Lot 34: Bernardo Cavallino , Naples 1618-1654 Portrait of a girl oil on canvas

oil on canvas

measurements note 16 1/2 by 13 7/8 in.; 41.8 by 35.3 cm.

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, December 9, 1992, lot 90, for £55,000.

PROPERTY FROM THE LONDON RESIDENCE OF LUIGI KOELLIKER
This exquisite little canvas may be compared in its inception to a group of small female figures by Cavallino in which the subject is represented in bust or half-length, her head inclined to the left or right, and her eyes looking directly out of the picture at the viewer; see, for example, the Clavichordist or Saint Cecilia in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, or the Saint Catherine of Alexandria in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.υ1 It is however Cavallino's Saint Catherine in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, with which the present work bears the most startling resemblance.υ2 That painting, and the Lyon and Birmingham works, all of which are characterised by broad brushstrokes and a cool, opaque tonality on top of a red/brown ground, have been dated to the second half of the 1640s and a similar dating for the present work would seem appropriate.

A physiognomic likeness of the model in the present work with the both the head of Thermuthis in Cavallino's Finding of Moses (Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) and that of the Virgin in his celebrated Immaculate Conception (Brera, Milan) should be noted.υ3

1. For which see A.T. Lurie and A. Percy, Bernardo Cavallino of Naples, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland/ Fort Worth/ Naples 1984, pp. 192-5, nos. 71 and 72, both reproduced.
2. Ibid., pp. 158-9, no. 54.
3. Ibid., pp. 213-215, no. 81, and pp. 151-53, no. 51, both reproduced.