Lot 131: Boy with a flute

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Lo Spagnuolo Bologna 1665-1747
Boy with a flute
oil on canvas
19½ x 16 1/8 in. 49.5 x 41 cm.

New York, Masterpieces of Art: exhibition at the New York World's Fair , May - October 1939, no. 24.

Richard Goetz, New York.

PROPERTY FROM THE WALTER BAREISS FAMILY COLLECTION


This superbly preserved and recently rediscovered work by Crespi has, despite being exhibited at the New York World's Fair in 1939, eluded all of the literature on the artist. The composition is known through a version that passed through the hands of the New York dealers Durlacher Bros. (fig. 1; current location unknown). This work was proposed by Mira Merriman as a pendant to Man with a Helmet in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (fig. 2; see Merriman, Giuseppe Maria Crespi , Milan, 1980, nos. 211 & 212, p. 295).

The Durlacher painting is slightly larger in size than the present work, measuring approximately 25 1/4 x 21 in. (64 x 53.3 cm.), and was initially dated by Merriman to c.1730. However, on reviewing a transparency of the present work, she writes 'Compared to the painting in your possession, the Durlachers version appears thin and smooth. It may be - revising previous dating - that the pair that came from Kansas City (my 211 and 212), is quite a bit earlier, maybe even in the 1690s. I always found the two difficult to date. They seemed to fit in nowhere, but there was no doubt that they were by Crespi. Now, with this contrasting version, they suddenly fit comfortably in the youthful period of the 1690s' (written communication, 14 August 2007).

The dating of the present work to the 1690s is extremely significant since it places it at the turning point of Crespi's career as a wholly independent artist. In 1690 he was elected to the Compagnia dei Pittori in his native Bologna and commissioned to execute his first major altarpiece in the same city, the Temptation of St. Anthony (1690, San Niccolo degli Albari). This altarpiece, which imitates the forceful style of Ludovico Carracci, was commissioned by Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who was a director of the Palazzo Ghislieri drawing academy. The influence of the Carracci is key in the present work not only in its informality but also its idiosyncratic and psychologically-charged subject matter. The somber colors and dramatic lighting are further indebted to this earlier dominant school of Bolognese painting.

Comparing the present work with the Durlacher version, Mrs. Merriman writes 'I find your painting much more interesting in the weight of forms. If one looks carefully at the sleeve winding around the wrist or the forehead meeting the hair line, the volume is much more clearly understood and purposefully painted than in the larger canvas. The brush is knowledgeable and skilled. The other version could almost be a copy in the way the same elements just read as brushstrokes. I don't think it is, however; I think it is just a youthful lack of clarity. There is also an interesting psychological difference between the two. The evasive side glance in your version is flirtatious and engaging in contrast to the gaze of the Durlachers' version: simultaneously direct and unfocused. In some ways, your version is much more French in spirit'.

The present work is tighter in composition than the Durlacher version with the figure more closely cropped in the picture space, which provides a greater intensity. Close inspection of the edges of the canvas reveal that it is in its original format with cusping of the canvas weave clearly visible. In fact, what is remarkable about the present work is its excellent state of preservation, which one rarely finds in Crespi's work. The artist's use of thinly applied pigments in the shadows and half-tones as well as his practice of leaving areas of the reddish-brown ground as an undertone leaves his work particularly vulnerable to over-cleaning. In the present work these appear to have survived largely intact as have the delicate layers of transparent glaze which so effectively create the contrasts of light and dark with the thickly built up impasto in lead-white pigments, enabling us to see with remarkable clarity, the artist's original intention.