Lot 66: Joseph Moij (active 18th Century)

Spring: a young man and shepherdess in a landscape indistinctly signed and dated 'iOSE: MOijs A:1760' (centre right) oil on canvas, shaped top 85.9 x 96.4 cm. PROVENANCE Lord Foley (Witt Library photograph), presumably Fitzalan, 6th Baron Foley (1852-1918), from whom acquired by Robert Langton Douglas (1864-1951). F.B.E. Gutmann, Heemstede. with J.W. B”hler, Munich, 1942. with K. Haberstock, Berlin, 1942. Taken to the Salzburg Central Collecting Point (no.2231), whence moved to the Netherlands, 1946. The Instituut Collectie Nederland (earlier the Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit, no. NK3251, as School of Francois Boucher) until restituted to Gutmann's heirs in 2002. NOTES The composition derives, in reverse, from Boucher's painting of 1755 that formed part of a set of The Four Seasons painted for Madame de Pompadour and now in the Frick collection, New York. The identity of the present artist is uncertain, although he may well be the Josephus Moy recorded in Bavaria in the late eighteenth century, but about whom nothing else seems to be known. Painted just five years after the original, the present version is presumably indebted to Jean Daull‚e's engravings after the series, which inspired numerous other derivations.