Lot Essay
This splendid pair of canvases depicting Old Testament subjects, in their original frames, were painted for the Genoese banker Marchese Niccolo Maria Pallavicini (1650-1714), one of the wealthiest patrons of his day. Pallavicini was a discriminating connoisseur who set about forming probably the most important private collection of contemporary art in Rome, employing Carlo Maratti (1625-1713), whom Leone Pascoli describes as ‘suo grande amico’ (L. Pascoli, Vite de Pittori, etc., I, 1730, p. 141), and Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, who was Maratti’s closest associate from 1666 until the latter’s death.
Maratti was a significant proponent of the classical tradition that had begun with Raphael, and Chiari, who had entered Maratti’s studio at the age of twelve, became a faithful adherent to his master’s classicism, although his style evolved towards a sweeter and more refined Rococo aesthetic. Chiari often produced replicas and variants of Maratti’s works for the market, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that the present pair were, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, given to Maratti, despite having been listed in Pallavicini’s inventories with an attribution to Chiari (Rudolph 1995, op. cit.). The attribution to Chiari is now widely deemed convincing by scholars.
A vivid account exists of the works’ acquisition – as works by Maratti – by Richard Dalton in Rome in the mid-eighteenth century. Dalton visited Italy in the summer of 1758, charged by Lord Bute with collecting drawings and other material for the Prince of Wales, later King George III, and on his own behalf, and by Sir Richard Grosvenor to purchase pictures. Dalton’s progress is documented in correspondence with both Bute and Grosvenor. On 8 July 1758, Dalton reported to the latter from Florence that he had seen pictures being offered by Marchese Arnaldi which had been in the collection of Marchese Niccolo Maria Pallavicini. Dalton wrote:
'there are two very fine Carlo Maratti’s Ovals about four feet four inches long & 3-3-broad, fine well preserv’d pictures which are also finely engrav’d and in Frey’s collection of prints, one is Bethsheba a bathing & her maids, one holds a glass as she is combing her hair/David at a distance, the other is Hagar & Ismael, She comforted by the Angel, These pictures they ask 4 hundred crowns for each, ye is a hundred pounds a piece, and I imagine will take seventy each, then they will be vastly cheap/for I’m certain they wou’d sell for two hundred in England, a piece I mean. These shall secure for you.'
In a further letter of 16 September 1758, Dalton reported on the frames of these canvases and his other Arnaldi purchases:
'The frames are good and truely C. Maratti frames, which are much the fashion in England. They are about seven inches broad. He made the designs of all the furniture of the House as well as the frames for the Prince of Palavacini at Rome, to whom the collections belonged formerly.'
Blunt and Cooke (loc. cit.) connect The Angel Appearing to Hagar with two drawings by Maratti at Windsor, pointing out that both 'differ substantially from the [present] composition...and must be either preliminary versions, or later variants'. Another drawing at Chatsworth is of the same composition as one of the Windsor drawings. Chiari, working alongside Maratti, would have had access to these preliminary drawings, which formed the basis of his compositions. The Frey engravings by Robert van Audenaerd mentioned by Dalton are also of different compositions, the Bathsheba being after the picture painted by Maratti in 1693 for the Prince of Liechtenstein (H. Voss, Die Malerei des Barock im Rom, 1924, p. 345, illustrated). The composition of the Bathsheba canvas here must have met with particular success, given that there are two other known versions by Chiari, including one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.