Lot Essay
Relatively little is known about the life of Michele Desubleo or 'Michael de Sobleò Pictor Belgicus', as he is referred to in his will. It is possible that he was trained by Abraham Janssens in Antwerp, together with his half-brother Nicolas Régnier. It has also been suggested that following this period in Janssens’ studio, Desubleo may well have joined Régnier in Rome. He was certainly in Bologna by the beginning of the 1630s, where he seems to have found work in Guido Reni's flourishing studio. However, it was probably in Rome that he first encountered the work of Reni, and the time spent in the latter’s studio gave him the opportunity to fully absorb the Bolognese painter’s brand of Classicism. It was during these years that Desubleo developed his own style, which reveals a distinctive and personal response to Reni’s art. Enriched by this Bolognese experience, he is thought to have travelled to Florence. Several paintings by him remain in Florentine collections, notably the monumental Tancredi and Erminia in the Uffizi, painted in Bologna in 1641 for Lorenzo de' Medici.
Desubleo taught in the Accademia founded in 1646 by Count Ettore Ghislieri. His illustrious colleagues there included Francesco Albani, Guercino, and Alessandro Tiarini. The demise of the Accademia in 1652, as well as the growing celebrity of Guercino, may well explain Desubleo's move to Venice, where his half-brother was living and where he remained until about 1663. His Classicism, however, did not find favour in the Republic, and he painted mostly for provincial or old Emilian patrons. He was briefly in Milan after 1663, before settling in Parma, maybe to be closer to his niece, Lucrezia Régnier. The last ten years of his career in Parma were arguably his most fruitful and dominated by a renewed interest in Reni's tradition, enriched by the French influences probably absorbed in Venice.
Alberto Cottino, who considers this picture to date to Desubleo’s final years in Parma, notes that the foreshortening of the young Joseph recalls that of Tancredi in the aforementioned Uffizi canvas (op. cit., p. 121), executed earlier in his career. A second rendition of this subject in a private Venetian collection, which is of slightly smaller dimensions and post-dates the present picture, is probably the work listed in various inventories of the Farnese collection from the late seventeenth century (ibid.).