A Boy with a Recorder
1665-1747
Oil on canvas, 24 3/4 ins by 19 3/4 ins
Collection Details
Faresini family, Venice; Francesco Algarotti, Venice; Mme B Gerster-Gardini, Kansas City; with Durlacher, 1937; Kirk Askew, jnr, New York, 1944: anon. sale, Sotheby’s, 11 March 1964, lot 101; bought by Lord Faringdon for the Faringdon Trustees.
Literature
Luigi Crespi, Vite, 1769, p.215; Mira Pajes Merriman, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, 1980, No.212 (as ‘location unknown’); exh cat Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy (by John T Spike), Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1986, p.32 and fig.21.
Exhibition Details
Durlacher, New York, G M Crespi, 1937, No.6 (as Portrait of a Girl); Baltimore, Detroit and St Louis Museums and Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, Strozzi, Crespi, Piazzetta, 1944, No.30; Finch Collection of Modern Art, New York, Bolognese Baroque Painters, 1962, No.20.
Engraved
By Pietro Monaco for Algarotti, as Daviddo fuggitivo.
Exhibition Details
The pendant to this picture, of a Man wearing a Helmet (thus making a pair, of the Active and Contemplative Life), is in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City (Merriman, No.211).
Background
Highly untypical of the work of Crespi, whose speciality was the highly painterly depiction of scenes from common life, with pronounced chiaroscuro, this painting has consequently been doubted as his, but the engraving after it secures his authorship. It is appropriate that the picture should have belonged to Venetian collectors, since it was in Venice rather than in his native Bologna that pictures of this kind by Crespi were influential. They particularly marked the output of the Venetian Giambattista Piazzetta, who deliberately came to Bologna to seek out Crespi’s school some time between 1703 and 1711.
The Trustees of the Faringdon Collection 24.
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