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Lot Essay
This unattributed group portrait, depicting an intimate exchange between two young ladies before their overseeing governess, bears the inscription 'L. M. Van Loo pinx. Roma 1761' on the spinet. While the date and reference to Rome are in keeping with the picture's cool, Italianate style and technique, the attribution to van Loo is inconsistent with the work, given the French painter's decorative, mid-century idiom. The present picture falls somewhere within the tragectory of Italian portraiture, between Pompeo Batoni's (1708-1787) formal portraits and Andrea Appiani's (1754-1817) schematic compositions. Vestiges of Grand Tour portraiture are evident in the painting's dark green curtain, fastened at the left, revealing the shaft and base of a classical column. Yet the plunging vistas of the Italian landscape so integral to Batoni's backdrops are here supplanted by a finely decorated back wall adorned with a contemporary male portrait. The domesticity of this picture is enhanced by the pianoforte and sheet music on the lower left, the porte-crayon and the portrait drawing held by the foreground figures. Drafting and music making were some of the leisurely activities of respectable women in eighteenth-century Italy--rendering the home their only true sphere of influence. In this domestic scene, the simply dressed governess looming in the right middle ground emphasizes the superior station of the two foreground sitters, whose costumes and activities bespeak a more privileged reality.
The formal movement of Neoclassicism, known in its own day as the 'True Style', owes its early beginnings, in part, to the serendipitous excavation of Herculaneum in 1738. Along with its neighbor, Pompeii, which was unearthed ten years later, these well-preserved resort towns from Antiquity provided painters, sculptors and architects with insight into the lives of Roman patricians for the first time since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Every aspect of the ancient household, from its furnishings and cooking utensils to its decorative arts and wall paintings, was preserved by the ashes of Vesuvius.
With the discovery of these ancient relics preserved at Herculaneum and Pompeii, the resurgence of a classical vocabulary-a welcome respite from the frivolous, decorative idiom of the Rococo-was disseminated by the privileged strata of European and American society, who flocked to southern Italy to ogle at the simplicity and grandeur of what would become the new aesthetic ideal during the Neoclassical period. As proof of having completed their de rigueur Grand Tour (Rome and Naples being the ultimate destinations), many haute bourgeois travelers commissioned souvenir portraits often from some of Italy's most eminent artists, Batoni heading the list. As Rome's leading mid-century portraitist, Batoni portrayed his wealthy clientele before classical statuary and ruins, practicing a proto-Neoclassical style, thus contributing to a mania for the antique. In the 1750s Batoni laid the foundation for Italy's new style of portraiture, a restrained idiom that would find its final expression in the works of Appiani, arguably the chief exponent of Italian Neoclassical painting.
The formal movement of Neoclassicism, known in its own day as the 'True Style', owes its early beginnings, in part, to the serendipitous excavation of Herculaneum in 1738. Along with its neighbor, Pompeii, which was unearthed ten years later, these well-preserved resort towns from Antiquity provided painters, sculptors and architects with insight into the lives of Roman patricians for the first time since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Every aspect of the ancient household, from its furnishings and cooking utensils to its decorative arts and wall paintings, was preserved by the ashes of Vesuvius.
With the discovery of these ancient relics preserved at Herculaneum and Pompeii, the resurgence of a classical vocabulary-a welcome respite from the frivolous, decorative idiom of the Rococo-was disseminated by the privileged strata of European and American society, who flocked to southern Italy to ogle at the simplicity and grandeur of what would become the new aesthetic ideal during the Neoclassical period. As proof of having completed their de rigueur Grand Tour (Rome and Naples being the ultimate destinations), many haute bourgeois travelers commissioned souvenir portraits often from some of Italy's most eminent artists, Batoni heading the list. As Rome's leading mid-century portraitist, Batoni portrayed his wealthy clientele before classical statuary and ruins, practicing a proto-Neoclassical style, thus contributing to a mania for the antique. In the 1750s Batoni laid the foundation for Italy's new style of portraiture, a restrained idiom that would find its final expression in the works of Appiani, arguably the chief exponent of Italian Neoclassical painting.