Francesco Zuccarelli

Francesco Zuccarelli (Pitigliano 1702-1788 Florence) Portrait of a lady, half-length, in an embroidered blue dress, holding a rose, a wooded landscape beyond, in a feigned oval oil on canvas 34¼ x 29 7/8 in. (87 x 75.8 cm.) This elegant portrait is an important addition to the artist's oeuvre. Born in the Tuscan village of Pitigliano, Zuccarelli initially trained in Florence, before moving to Rome where he was a pupil of Giovanni Maria Morandi and Pietro Nelli. In the Eternal City he was able to absorb the great tradition of European landscape painting, from Claude through to the 18th century, before returning to Florence and then to Venice, where he settled in 1732. In Rome he also trained as a figure painter, a fact that tends to be obscured by the great success he had as a composer of pastoral landscapes, enjoying the patronage of the most illustrious collectors of the time. The decision to forge a career as a landscape painter was in fact taken at a relatively late stage in his career, when the artist was already in his third decade, and may have been guided by commercial reasons, possibly to fill the gap left by the recent death of Marco Ricci in 1730. The delicacy of the figures that populate his Arcadian landscapes is key to his international success, but amongst his commissions there are also religious paintings and portraits. Furthermore, his few signed works are not scene campestri but a Saint Jerome Emiliani with the orphans and the Virgin in Glory (Chiari, Brescia, Pinacoteca Repossi) and the Portraits of Ercole and Margheritina Tassi (Bergamo, Accademia Carrara), painted in 1751. After Zuccarelli moved to London in 1752, his landscapes became subservient to the biblical, historical and mythological scenes which defined the work he produced during this period, and which consequently brought about the artist's renewed interest in figurative painting. The inventory of paintings he sold with Prestage and Hobbs, London, in 1762, before his return to Italy, included an Anthony and Cleopatra, an Arab stallion, and a Portrait. As Federica Spadotto observes (private communication), in this Portrait of a lady, a work that combines sensitivity, elegance, and irony, with the sitter depicted in a typically Zuccarellian landscape, one can readily detect the high spirited and vivacious mood of the English artistic culture of the mid-century. These characteristics led Dr. Spadotto to date the painting to the 1760s. She also compares an x-ray image of it with a drawing of a Smiling boy in the National Gallery in Washington, which reveals strong affinities in the artist's treatment of the portrait. The same characteristically 'nervous' hands can also be recognised in the Portrait of the artist (London, Royal Academy). The identity of the sitter remains a mystery, but one could presume that she is a bride, with a pink and white rose in her hand, possibly referring to purity and chastity. We are grateful to Dr. Federica Spadotto for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.

Lot Description Francesco Zuccarelli (Pitigliano 1702-1788 Florence) and Antonio Visentini (Venice 1688-1788) An Italianate river landscape with women fishing and resting on the bank, with a capriccio view of the Redentore and the Rialto Bridge as designed by Andrea Palladio beyond oil on canvas 32 3/8 x 45 5/8 in. (82.2 x 115.9 cm.) Provenance with Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, London, circa 1970. Private collection, England. with Whitfield Fine Art, London. Private collection, England. Pre-Lot Text PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT EUROPEAN PRIVATE COLLECTION View Lot Notes › Born in the Tuscan village of Pitigliano, Francesco Zuccarelli had his early training in Florence, possibly with Paolo Anesi, and then in Rome with Giovanni Maria Morandi, Pietro Nelli and perhaps Andrea Locatelli. In the Eternal City he was able to absorb the great tradition of European landscape painting, from Claude through to the eighteenth century, and carry these lessons first back to Florence and then to Venice, where he settled in 1732. There he immediately succeeded as a painter of pastoral landscapes, enjoying the patronage of the most illustrious collectors of the time: Francesco Algarotti, Marshal Schulenburg and Consul Smith, the latter playing a key role in the development of the artist's career in Venice and abroad. Joseph Smith (circa 1686-1770) was not only the banker to the British community in Venice, but also a major patron of artists, a collector and a connoisseur, certainly the chief link between British Grand Tourists and the local artistic community. He disseminated the taste for vedute and for several years acted as a patron and, above all, as an agent for Canaletto. Smith and his English contemporaries were passionate about Palladian architecture, prompting him to reprint Palladio's Quattro libri dell'Architettura. Taking this passion even further, he commissioned Canaletto to paint a suite of thirteen overdoors depicting the principal Palladian buildings of Venice in 1744. Two years later, he ordered a similar series from Francesco Zuccarelli and Antonio Visentini. The eleven canvases they produced show the most notable neo-Palladian buildings in England, eight of these canvases have remained in the Royal Collection since George III's acquisition of Smith's collection in 1762. Francesco Zuccarelli collaborated with some of the greatest eighteenth-century artists, including Bellotto and Tiepolo. His collaboration with Visentini, however, has been singled out as one of 'perfect harmony', but one in which Zuccarelli was allowed to work freely from imagination, while Visentini 'was faced with greater difficulties. He had to provide accurate versions of buildings which he had never seen and of which he had only plans and elevations' (A. Blunt, 'A neo-Palladian programme executed by Visentini and Zuccarelli for Consul Smith', The Burlington Magazine, C, 1958, p. 284). This comment conveys Visentini's skill. A knowledgeable and eccentric pupil of Pellegrini, he worked as a professor at the Venetian Academy, painter, engraver and architect, whom Consul Smith had also hired to redesign the façade on the newly acquired Palazzo Balbi in the Palladian style. This picture represents Zuccarelli's work of the 1760s and 1770s, and was probably made for an English patron. It may be compared with a series of four canvases, of very similar size, first published by Antonio Morassi in 1960. Morassi saw them in London, a few years before they entered a Roman private collection (A. Morassi, 'Documenti, pitture e disegni inediti dello Zuccarelli', Emporium, CXXXI, 1960). That group depicts four masterpieces of sixteenth-century Venetic architecture in pastoral settings: Palladio's Villa Rotonda in Vicenza; Antonio da Ponte's Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice; Palladio's Church of San Giorgio Maggiore; and finally Palladio's Church of the Redentore. If it were not for this last painting, the subject being too similar, one could conclude that the present picture was once part of the same series. Another splendid pair was formerly in the Modiano collection in Bologna, also with the Redentore and the Villa Rotonda, and a fourth painting with the Redentore is in another private collection (respectively illustrated in F. Spadotto, Francesco Zuccarelli, Milan, 2007, p. 244, figs 159-60, and p. 229, fig. 121). This painting is the only known one by the two artists to recreate the project that Palladio submitted for the Ponte di Rialto in circa 1551, after the old timber bridge had collapsed once again. Palladio's classical idea was possibly considered inappropriate, and a stone bridge with a single span was completed in 1591 under the supervision of Antonio da Ponte. Other fascinating renditions of Palladio's project -- which was published in his Trattato di Architettura (fig. 1) -- are Canaletto's Capriccio with the Palladian design for the Rialto Bridge in The Royal Collection, the same artist's much celebrated Capriccio with the Palladian design for the Rialto Bridge and buildings at Vicenza (Parma, Galleria Nazionale) and Guardi's Capriccio of the Grand Canal in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, of which an autograph version was formerly in the Wallraf collection (illustrated in A. Morassi, I Guardi. Antonio e Francesco Guardi, Venice, I, fig. 534).

LOT 42 FRANCESCO ZUCCARELLI PITIGLIANO, UMBRIA 1702 - 1788 FLORENCE PAYSAGES DE LA CAMPAGNE VÉNITIENNE ANIMÉS DE PERSONNAGES FRANCESCO ZUCCARELLI ; LANDSCAPE IN THE VENETO WITH FIGURES CONVERSING AND RESTING ; OIL ON CANVAS, A PAIR ; Quantity: 2 Huile sur toile, une paire 86,5 x 61,5 cm ; 34 by 24 1/4 in

Francesco Zuccarelli (Pitigliano 1702-1788 Florence) Two shepherdesses grazing their cattle in an Italianate landscape, with a horseman in the distance and classical buildings on the horizon oil on canvas 38.3 x 31.8cm (15 1/16 x 12 1/2in). We are grateful to Dr. Federica Spadotto who kindly confirmed the attribution to Zuccarelli on the basis of photographs.

Francesco Zuccarelli (Pitigliano 1702-1788Florence) A pastoral landscape with a washerwoman andher child beside a well, a cowherd with his livestock and a countryvillage and mountains beyond oil on canvas 42.3 x 50.4cm (16 5/8 x 1913/16in). Estimate: �20,000 - 30,000, � 22,000 - 34,000, US$ 33,000 -49,000 Request Condition Report PROVENANCE: A noble villa in Lombardy, from which acquired at the end of the19th century by an old Milanese family and thence by descent to thepresent owner LITERATURE: F. Spadotto, Francesco Zuccarelli (Milan, 2007), cat. no.45, p. 107, ill. p. 197 The present painting was originally a pendant to a Landscapewith young girls and a man playing the flute and can be datedto the 1740s. Federica Spadotto has observed how both companionsshow the influence of Marco Ricci's work, which Zuccarelli hascombined with more classical elements from the Romantradition.