Lot 96: GIOVANNI BATTISTA LUSIERI

THE PROPERTY OF SIR PETER MOORES, CBE DL, REMOVED FROM PARBOLD HALL ROME CIRCA 1755 - CIRCA 1821 ATHENS A GROUP OF STUDIES OF NEAPOLITAN FIGURES, INCLUDING: A NEAPOLITAN WOMAN WITH A RAKE; A WOMAN WITH A BASKET, SEEN FROM THE BACK; A WOMAN MUFFLED IN A HEAVY CLOAK; A SEATED WOMAN REACHING UP; A MAN STANDING, HIS CLOAK SLUNG OVER HIS SHOULDER, SEEN FROM BEHIND Quantity: 5 Each pencil and grey wash Each 255 by 195 mm, sight size

Purchased from the artist's heirs in 1824 by the 7th Earl of Elgin; by descent to Lord Bruce (later the 11th Earl of Elgin), his sale and others, London, Christie's, 6 July 1965, lot 109

About sixty independent figure studies by Lusieri have survived, and the majority are still in the Elgin Collection at Broomhall. These and the ones in lot 98 were once part of the same group with a provenance from the artist's studio, bought by the 7th Earl of Elgin in 1824. Twenty-one, including the present ones, were sold at auction in 1965 (see Provenance). The majority of these studies are monochrome and only a few are executed with watercolour. As pointed out by Aidan Weston-Lewis in his entry for the 'Figure Studies', in the recent Lusieri exhibition, most of them represent ordinary working men and women.1 He rightly stresses the similarity in type and execution with '...the increasingly popular genre of serial representation of local and regional costumes and trades, as produced by such artists as Pietro Fabris, David Allan, Saverio della Gatta....' This fashion lasted well into the nineteenth century. Some of these studies, as pointed out by Weston-Lewis, were used in Lusieri's extraordinary watercolours.2 Lusieri's incredible technique has always been admired for the effect of light and clarity of colouring it achieved, producing a precision unparalled by any of the other vedutisti. 1. Giovanni Battista Lusieri, exhib. cat., Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, 2012, pp.122-125, reproduced 2. Ibid., p. 122