Echoes of the Past: Property from an Important Private Collection

Michael Mahoney, author of The Drawings of Salvator Rosa, 1977, has previously confirmed the present work is likely an early drawing.

Provenance:

Dutch Private Collection, probably bought at auction

Paul Brandt, sale, Amsterdam, date unknown (bears pencil inscription on accompanying paper folder: S. Rosa/ Brandt btz 22 f110,-/ No 449i

Lot Essay:

Originally from Naples, where he first trained as an artist, Salvator Rosa moved to Rome in 1635. He joined the household of Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, a well-connected Neapolitan with literary and intellectual tastes. Rosa’s own poetic and theatrical talents attracted many patrons and supporters, and his friends and fellow artists delighted in his inventive, witty, and often outrageous conversation. Despite this seemingly light deportment, however, there was a disillusionment and darkness, partly connected to the uncertainty and violence in Neapolitan society and politics, but also indicative of his occasionally misanthropic character.

In 1639, Rosa made a series of landscape paintings peopled with ruffians and travelers, in part inspired by the work of the Bamboccianti painters, the rambunctious group of Dutch artists who lived nearby. As Michael Mahoney has kindly confirmed, the present work must be an early drawing, particularly Riberesque and

exceptional for being a fully realized composition from a period when most of Rosa’s surviving work is sketchy and fragmentary. The subject is particularly poignant, in light of the uncertain and dangerous society in which Rosa lived, and his habit of wandering the Naples countryside to sketch. A simply dressed man, perhaps robbed of his outer garments, is bound outstretched along the branches of a half-dead tree. A passerby points to the figure. The unusual event is particularly emphasized by the otherwise undisturbed landscape, with a sunlit plain and town in the distance. The elegant draftsmanship and the application of the wash in to convey the dappled light on the tree trunk and leaves, but an absence of any shading on the trousers of the hanging figure, adds starkness to the strange scene.