and an abundance of buttons. He stands with his right arm akimbo, his exaggerated hands both a trademark of Huybrecht and his brother Joachim’s art, as well as a possible reference to the “hand of the artist.” The figure peers out of the painting, interacting intimately and directly with the viewer, as we witness him posed in an interior, the tools and results of his craft visible nearby. He holds a square or ruler in his left hand, while a drawing compass...

The panel has been attributed both to Joan de Joanes and his son Vicente Macip Comes (Valencia, ca. 1555 – 1623). Provenance: Private Collection, England, by 1886 (according to stencils on the reverse) Private Collection, New Jersey, until 2010 The Veil of Veronica, often called the Sudarium, is one of the most important and well-known relics of Christ. According to legend, Veronica offered Christ her veil as he carried the cross to his crucifixion. He wiped his face with the veil, which left the cloth miraculously imprinted with his image. Depictions of Christ’s face on a veil, or simply images that focused in on Christ’s face, were treasured objects of religious devotion. The popularity of this format also inspired similar images of the face of the Virgin. The iconographic type of the present painting is known as the Veronica of the Virgin, which was especially favored in late medieval and early Renaissance Spain. Distinct from the images of the suffering Christ, the Veronica of the Virgin is based on the legend that Saint Luke painted a portrait of Mary from life. Although scholars have sometimes mistaken them for portraits of Queen Isabella I of Castile (known as Isabel la Católica) or as a depiction of Saint Maria Toribia (known as María de la Cabeza, or, Mary of the Head), paintings like this one were clearly intended as images of the Virgin in the style of Saint Luke’s lost portrait. The Veronica of the Virgin was especially popular in Valencia, and depictions of this subject produced there all stem back to one visual prototype: a Byzantine image in the city’s cathedral (Fig. 1). This early treatment of the Veronica was given to the cathedral in 1437 by Martin the Humane, King of Aragon and Valencia, who promoted religious veneration of the Veronica of the Virgin as part of the celebration of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. This devotion spread throughout Martin’s kingdom and particularly took hold in Valencia, where the Byzantine image resided. The image, which is displayed in a gold reliquary...

Provenance: with Leo Blumenreich and Julius Böhler, Munich, 1924 Dr. Frederic Goldstein Oppenheimer (1881-1963), San Antonio, Texas; by whom given to: Abraham M. Adler, New York, un...

Oil Painting Portrait of John Campbell, 4th Duke of Argyll,, att to John Vanderbank (1694-1739) Housed in a swept frame which has been restored after photo. Canvas Size 50" x 40", Fr...

Signed, inscribed and dated, lower right: 'Geo Dawe RA St Petersburgh 1819', also signed with initials, lower centre: 'G D RA'; and signed and inscribed verso: 'Geo Dawe RA Pinxit 1819 St Petersburgh'; Also inscribed on the stretcher by Cornelius Varley with varnishing instructions. Collections: Private collection, UK, 2010 Literature: Galina Andreeva Geniuses of War, Weal and Beauty: George Dawe...

Expertise by Prof. Davide Dotti. Expertise by Prof. Anna Orlando.

Pietro Bardellino (Naples, 1731 – Naples, 1806) Mary Magdalene Oil on canvas, cm. 75 x 60 – with frame cm. 97 x 82 Antique shaped and carved wooden frame Publications: unpublished T...

Frame in lacquered and gilded wood. The painting is mentioned in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani in the biography of the artist.

Giuseppe Assereto (Genova - 1626 ca – Genova 1656/57) Portrait of an elderly woman, possible portrait of Maddalena Massone, wife of Gioacchino Assereto Oil on canvas, cm. 65,5 x 51,5...