Herbette, from France, sells on 17 June 2018 a "French School, 18th century" portrait of a lady, estimated at 1,300 to 1,800 Euro.
At first I tweeted about it, as I thought it looked better and older than the description and estimate indicated, but I couldn't immediately find the right artist or period. But looking further and further first led me to the 16th century, then to Italy, and finally to Alessandro Allori (1535-1607).
I was first searching for French paintings of princesses or noble ladies, but I couldn't match the striking (and truly beautiful) fashion displayed in this painting with any works I encountered. A brief excursion to Elizabethan works confirmed that the work was probably from that period, but again the fashion didn't really match. Which led me to Italy, and a painting of Isabella de' Medici (1542-1576) from the Uffizi was the first match, both in clothing and by sheer luck also in style of painting.
This lead me to look further at Allori paintings, which share the same dress style, same way of painting faces (the eyes especially, but also the pale skin, the small mouth, the eyebrows, ...). Most of them are slightly turned sideways, but a few look directly at the viewer, and these are to me the best. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna houses this portrait (either Maria de' Medici or Eleonora di Toledo).
And ultimately I came across an Allori portrait from the
Fogg Museum (or Harvard Art Museum). It is slightly larger than the current work (64 by 47 cm instead of 56 by 43 cm), and depicts the same woman, in the same dress and necklace, but with a different posture and a different hair jewel. And, most importantly, the work for sale is a lot better than this one (the reverse of what I usually have to say in my blog posts).
Comparing the head and the collar clearly shows the much more refined finish of the work for sale, the attention to detail in the lace (or whatever the cloth is), the much more realistic look of the face (no matter how much it still resembles a porcelain doll), ... The yellowing of the Fogg version is partly to blame for it, but even ignoring this you get in their version a lifeless, flat cloth, painted with skill but without real vigour, real splendour. It is a very good depiction of somptuous clothing, but it is not life-like.
The Fogg version is given as by Allori on ther website, but the
Fondazione Zeri (a catalogie of Italian painting comparable to the RKD website for Dutch and Flemish painting) has catalogued it as "School of Allori", which may be correct as the quality is not there compared to the best of his own works.
While I can't give any guarantees, being a generalist art historian who has based the above on images from the Internet, not on handling the actual painting or on a thorough knowledge of the works of Allori, to me this is almost certainl to be a real work by Alessandro Allori. Herbette indicates that it has been relined and has some repainted areas, and gives no provenance on their website.
So what's it worth then? At least 50,000 Euro. And sometimes these good sleepers in unsuspecting auctions go way beyond that, surpassing what the same painting would fetch in a major auction house even, so who knows?
