Tuesday 24 March 2015

Unlikely paintings



At Marques de Santos, a Portuguese auction house, they sell two Italian School 16th-17th century paintings, lot 374 and 375, with an old(?) attribution to Bernardino Campi. They are estimated at 2,400 Euro each. UPDATE: not sold, apparently most people had misgivings about these...

It seems unlikely, and I couldn't immediately find other examples, that upper-class women (viz. the clothing, especially the lace collar) would be painted doing the work of maids. The type of jolly plump girl with rosy cheeks at work is well-known, in the work of e.g Joachim Beuckelaer or indeed Bernardino Campi. But these girls are clothed as lower-class people (with often some spice added by strategic unbuttoning), not the nobility or rich bourgeoisie that wore the more elaborate clothes.

So why the discrepancy here? My gut feeling is that some faker (19th century or much more recent) wanted to give his paintings all possible checkmarks on the 16th century box, by style of painting, subject, and clothing, but didn't realise that some of those didn't match.

Whatever the case, the quality is certainly not good enough to warrant any attribution to Campi, which the auction house wisely didn't do.

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