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Lot Essay
Bernhard Keil was among the most distinctive genre painters active in Italy during the second half of the seventeenth century. Born in Helsingør, Denmark, he apprenticed under the Copenhagen court painter Maarten van Steenwinckel (1595-1646) before his Dutch mother's contacts secured him a position in Rembrandt's studio in Amsterdam, where he remained from 1642 to 1644. This formative encounter with Rembrandt shaped much of his early technique. Keil subsequently worked for the prominent dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh for three years and ran his own shop for four more before traveling to Italy, arriving in Venice in 1651. After a period in Bergamo beginning in 1654 and a brief sojourn in Milan, he set out for Rome, where he absorbed the influence of Bernardo Strozzi, Domenico Fetti, and Giovanni Battista Langetti. In 1657, despite the plague that had infested the city since the previous summer, Keil settled definitively in Rome, marrying and converting to Catholicism; he would remain there, known locally as 'Monsù Bernardo', until his death thirty years later.
The present canvas depicts a subject much favored by Keil: a domestic incident transformed into an allegory. A boy has fallen to the ground, his expression one of shock and distress, while a broken maiolica jug lies overturned beside him; an elderly woman bends to grasp his arm in concern as a young girl at right looks on in alarm. A related composition of this subject, with an elderly man at left in place of the woman, is illustrated by Minna Heimbürger in her catalog raisonné of the artist (see M. Heimbürger, Bernardo Keilhau detto Monsù Bernardo, Rome, 1988, p. 220, no. 132). Discussing that version, Heimbürger cited Guercino's Tancred wounded succored by Erminia in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome, as a possible prototype for the arrangement of figures around a prone central figure, and suggested that the balustrade glimpsed in the background, evocative of Venetian painting, places such compositions at the beginning of Keil's Roman period, likely the late 1650s or early 1660s. A similar date may be proposed for the present painting
The present canvas depicts a subject much favored by Keil: a domestic incident transformed into an allegory. A boy has fallen to the ground, his expression one of shock and distress, while a broken maiolica jug lies overturned beside him; an elderly woman bends to grasp his arm in concern as a young girl at right looks on in alarm. A related composition of this subject, with an elderly man at left in place of the woman, is illustrated by Minna Heimbürger in her catalog raisonné of the artist (see M. Heimbürger, Bernardo Keilhau detto Monsù Bernardo, Rome, 1988, p. 220, no. 132). Discussing that version, Heimbürger cited Guercino's Tancred wounded succored by Erminia in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome, as a possible prototype for the arrangement of figures around a prone central figure, and suggested that the balustrade glimpsed in the background, evocative of Venetian painting, places such compositions at the beginning of Keil's Roman period, likely the late 1650s or early 1660s. A similar date may be proposed for the present painting