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Lot Essay
This canvas is a high point amongst the relatively few easel paintings by Alessandro Gherardini, the most fascinating anti-academic Florentine painter working in Tuscany at the end of the 17th and the frst two decades of the 18th century. Far greater in number are his frescoes for the churches, palazzi, and villas of Florence and the nearby provinces (though also in Pontremoli where he was a long time resident), works commissioned by high-ranking noble families, such as the Corsini, Gerini, Ginori, Giugni and Orlandi.
Gherardini absorbed the infuences of Luca Giordano and Sebastiano Ricci, who had both worked in Florence, and here he transforms this noted biblical story into a composition full of dynamism, with fashes of light that whiten the clothes and heighten the vivid colours. At the centre of the composition in Moses, who chases away the shepherds, shown on the left, so as to allow the seven daughters of Jethro to draw water from the well for their herd. The clothing of all the figures is rendered in a frayed manner, painted with typically rapid brushwork. The landscape that can be glimpsed beyond the figures recalls the frescoes of the gallery painted by Luca Giordano in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi (1685-1686).
The stylistic affinities between the present lot and the frescoes painted by Gherardini for the piano nobile of the Palazzo Corsini in Florence (1695- 1696) suggest that the canvas can be dated to between the end of the 17th and the first decade of the 18th century.
We are grateful to Dr. Francesca Baldessari for confrming the attribution to Gherardini on the basis of photographs and for providing the catalogue note.
Gherardini absorbed the infuences of Luca Giordano and Sebastiano Ricci, who had both worked in Florence, and here he transforms this noted biblical story into a composition full of dynamism, with fashes of light that whiten the clothes and heighten the vivid colours. At the centre of the composition in Moses, who chases away the shepherds, shown on the left, so as to allow the seven daughters of Jethro to draw water from the well for their herd. The clothing of all the figures is rendered in a frayed manner, painted with typically rapid brushwork. The landscape that can be glimpsed beyond the figures recalls the frescoes of the gallery painted by Luca Giordano in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi (1685-1686).
The stylistic affinities between the present lot and the frescoes painted by Gherardini for the piano nobile of the Palazzo Corsini in Florence (1695- 1696) suggest that the canvas can be dated to between the end of the 17th and the first decade of the 18th century.
We are grateful to Dr. Francesca Baldessari for confrming the attribution to Gherardini on the basis of photographs and for providing the catalogue note.