Per Tellander (Swedish, 1879–1951), Lake, forest, and tree, oil on panel, 44 × 33 cm.

Painted around 1915, this work belongs to the generation of Nordic artists who reimagined the northern landscape as a symbol of spiritual purity and national identity. A member of the pioneering modernist group De Unga ('The Young Ones'), Tellander developed a deeply personal vision that united National Romanticism with the new expressive language of early twentieth-century painting, placing him within one of the defining artistic movements of Scandinavian modernism.

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Helene Schjerfbeck (Finnish, 1862–1946), Head of a Man (Christ), 1898, pencil on paper, 11.5 × 9.5 cm.

Today recognised as one of the defining figures of Nordic modernism, Helene Schjerfbeck has recently been the subject of a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reaffirming her place within the international history of modern art. This intimate drawing is a study for her Resurrection of Christ altarpiece of 1898 and belongs to the decisive moment in which she began developing the pared-back, psychologically charged language that would come to define her mature work.

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August Johnsson (Swedish, 1873–1900), Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile, possibly Alma Ekberg, oil on canvas, 48.2 × 40.5 cm.

Although his career was tragically cut short at the age of twenty-seven, August Johnsson was widely regarded as one of the most gifted young Swedish painters of his generation, receiving the prestigious Hertliga Medal at just twenty-five. Having destroyed much of his own work before his death, his surviving paintings are exceptionally rare, preserving the legacy of one of the leading voices of the so-called 'Scanian twilight' generation at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Magnus Enckell (Finnish, 1870–1925), Autumnal scene in Vääksy, 1912, mixed media on canvas, 54 × 42 cm.

Regarded by the Ateneum Art Museum as one of the most significant artists of Finland's Golden Age, Magnus Enckell stands among the leading figures of Nordic modernism. Painted in 1912, at the moment he emerged as leader of the influential Septem group, this work belongs to the pivotal period in which Finnish painting embraced a new language of colour and Post-Impressionist light, establishing Enckell at the forefront of the country's artistic renewal.

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Moving Stillness: Nordic Painting and Drawing from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Modern Period is on view at Colnaghi London until 31 July 2026.

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Kylix, Greek, Mycenaean, ca. 14th century B.C., terracotta, h. 12.4 cm (4 7/8 in.).

Created during the fourteenth century B.C., at the height of Mycenaean cultural expansion, this kylix belongs to one of the earliest traditions of Greek drinking vessels. Its elegant form marks a transitional moment in Aegean ceramic production, preserving elements of earlier mainland pottery while anticipating the shapes that would define the Greek symposium. The abstract decoration likewise reflects the Mycenaeans' growing interest in ordered, symmetrical design, an important development in the visual language of Bronze Age Greece.

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Kylix, Greek, Mycenaean, ca. 14th century B.C., terracotta, h. 17 cm (6 3/4 in.).

Produced in the fourteenth century B.C., this kylix exemplifies the remarkable sophistication of Mycenaean painted pottery. Inspired by the vegetal and marine ornament of Minoan Crete, Mycenaean artists transformed these motifs into increasingly abstract compositions, laying the foundations for a distinctly Greek decorative tradition. Its proportions and balanced design foreshadow the drinking vessels that would become central to Greek convivial culture for centuries to come.

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“Carian Wild Goat Style” Trefoil Oinochoe, Eastern Greek, ca. late 7th–early 6th century B.C., terracotta, h. 19.1 cm (7 1/2 in.).

Belonging to the celebrated Carian Wild Goat tradition, this oinochoe was produced in southwestern Anatolia during the late seventh or early sixth century B.C., when the eastern Greek world was absorbing artistic influences from across the eastern Mediterranean. The style represents one of the most distinctive regional expressions of the Orientalising period, reflecting an age in which commerce, migration and cultural exchange reshaped Greek visual culture.

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Black-figure Eye Cup, Greek, Attic, ca. 530–520 B.C., terracotta, d. 36.8 cm (14 1/2 in.).

Fashioned in Athens around 530–520 B.C., this eye cup belongs to one of the most recognisable forms of Archaic Greek pottery. Created for the symposium, the ritualised drinking party at the heart of elite social life, such vessels united craftsmanship, performance and belief. Their painted eyes were understood to possess an apotropaic function, while, when raised to the lips, the cup transformed its user into a theatrical mask: the handles became ears, the foot a comic snout, and the painted eyes an extension of the drinker's own. It is a striking expression of the wit and performative culture that characterised the Greek symposium.

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Black-figure Neck Amphora, Greek, Chalcidian, ca. 530–520 B.C., terracotta, h. 21.9 cm (8 5/8 in.).

Produced in one of the Greek colonies of southern Italy during the late sixth century B.C., this amphora belongs to a remarkable period of artistic and cultural expansion across the Mediterranean. As Greek settlers established prosperous new cities beyond the Aegean, they carried with them the techniques and visual traditions of the mainland, while local workshops developed distinctive regional styles. Chalcidian pottery stands among the finest expressions of this dialogue between migration, trade and artistic innovation in the Archaic world.

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Antonio Ponce (Valladolid 1608–1677 Madrid), Still Life with a Basket of Fruit and Tray with Sweets, ca. 1640, oil on canvas, 43.8 × 77.7 cm (17 1/4 × 30 5/8 in.).

Painted in Madrid during the flourishing of Spain's Golden Age, this work belongs to a period in which the bodegón emerged as one of the defining genres of seventeenth-century painting. A documented pupil of Juan van der Hamen, Antonio Ponce helped elevate the still life beyond simple representation, developing a refined and highly personal style that appealed to the sophisticated tastes of the Habsburg court. Today, he is recognised as one of the principal figures in the second generation of Spanish still-life painters, whose work shaped the evolution of the genre.

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In Vino Veritas: The Visual Rhetoric of Wine is on view at Colnaghi London until 31 July 2026.

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In Vino Veritas examines the changing role of wine within the Western visual tradition. Bringing together archaeological material, sculpture, and painting, the exhibition traces a shift from the communal and ritualised culture of antiquity to the increasingly allegorical and reflective functions wine assumed within Renaissance, Baroque, and still-life traditions.

Byzantine, Amphora with Leopard Handles, c. 6th century AD, bronze, 38.1 cm high (15 in.).

Produced at a moment when Byzantine culture continued to absorb and reinterpret the visual inheritance of antiquity, this amphora illustrates the persistence of Dionysian imagery long after the Christianisation of the Eastern Mediterranean. The object occupies the intersection of classical tradition, luxury metalwork, and the material culture of wine.

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Greek, Funnel Strainer, Early Hellenistic period, late 4th–early 3rd century BC, bronze, 21 cm diameter (8 1/4 in.).

Associated with a group of luxury objects discovered near Amphipolis, this strainer belongs to the highly developed drinking culture of the Hellenistic world. Such objects formed part of the symposium, one of the most influential social institutions of antiquity and a model that continued to shape European attitudes towards wine for centuries.

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Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Fuendetodos 1746–1828 Bordeaux), Sacrifice to Priapus, 1770 or 1771, oil on canvas, 40.4 × 30.3 cm (15 7/8 × 11 7/8 in.).

Executed during Goya's Roman period, this painting belongs to a small corpus of works produced during the artist's formative encounter with Italian antiquity. Its subject reflects the eighteenth-century revival of classical paganism, a phenomenon that profoundly shaped artistic production in Rome during the decades preceding Neoclassicism's full emergence.

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Moving Stillness: Nordic Painting and Drawing from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Modern Period

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a period of profound transformation within Nordic art. As artists increasingly engaged with Symbolism, National Romanticism, and emerging modernist tendencies, landscape and everyday life became sites through which questions of national identity, perception, and artistic expression could be explored.

Olof Jonas Grafström (Attmar 1855–1933 Stockholm), Sami in the Kvikkjokk Valley, 1882, oil on canvas, 105 × 179 cm (41 1/3 × 70 1/2 in.).

Painted at the height of Scandinavian interest in the northern territories, this work belongs to a broader cultural movement that positioned Lapland as a defining component of Nordic identity. Its acquisition by King Oscar II shortly after completion reflects the growing national significance attached to representations of the far North.

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Hugo Simberg (Hamina 1873–1917 Ähtäri), The Model Warming Up, c. 1906, oil on canvas, 67 × 43 cm (26 3/8 × 16 15/16 in.).

Produced during the same period as the artist's celebrated commissions for Tampere Cathedral, this painting demonstrates Simberg's increasing interest in everyday subjects. The work occupies an important position within Finnish art of the early twentieth century, when Symbolist concerns were increasingly being redirected towards the observation of modern life.

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Gustaf Fjæstad (Stockholm 1868–1948 Arvika), The Snow, 1920–21, oil on canvas, 134 × 174 cm (52 3/4 × 68 1/2 in.).

Among the most celebrated interpreters of the Nordic winter, Gustaf Fjæstad achieved considerable international acclaim during his lifetime, with collectors ranging from King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy to major European institutions. Painted during the mature phase of his career, The Snow exemplifies the distinctive synthesis of Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and landscape painting that established Fjæstad as one of the defining figures of early twentieth-century Scandinavian art.

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In Vino Veritas: The Visual Rhetoric of Wine and Moving Stillness: Nordic Painting and Drawing from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Modern Period are on view at Colnaghi London until 31 July 2026.

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Jacob Jordaens (Antwerp 1593–1678 Antwerp), The Triumph of Minerva, c. 1655–1660, red and black chalks, watercolour and bodycolour over charcoal on a sheet composed of three subsidiary sheets on laid paper, 38 × 60 cm (15 × 23 5/8 in.), with the collection mark of Sir Joshua Reynolds lower right.

Executed around 1655–60, The Triumph of Minerva belongs to the final decades of Jordaens’s career. The composition centres on Minerva, goddess of wisdom, crowned by Time and holding the shield of Medusa and the palm of victory. Around her gather Mercury, Hercules, Bellona, Fame and a multitude of allegorical figures, while Mars sits defeated in the foreground, his armour and weapons scattered beneath him. As Roger-Adolf d’Hulst observed, the drawing constitutes an allegory of peace and prosperity, celebrating the triumph of wisdom over conflict and the flourishing of civic life that follows the end of war. The figure presenting tribute to Minerva has even been interpreted as a personification of the city of Antwerp itself.

The subject was particularly resonant in the decades following the Treaty of Münster of 1648, which brought an end to the Eighty Years’ War. Across the Southern Netherlands, peace was celebrated not only as a diplomatic achievement but as the necessary condition for commerce, stability and artistic production. Jordaens’s drawing reflects this broader political culture. Mercury, the god of commerce, appears among the assembled figures, while Fame sounds her trumpet above. Together they articulate a vision of civic prosperity restored through peace. The composition presents a world in which trade, learning and the arts thrive under Minerva’s protection once the destructive forces of war have been subdued.

By the time this drawing was executed, Jordaens occupied a position of extraordinary prominence within Antwerp. Having entered the Guild of Saint Luke in 1615 as a waterschilder, or watercolour painter, he went on to establish one of the most successful workshops in the city. During the 1630s he collaborated on major decorative projects associated with the Habsburg court, including the celebrations organised for the entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp and the decoration of Philip IV’s hunting lodge. Following Rubens’s death in 1640, Jordaens emerged as Antwerp’s leading painter, producing altarpieces, mythological scenes, tapestry designs and monumental decorative programmes for patrons across Europe.

Scholars have suggested that The Triumph of Minerva may have been conceived in relation to one of the large decorative commissions executed for the Guild of Saint Luke around 1665, of which only fragments survive today. If so, the subject would have carried a particular significance. As Antwerp’s historic guild of artists and craftsmen, the institution embodied the close relationship between civic prosperity and artistic production. The triumph of Minerva over Mars would have served as an eloquent visual statement of the conditions under which culture itself could flourish.

The drawing is equally important for what it reveals about Jordaens’s working methods. Executed in red and black chalk with watercolour and opaque bodycolour over charcoal, the sheet is composed of three subsidiary sheets joined together. Comparison with related versions has demonstrated that the composition was once larger and subsequently trimmed. A closely related drawing in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and a studio copy preserved in Antwerp indicate that additional figures and passages of landscape originally extended beyond the present boundaries of the sheet. Such evidence offers a rare insight into Jordaens’s creative process, revealing how compositions were expanded, revised and reconfigured during their development.

The work also possesses an exceptional collecting history. It once belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy and one of the most influential collectors of Old Master drawings in eighteenth-century Britain. Reynolds’s collector’s mark remains visible at the lower right of the sheet, bearing witness to the drawing’s early recognition as an important example of Flemish draughtsmanship. In the twentieth century it entered the collection of Professor Roger-Adolf d’Hulst, the foremost scholar of Jordaens and author of the landmark catalogue Jordaens Drawings (1974), which remains one of the foundational studies of the artist’s graphic work.

The drawing has long occupied a distinguished place within Jordaens scholarship. It was exhibited in Antwerp as early as 1905 and later featured in major exhibitions devoted to the artist, including presentations at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Museum Plantin-Moretus and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen. Its acquisition by the Flemish Community therefore represents a significant moment in the preservation of Flemish cultural heritage, ensuring that a major work by one of Antwerp’s greatest artists is now permanently accessible to the public in the city where it was conceived more than three and a half centuries ago.

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At the centre of this world stood Infanta María Luisa Fernanda de Borbón, Duchess of Montpensier.

Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer, Portrait of the Duchess of Montpensier, 1853, signed and dated, oil on canvas, 193 × 116 cm (76 × 45 5/8 in.).

Painted in 1853, Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer’s portrait presents the twenty-one-year-old duchess standing on the terraces of the Palacio de San Telmo only a few years after the political collapse of the July Monarchy in France and the exile of the Orléans family from Paris. More than a court portrait, the painting documents the establishment of a new political and cultural sphere in Seville, where the Montpensiers attempted to reconstruct, on Andalusian soil, something of the ceremonial prestige and dynastic visibility they had lost in France.

The marriage of María Luisa Fernanda to Antoine d’Orléans, Duc de Montpensier, had itself emerged from one of the great diplomatic episodes of nineteenth-century Europe. Negotiated during the so-called ‘Spanish Marriages’ crisis of the 1840s, the union formed part of a broader contest between Britain and France over influence within the Spanish succession. Louis-Philippe viewed the marriage as an opportunity to strengthen Orléanist influence in Spain, while British diplomats feared precisely such an expansion of French dynastic power. The double wedding of Queen Isabel II and her younger sister María Luisa Fernanda in October 1846 consequently provoked diplomatic outrage in London and permanently strained relations between the July Monarchy and Britain.

The diplomatic calculations underpinning the marriage were, however, rapidly overtaken by events elsewhere in Europe. The revolutions of 1848 swept Louis-Philippe from the French throne, abruptly ending the political ambitions of the Orléans dynasty. Forced into exile, the Duke and Duchess of Montpensier relocated permanently to Spain and, by 1849, established themselves in Seville at the Palacio de San Telmo on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Contemporary observers would soon refer to their household as a corte chica - a ‘little court’ - whose influence extended far beyond Andalusia itself.

It was within this context that Bécquer painted the present portrait. The Duchess appears dressed entirely in black silk and lace, wearing a mantilla in the Sevillian style and holding a painted fan together with a folded lace pañuelo.

The costume was not simply fashionable court attire and likely functioned simultaneously as mourning dress (following the earlier death of Ferdinand Philippe, Duke of Orléans) and as a carefully constructed expression of aristocratic Andalusian identity. The Montpensiers understood quickly that political legitimacy in Spain depended not merely upon dynastic prestige, but upon cultural assimilation into Sevillian life and ceremony.

The immense black dress itself emerged from the flourishing luxury trades patronised by the Montpensier household after their arrival in Seville. The lace garments were produced by the tailor Domingo Margarit, who maintained workshops in Madrid and Barcelona and corresponded directly with San Telmo regarding designs and materials. Contemporary archival records reveal the extraordinary expense of these commissions, with vast quantities of fabric required for the construction of the layered skirts and flounces. Accessories visible within the portrait (gloves, fans, parasols) were supplied by merchants on Calle Sierpes, then the commercial centre of elite Sevillian consumption.

Such details matter because the Montpensiers actively reshaped the economic and cultural life of the city around them. During the 1850s, the couple invested heavily in urban development, landscape design and river transport between Seville and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where they constructed a lavish summer palace surrounded by botanical gardens. The Guadalquivir became central to this aristocratic geography of movement and display. In the background of Bécquer’s portrait, the faint masts of steam vessels emerge along the riverbank, a significant reference to the navigation projects and modern transport networks financed by the Duke himself after the collapse of the state-run river company in 1852.

The painting thus stages a revealing juxtaposition between tradition and modernity. On the one hand, the Duchess appears enveloped in the visual language of ‘old Spain’: mantilla, lace, mourning ritual and aristocratic restraint. On the other, the world surrounding her was being transformed by precisely the forms of industrial modernity - steam navigation, urban redevelopment, infrastructural investment - through which displaced European dynasties attempted to secure renewed relevance after 1848.

The Palacio de San Telmo itself became one of the great centres of artistic and literary patronage in nineteenth-century Spain. French writers including Prosper Mérimée, Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas circulated through the Montpensier court, while Sevillian painters received major commissions from the ducal household. The collection assembled at San Telmo included both Spanish Old Masters and contemporary works, helping transform Seville into an important centre of Romantic artistic production during the middle decades of the century.

Few artists benefited more directly from this environment than Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer. Born in Seville in 1817, Bécquer emerged as one of the leading painters of Andalusian Romanticism and costumbrismo. His relationship with the Montpensiers began shortly after their arrival in the city and continued uninterrupted for decades. By the early 1850s he had effectively become the principal painter associated with San Telmo, producing portraits, genre scenes and historical paintings for the ducal residences while also serving as drawing master to the young infantas. Queen Isabel II would later appoint him honorary Pintor de Cámara, consolidating his position within the artistic establishment of mid-century Spain.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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A Marble Portrait Head of a Woman, Roman Imperial, Early Hadrianic period, c. AD 120–130, marble, H. 22.8 cm (9 in.).

Among the exhibition’s most striking antiquities is a marble portrait of a young woman dating to the Hadrianic period. While modern audiences often approach Roman portraiture as an exercise in realism, Roman sculptural traditions pursued something more complex. Portraits functioned not simply as records of appearance but as vehicles through which social position and cultural affiliation could be made visible.

The reign of Hadrian represented one of the most intellectually ambitious moments of the Roman Empire. A passionate admirer of Greek culture, Hadrian initiated a broader programme of classicising revival across architecture, sculpture and imperial imagery. Women of elite Roman society became increasingly implicated within this visual culture. Hairstyles in particular functioned almost as declarations of allegiance to court fashion, disseminating imperial ideals throughout the empire with remarkable speed. The elaborate braided coiffure visible here, arranged in waves of tightly controlled curls and gathered into a plaited turban across the crown, follows styles associated with imperial women such as Sabina, Hadrian’s empress.

Ancient writers frequently describe the extraordinary labour involved in constructing such arrangements. Hairdressers employed curling irons, imported hair and intricate braided structures requiring hours of work. To Roman audiences, these styles signalled education, wealth and social legitimacy. What appears decorative to modern viewers would have functioned as a visible expression of status itself. Even the surviving traces of pigment remind us that Roman sculpture originally existed in vivid colour rather than the monochrome marble surfaces later celebrated by Renaissance classicism.

Portrait of a Woman from Arles, Jean-Baptiste Isabey, 1837, pencil on paper, 15.5 × 12.2 cm (6⅛ × 4¾ in.).

By the nineteenth century, adornment increasingly became entangled with ideas of memory and cultural identity. Jean-Baptiste Isabey’s Portrait of a Woman from Arles belongs to a period in which regional costume acquired almost mythological significance within the European imagination.

Across nineteenth-century Europe, industrialisation and political upheaval transformed patterns of everyday life with unprecedented speed. In response, artists and writers increasingly turned toward regional traditions and local customs, treating them as repositories of authenticity at a moment when modernity seemed to threaten older forms of identity. Provence occupied a particularly important position within this imagination. Women from Arles (the celebrated Arlésiennes) became renowned for distinctive dress and repeatedly appeared within literature and visual culture as symbols of elegance and provincial beauty.

Isabey himself occupied an extraordinary position within French artistic life. Trained by Jacques-Louis David and later serving Napoleon’s court, he had spent decades constructing images of aristocratic and political authority. Executed late in his career, the present drawing retains the remarkable delicacy that had defined his earlier work. Fabric, ribbons and ornament dissolve into an intricate network of pencil marks, demonstrating a precision associated with miniature painting.

Yet beyond its technical accomplishment, the portrait reveals something larger about nineteenth-century attitudes toward costume itself. Dress increasingly became understood not merely as clothing but as a visible expression of cultural memory. Ornament here functions less as embellishment than as a way of imagining identity itself.

Mask (Pwevo), Lwena artist, Angola, late nineteenth–early twentieth century, wood, fibre and beads, H. 31.2 cm (12¼ in.).

If Roman portraiture transformed the body into an expression of political identity, the Lwena pwevo mask reveals adornment functioning within an entirely different system of meaning. Created in Angola during the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, the work belongs to a much older artistic and ceremonial tradition in which masks occupied a central place within social and spiritual life.

Historically, masks of this kind formed part of elaborate masquerade performances associated with initiation, community ritual and ancestral belief systems. Unlike the European sculptural tradition, where objects often became detached from their original contexts and viewed as autonomous works of art, such masks acquired meaning through movement, music and performance. Their significance emerged through use.

The pwevo specifically represents idealised female beauty, despite historically being worn by male performers. The resulting tension between embodiment and representation reveals a highly sophisticated understanding of identity as something performed rather than fixed. Deeply incised geometric motifs mark the face, while the sculptor preserves the grain and colour of the wood itself. Years of ritual handling have produced the rich patina visible today, creating a surface upon which time itself has become inscribed.

Twentieth-century European artists would later encounter African sculpture and celebrate its formal innovations, particularly its movement between abstraction and observation. Yet objects such as this remind us that these works existed within complex ritual systems long before they entered Western narratives of modernism.

The Art of Adornment remains on view at Colnaghi London until 10 June.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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The Art of Adornment, which opened this week at Colnaghi, explores these enduring histories of ornament and display. Produced in collaboration with Sonia Petroff, the exhibition brings together antiquities, portraiture and jewellery across more than three millennia, placing historical objects alongside Petroff’s distinctly Roman vocabulary of gilded surfaces, mythological motifs and sculptural jewellery.

Born into a Bulgarian aristocratic family before fleeing Europe during the Second World War, Sonia Petroff later settled in Rome, where she established herself as one of the more distinctive jewellery and accessories designers working within postwar Italian couture. From the 1960s until her retirement in 1990, Petroff designed for Valentino, Balmain and Nina Ricci, in addition to cultivating an international private clientele drawn to her highly recognisable visual language of gilded metalwork, enamel, semi-precious stones and natural motifs. Produced by Roman artisans, her jewellery drew heavily upon Mediterranean culture, mythology and the natural world, combining the theatrical glamour of postwar Rome with a broader historical fascination for ornament and display. Relaunched in 2018 by Maria Leoni-Sceti, Petroff’s niece by marriage, the house continues to preserve both the archival designs and the distinctly cosmopolitan sensibility upon which the brand was originally established.

Bee Belt (Yellow) by Sonia Petroff, 24K gold overlay, brass, enamel, and genuine Italian leather, made in Italy and handcrafted by artisans.

Falena Choker (Blue) by Sonia Petroff, 24K gold overlay, brass, enamel, and Swarovski crystals, made in Italy and handcrafted by artisans.

One of the exhibition’s earliest works is an exceptional Hellenistic gold armlet dating from the late fourth to early third century B.C., centred upon an elaborate Herakles knot. Constructed from hammered gold sheet and enriched with delicate beaded-wire filigree imitating acanthus leaves, lotus buds and palmettes, the bracelet belongs to the centuries immediately following the death of Alexander the Great, when the newly expanded Hellenistic world produced unprecedented exchanges between Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern artistic traditions. Goldsmithing during this period became increasingly elaborate, characterised by technical virtuosity, miniature detail and highly naturalistic ornament. Particularly remarkable are the repoussé appliqués decorating the surface of the armlet, including miniature doves, a lion and a rare frontal representation of Pan shown piping.

Armlet with a Herakles Knot, Greek, Hellenistic, late 4th–early 3rd century B.C., gold, diameter: 12.3 cm (4⅞ in.), width: 2.7 cm (1½ in.), weight: 77.5 g.

The Herakles knot itself carried extensive symbolic associations throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Probably Egyptian in origin before later entering Greek visual culture, the motif became associated with fertility, healing and protection, while its connection to Herakles linked it more broadly to heroic strength and dynastic legitimacy. Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kings adopted the knot within royal iconography, allowing objects of this kind to function simultaneously as luxury jewellery and political symbol. Its scale indicates aristocratic ownership, intended to encircle the upper arm of an elite Greek woman, while the extraordinary density of decoration reflects the Hellenistic fascination with abundance and surface.

Questions of costume and idealisation emerge differently in Olof Johan Södermark’s unfinished Young Woman in Italian Costume. Painted during the artist’s repeated stays in Rome throughout the 1820s and 1830s, the work belongs to a broader nineteenth century northern European fascination with Italy, particularly amongst Scandinavian and German artists travelling south in pursuit of classical precedent, Renaissance painting and the perceived authenticity of Mediterranean life. Rome functioned during this period as a centre of artistic pilgrimage, where painters sought both technical training and proximity to antiquity itself.

Olof Johan Södermark, Young Woman in Italian Costume, oil on canvas, 60.5 × 48 cm (23¾ × 19 in.).

Italian regional costume occupied a particularly important place within this culture of artistic travel. To northern European painters, traditional Italian dress came to symbolise an idealised continuity between the contemporary Italian population and the classical past. Södermark’s sitter therefore exists somewhere between portrait and cultural fantasy, shaped by the nineteenth century romantic tendency to imagine Italy as a site of beauty, sensuality and pre-modern authenticity untouched by industrialisation. The unfinished state of the work only intensifies this atmosphere. Södermark’s underdrawing remains visible beneath the painted surface, while sharply articulated folds of red and white fabric recall the sculptural drapery of Renaissance painting, particularly Venetian and Roman traditions encountered by the artist during his years in Italy.

A third highlight is Franz Winterhalter’s portrait of Adelina Patti as Rosina in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, painted in 1863 at the beginning of Patti’s extraordinary rise to international fame. Following her triumph at the Théâtre Italien in Paris, Napoleon III reportedly commissioned the portrait himself, presenting it to the singer together with a diamond and ruby brooch. Patti was only nineteen at the time, though already one of the most celebrated performers in Europe, moving rapidly through the cultural circles of Paris, London, Vienna and St Petersburg at a moment when opera occupied a central place within nineteenth century aristocratic and imperial society.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter, A Portrait of Adelina Patti as Rosina in Rossini’s opera “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”, 1863, signed and dated lower left “F Winterhalter / 1863,” oil on canvas, 110 × 78 cm (43¼ × 30¾ in.).

Winterhalter himself had become the definitive portraitist of European court culture under the July Monarchy and Second Empire, producing images for Queen Victoria, Empress Eugénie and numerous aristocratic families across the continent. His portraits helped define the visual language of nineteenth century glamour through their extraordinary handling of satin, lace, jewellery and flesh. In the present work, Patti appears luminous, poised and entirely conscious of the effect she produced upon audiences while Rosina’s theatrical identity begins almost to merge with Patti’s own celebrity persona.

Unlike the formal dynastic portraits more commonly associated with Winterhalter, the painting retains an unusual freshness and immediacy, preserving Patti at the precise moment her fame was beginning to harden into myth. The portrait captures the emergence of modern celebrity culture, in which theatre, fashion, portraiture and public image increasingly collapsed into one another.

The Art of Adornment remains on view at Colnaghi London until 10 June.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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As such, viewed from a sufficient distance, art history begins to resemble a history of packing. The movement of artworks, however, tends to disappear from view once it has been successfully completed. The crate arrives intact, the installation opens on time, and the infrastructure behind it recedes into the background precisely because nothing has gone wrong. As with restoration or cataloguing, the highest level of expertise often appears effortless to everyone except those responsible for it.

That unseen work is the subject of the latest episode of Colnaghi Talks, our YouTube series exploring the specialist practices that sustain the art world and shape how artworks are handled, studied and experienced over time.

In this episode, we are joined by Madeleine Galbraith, Head of Operations at Colnaghi, alongside Zak Warboys and Rupert Sloane of Regency Shipping, for a discussion centred on the movement of artworks and the logistical systems that support international exhibitions, collections and sales. Together, they examine the relationship between galleries and shippers, and the degree to which trust, preparation and communication determine the success of even the most carefully planned projects.

Drawing on firsthand experience, the conversation explores the realities of coordinating complex international shipments, managing installations across multiple venues and responding to the unexpected challenges that inevitably arise when moving fragile and historically significant works. What emerges is a portrait of logistics as a discipline built on foresight, organisation and deeply established professional relationships.

We invite you to watch the latest episode, available here, and to follow the series as it continues on our YouTube channel.

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Yet this dependence on performance has always been shadowed by a persistent anxiety. If identity can be assumed, can it also be falsified? If the self is something that appears, what guarantees its truth? The very systems that stabilise authority through repetition and display also introduce the conditions for scepticism, since what can be convincingly staged can, by the same logic, be strategically misrepresented. These questions emerge wherever systems of representation become sufficiently elaborate to sustain doubt about their own procedures, and they recur with particular force in cultures that invest heavily in ritualised forms of appearance, where the distinction between enactment and essence is both necessary and difficult to secure. Mythological traditions across geographies and periods register this instability with notable consistency through figures of substitution, duplication, and transformation: deities who adopt human form in order to intervene in mortal affairs, hybrid beings that traverse the boundary between animal and human states, and the recurring motif of the changeling, in which outward familiarity conceals an altered or displaced identity.

It is from this premise that Colnaghi New York’s upcoming exhibition Leonor Fini: A Practice of Transformation takes its form, a trans-temporal dialogue between the work of Leonor Fini and Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and African ritual objects that foregrounds a shared language of metamorphosis and spiritual agency, on view from 13 May to 26 June 2026.

Leonor Fini (1907–1996), Set Design for La Mégère apprivoisée, 1957, signed lower right “L. Fini”, collage, pencil, and watercolour on paper, 32 × 53 cm (12 5/8 × 20 7/8 in.)

One of the most compelling works in the exhibition is a stage design by Leonor Fini for La Mégère apprivoisée (1957), produced during a period in which she was extensively engaged in scenography for theatre, opera, and ballet across Europe. Executed in pencil, collage, and watercolour on paper, the sheet is a preparatory design for a theatrical production based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, first performed in the late sixteenth century and widely staged in modern adaptations throughout the twentieth century. The play centres on the courtship and contested ‘taming’ of Katherina and belongs to a longer European tradition, from the classical myth of Pygmalion to its modern reformulations in works such as My Fair Lady, in which identity is treated as something to be shaped, corrected, or performed through discipline, display, and repetition. Fini’s work for the stage during the 1950s forms a distinct part of her broader practice, which included collaborations with major cultural institutions and reflects her involvement with performance, costume, and set design as parallel fields to her work in painting and drawing.

Leonor Fini (Buenos Aires 1907 – Paris 1996), Sketches for Mask Designs, signed lower right “Leonor Fini” and numbered upper left “218”, pen and ink on laid paper highlighted with colour, 36.5 × 27.5 cm (14 3/8 × 10 7/8 in.)

A further group of works in the exhibition is represented by a sheet of mask studies. Executed in pen and ink on laid paper, the drawing belongs to her great engagement with masks across both her independent work and her activity in theatre and costume design from the 1940s onwards. Fini’s interest in masking extended beyond the stage into a broader exploration of disguise and the instability of the face as a fixed marker of identity, themes that recur throughout her practice and informed projects such as the 1951 publication Masques de Leonor Fini.

Mask, nyoho, Eket-Ibibio artist, Nigeria, late 19th–early 20th century, wood, h. 18 cm (7 in.)

From this focus on the mask as a constructed and mobile surface, the exhibition turns to an Ekpo mask of the Ibibio and Eket peoples of southeastern Nigeria, where masking operates within a defined political and religious system rather than as an artistic or theatrical device. Within Ibibio society, the Ekpo association functioned historically as both a governing and judicial body, with masked members acting as agents of enforcement on behalf of elders and ancestral authority. The term ‘Ekpo’ itself refers to ancestral spirits and masks are understood not as representations but as the means through which these spirits assume visible form, allowing them to intervene directly in the affairs of the living. Their appearance during the annual Ekpo season regulated daily life, suspending ordinary activities and imposing strict behavioural codes, while the masquerades themselves were authorised to punish transgressions and maintain social order. The distortion of facial features, often exaggerated or deliberately unsettling, is therefore not expressive in a purely aesthetic sense but forms part of a codified system designed to produce fear, recognition, and compliance, reinforcing the authority of both the ancestors and the society that mediates them. This early Nyoho mask has a distinguished provenance coming from the dealer Julius Carlebach and the collection of Ruth and Ernst Anspach of New York.

Ndeemba mask, Yaka artist, Democratic Republic of the Congo, late 19th–early 20th century, wood, fiber, pigments, h. 48.3 cm (19 in.)

The exhibition further includes a Yaka initiation mask from the south-western regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, produced within the context of male initiation rites that structure the transition from youth to adulthood among Yaka-speaking communities. Among the Yaka, circumcision schools, often held outside the village, function as extended periods of instruction during which initiates are separated from ordinary social life and prepared for reintegration as adult men, a process marked at its conclusion by masked performances. Masks of this type, commonly referred to as Ndeemba, appear in these final ceremonies and are presented in groups, accompanied by dance and music, to signal the end of seclusion and the return of initiates to the community. Their construction follows established conventions, including a carved wooden face with an upturned nose and stylised features, combined with a substantial raffia collar that obscures the body of the performer, who holds the mask before the face using an internal handle rather than wearing it directly. These objects are typically made for a specific initiation cycle and are not preserved for repeated use. Their function is within a time-bound ritual sequence rather than as durable or accumulative forms. The mask marks a collective and socially recognised transformation embedded within a structured system of instruction, performance, and return.

Statuette of a Siren, Greek, Boeotian, ca. 450–400 B.C., terracotta

Also included in the exhibition is a Boeotian terracotta statuette of a siren, dated to circa 450–400 B.C., which situates the theme of transformation within the established conventions of Greek mythological representation. Such figures belong to a broader class of hand-modelled terracottas associated with cult and votive practice, commonly produced and deposited in sanctuaries or burial contexts. In ancient sources, sirens are described as creatures whose song lured sailors to their deaths, a tradition recorded in the Odyssey attributed to Homer and noted by Strabo, who refers to sanctuaries dedicated to them in South Italy and Sicily. The figure’s hybrid form reflects a standardised type within Greek visual culture, through which mythological beings were rendered in material form and circulated within both religious and commemorative contexts.

Statuette of a Griffin, Hellenistic Greek, ca. 2nd–1st century B.C., bronze, h. 6.6 cm (2 1/2 in.)

This bronze statuette of a griffin dated to the Hellenistic period, circa 2nd–1st century B.C., reflects a long-standing iconographic tradition established in the Greek Archaic period. The griffin, a composite creature combining leonine and avian elements, appears frequently in Greek art from the seventh century B.C. onwards and is closely associated with votive practice, most notably in the form of griffin-head attachments dedicated at sanctuaries such as Olympia. Objects of this type, including small-scale bronzes, formed part of a wider material culture in which mythological creatures were standardised and reproduced across different media, functioning within religious, decorative, and symbolic contexts. The persistence of the griffin type into the Hellenistic period demonstrates the continuity of these visual forms, which remained legible and culturally operative across several centuries of Greek artistic production.

Amulet of a Cat, Egyptian, Late Period, 700–30 B.C., bronze, 6.6 cm (2 1/4 in.)

Also included in the exhibition is an Egyptian bronze amulet in the form of a cat, dated to the Late Period (700–30 B.C.), a time in which small-scale votive objects of this kind were produced in large numbers and closely associated with the cult of Bastet. Bastet, typically represented as a cat or as a woman with a feline head, was a major deity linked to protection, fertility, and domestic life, and her worship was centred at sites such as Bubastis in the Nile Delta. Bronze cat figures and amulets were commonly dedicated in temples or deposited as offerings, often in conjunction with the well-documented practice of animal mummification, in which cats were bred, consecrated, and interred as votive gifts. Objects of this type functioned within a clearly defined religious framework, serving as tangible expressions of devotion and as intermediaries between the individual and the divine.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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These new questions reshape how we approach the works themselves. Rather than asking what these paintings reveal about Western fantasies of the East, one may wonder the following: where did artists actually go? What could they see, and what remained closed to them? How did architectural and social barriers shape what ended up on canvas? The threshold thus becomes both a literal subject and a way of understanding the partial, mediated nature of cross-cultural encounter.

These paintings reveal threshold spaces where cultures intersect, souks where Europeans bought souvenirs such as carpets and Islamic armour, city gates where traders and travellers negotiated entry, and even, in one instance, a wonderful reversal showing Turkish merchants arriving in Venice. These were not just Western fantasies but real places of negotiation and exchange. The paintings that follow move from the historical and panoramic inwards: from the epic threshold of the Puerta de Elvira to the intimate genre scenes and portraits of individual figures, from the strictly controlled doorways of sacred spaces to the open rhythms of city life, from distant landscapes to the harem, that ultimate threshold where observation gives way entirely to imagination.

From Travel to Studio

The paintings in this section offer something rare in Orientalist art: proximity. These works bring us close enough to observe individual faces, the texture of fabric, architectural details, interior luxury, and the intimate rituals of everyday life.

Rudolf Ernst (1854-1932), born in Vienna but working primarily in Paris, assembled an extensive collection of ceramics, tiles, textiles, carpets and weapons following his 1880 journey to Constantinople. His Chubuk Smoker depicts a figure absorbed in the ritual of smoking the long Turkish pipe, in a sumptuous interior scene surrounded by the intricate tile work Ernst had collected and studied in his Paris studio. Like Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), whose father-in-law, the renowned art dealer Adolphe Goupil (1806- 1893), had supported Ernst’s early career, Ernst painted not from direct observation but from carefully assembled props and photographs, constructing plausible Oriental scenes in European workshops. Ernst amassed his tiles and exotic props from travels to North Africa, Spain and Istanbul; he even pursued a career as a ceramicist from 1900 onwards. The Chubuk Smoker reveals how these artists’ Eastern subjects were mediated through European collecting practices, the ‘Orient’ reassembled tile by tile in Parisian ateliers.

Rudolf Ernst (1854—1932), Chubuk Smoker, Oil on panel, 64.5 x 81 cm.

A Reverence for Sacred Spaces

While commercial streets and domestic interiors allowed certain proximities, albeit mediated by studio practice or social custom, sacred spaces imposed thresholds of an altogether different order. Mosques were active places of worship, and access required official permission and respect for Islamic ritual. David Roberts (1796-1864) was the first professional British artist granted permission by Muhammad Ali Pasha (r. 1805-1848) to sketch inside Cairo’s mosques, but only after shaving his side-whiskers, abandoning his hog-hair paintbrushes (considered ritually impure), and adopting Arab dress. Such permission was exceptional. Most artists depicted mosques from approaches and thresholds: doorways framing glimpses of interiors, shoes removed at entrances, and guardians controlling access.

The German painter Gustav Bauernfeind (1848-1904), who had trained as an architect, first travelled to the Middle East in 1880-1881 and made two further journeys during this decade. His architectural training shaped his particular attention to buildings. When he encountered Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque in December 1888, he noted in his diary:

‘Today I explored the city and discovered the entry gate to the Great Mosque, a very gratifying motif.’

However, as a non-Muslim, he was forbidden to enter the holy site. He recorded negotiating with the mosque’s wardens to obtain informal permission to sketch the forecourt, not inside the prayer hall but merely at the threshold. At the Door of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, we see exactly what Bauernfeind could access through this special permission. A guardian sits at the entrance, his posture casual but authoritative. Shoes are scattered across the worn stone floor, evidence of worshippers who have entered barefoot. The ornate doorway frames a view into the mosque’s interior, but the architectural composition places us firmly at the entrance. This was what he was permitted to observe.

Gustav Bauernfeind (1848—1904), At the Door of the Umayyad Mosque, c. 1889-91, Watercolour on cardboard, 50 x 38 cm.

Carl Cowen Schirm’s (1852-1928), View of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, 1884, revered as the third holiest site in Islam, showcases where controlled access became possible. In the early nineteenth century, the esplanade surrounding Al-Aqsa was entirely closed to non-Muslims. Access began to change under Ottoman rule in 1839, though visitors still required special permission to enter even these outer zones. The esplanade itself served as a transitional space between the outside world and the prayer hall, used for communal worship, ritual purification at its fountains, and social gatherings. It was a sacred space, but not the innermost sanctuary.

Carl Cowen Schirm came from the middle class of Wiesbaden in Hesse and studied chemistry and physics in Bonn before entering the Karlsruhe Art Academy in 1874, where he was a pupil of the Norwegian landscape painter Hans Fredrik Gude (1825—1903). There he met Eugen Bracht (1842—1921) and Adolf von Meckel (1856—1893), who, like him, were among the most interesting Orientalist painters in Germany. In 1876, Carl Schirm and Eugen Bracht went on a study trip to the Luneburg Heath, where they found beautiful moorland and woodland landscapes to inspire them. Two years later, Carl Schirm joined his teacher in Scotland and Wales where they explored other landscapes. The idea of a trip to the Orient took shape between the three friends at this time, and in 1880 they set off for Syria, visiting the shores of the Caspian Sea and Mount Sinai, which provided them with extraordinary new motifs. In contrast to Bracht and Meckel, Carl Schirm's Orientalist works occupied only a small place in his landscape corpus, but the quality of the works from his Orientalist period is remarkable and ‘they are among the most impressive works in German painting of the late nineteenth century’ according to the specialists Martina Haja and Günter Wimmer.

Carl Cowen Schirm (1852—1928), View of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, 1884, Oil on canvas, 55 x 37.5 cm.

The paintings that followed documented varying degrees of access. In the genre scenes and portraits, the artist mainly observed ‘types’. Sacred spaces were more restrictive, with guardians at their gateways, sometimes allowing artists to depict views glimpsed from doorways; though in some instances, exceptional access was granted thanks to diplomatic intervention. These paintings are not just a story of Western observation and Eastern subjugation but a negotiation of partial access, strategic restriction and genuine crossing. They remind us to ask not just what was painted but how artists gained, or failed to gain, access to what they depicted.

Beyond the Threshold: Revisiting Orientalism II is currently on view at Colnaghi London through May 29, 2026.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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Any account of the relation between myth and the image might reasonably begin with the Greeks, who, among other contributions, proposed that ‘man is the measure of all things’. Attributed to Protagoras and often taken to summarise a broader sophistic confidence in human judgement, the aphorism has long sustained the assumption that the subject occupies a stable position from which the world can be known, represented and assess. Yet the claim sits somewhat uneasily within the broader intellectual and mythological traditions in which it circulates. Greek mythology, for instance, offers no shortage of figures for whom the human is anything but the measure, while biblical tradition likewise presents a world in which human limits are repeatedly exposed.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, this tension acquires a new urgency. Developments in psychoanalysis begin to challenge the assumption of a coherent and self-transparent subject, while at the same time new forms of image-making reconfigure the image as something that no longer simply reflects the world, but intervenes in the conditions under which it is perceived. It is within this shifting framework that the work of Leonor Fini may be situated. Born in Buenos Aires in 1907 and raised in Trieste, Fini arrived in Paris in 1931 where she entered into the artistic and literary circles associated with Surrealism. Following her arrival in Paris, elements drawn from classical mythology, fantasy and symbolic imagery begin to enter her compositions alongside portraiture. This interest develops in parallel with her work for theatre and costume in the 1940s and 1950s, where masks, disguise and transformation become central concerns. By the 1960s and 1970s, these themes reappear in a more reduced form in her drawings and illustrations.

The drawings presented here which will form part of our upcoming exhibition Leonor Fini: A Practice of Transformation at Colnaghi New York, on view from May to June 2026, belong to a later phase of Fini’s practice in which her engagement with mythological material is revisited in a more concentrated manner.

Leonor Fini (1907 – 1996), Metamorphoses d’Ovide, Signed lower right ‘Leonor Fini’, Ink and watercolour on paper, 50.8 x 33.02 cm.

Executed in the 1970s, the sheet titled Metamorphoses d’Ovide is structured around a pre-existing printed text, into which the drawn elements are subsequently introduced. Rather than organising the image according to a single episode, the figures are dispersed along the lower margin, extending laterally across the page and remaining only partially defined. Their arrangement does not correspond to a stable narrative sequence but follows the progression of the text itself, which relates to the episode of Circe in Book XIV of Metamorphoses.

In this passage, Circe transforms the companions of Ulysses by administering a potion that alters their outward form while leaving their consciousness intact. Ovid describes the process in stages. First, the body gradually changes, its limbs contracting, voices breaking into animal sounds and human posture giving way to a different mode of movement, even as recognition persists internally. The emphasis falls not on a single moment of change, but on the successive alteration of bodily features, described across the unfolding lines of the text. The figures in the lower register correspond to this sequence in a general way, appearing in successive states and remaining only partially defined without being fixed to a single point within the narrative.

Leonor Fini (1907 – 1996), La chambre d’écho, Ink on paper, 27.2 x 21 cm.

Fini’s engagement with Ovid extends beyond Metamorphoses d’Ovide to individual figures drawn from the poem. La Chambre d’écho takes up the episode of Echo in Book III, where the nymph is deprived of independent speech, falls in love with Narcissus, and is finally reduced to voice alone. Since Ovid reserves the scene of reflection for Narcissus, the partial head set opposite Fini’s profile figure does not correspond directly to the text. It may be read as a transfer of Narcissus’s image to Echo; equally, it may be understood as a visual analogue to echoing speech, an answering form rather than a reflected one. The drawing does not insist on either interpretation. What it does preserve from Ovid is the sense that Echo cannot appear as a complete and self-sufficient figure, but only through repetition, return, or remainder.

If there is a figure within Greek myth against which the claim that ‘man is the measure of all things’ might readily be tested, it is the sphinx. As a composite being, neither fully human nor fully animal, it does not correspond to a single, stable form and therefore cannot be easily measured within a system that takes the human as its standard. Instead, the sphinx leaves the human to account for the claim.

Leonor Fini (1907 – 1996), Studies for sphinxes and heads (recto and verso), Ink on paper, 27 × 21 cm.

Ovid’s reference to the sphinx in Book VII of Metamorphoses is very brief. Associated above all with the Theban cycle, she is typically described with the head of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird, stationed outside the city and confronting those who pass with a riddle. The terms of that encounter are simple: those unable to answer are destroyed, while the correct response (given by Oedipus) brings about her death. In our drawing, the sphinx is presented as a series of related forms distributed across the page. A central female body is surrounded by multiple heads, each turned in a different direction and rendered with varying degrees of definition. The line moves continuously between them, so that no single figure is fully isolated from the others.

Leonor Fini, Sphinx (Inv: LF/ WPO46), Ink on paper, 29.7 × 20.8 cm.

Elsewhere, the sphinx appears as a single and more contained body. A female torso is joined to the crouching body of an animal, with the hind legs drawn beneath and the tail extending outward in a loose, continuous line. The head remains the most defined element with facial features more clearly articulated than the rest of the body, which is indicated through abbreviated contour. One wing is raised, though its outline is not fully resolved and the line begins to loosen as it moves away from the central mass of the figure.

Leonor Fini, Two studies for sphinxes (inv. 176), ink on paper, 29.7 × 21 cm.

The answer to the riddle is ‘man’ and it is sufficient to bring about the sphinx’s end and with it a provisional confirmation that man may just be the measure of all things. The sphinx disappears, and the terms of the problem are, in principle, resolved. It is a satisfactory conclusion, at least within the limits of the narrative. In Fini’s drawings, however, the figure remains and continues to exceed the terms in which the answer was given. It is not, it seems, so easily disposed of.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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That is the premise of Colnaghi Talks, our new YouTube series, which brings together conversations with specialists from across the art world, and considers the field through the range of practices that sustain it. Each episode takes up a specific area of work, examining how decisions are made, what kinds of evidence are used, and how different forms of expertise shape the way artworks are studied, handled and understood over time.

Our first episode features Helen Loveday, a leading paper conservator and technical art historian whose work centres on manuscripts and works on paper. An accredited member of the Institute of Conservation, she has over 30 years of experience and is known for her research on Islamic paper and paper history.

In this episode, we explore the hidden life of artworks on paper and the role of conservation as a form of technical art history. Through real examples, Loveday discusses how conservators read material evidence, judge condition and navigate the ethical questions involved in treatment. The result is a conversation about how works survive, and how conservation changes what we know about them.

Further conversations will follow, each taking up a different aspect of the field and extending this line of inquiry. We invite you to begin with the first episode, available here, and to follow the series as it develops on our YouTube channel.

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In the Iberian Peninsula, for example, the elaborate processions of Seville, whose origins can be traced to late medieval confraternities, developed into increasingly visually structured and orchestrated public processions by the sixteenth century. These processions, featuring polychrome sculptures carried through the streets, were not merely devotional exercises but also civic affirmations of identity and collective memory. Comparable traditions emerged in southern Italy, particularly in regions such as Apulia and Campania, where ritual lamentations and processional tableaux emphasised the emotional immediacy of Christ’s suffering. Beyond Europe, parallel forms of collective enactment developed in colonial Latin America, notably in cities such as Antigua Guatemala, where, from the sixteenth century onwards, confraternal processions combined Iberian devotional models with local artistic and material traditions, giving rise over time to elaborate ephemeral displays, including alfombras composed of coloured sawdust and organic materials, which temporarily reconfigured the streets within a ritual framework. In central Europe, Passion plays (most famously those later institutionalised in places such as Oberammergau) transformed scriptural narrative into communal theatre, reinforcing shared moral and historical frameworks.

Such traditions demonstrate that the commemoration of the Passion extended beyond strictly ecclesiastical settings, becoming embedded within broader social and cultural frameworks while remaining grounded in their theological origins. The visual arts played a crucial role in this process, offering a parallel, and often more enduring, mode of engagement. Painters across Europe responded to these currents by developing increasingly direct and affective representations of Christ’s suffering, aligning with wider intellectual and artistic shifts of the sixteenth century. It is within this broader context of ritual practice and its translation into visual form that the two works currently at Colnaghi may be understood.

Luca Cambiaso, Flagellation of Christ, c. 1570–1575, oil on canvas (134 × 162 cm), signed on the reverse with the initials “S. (or I?) + P.”

Luca Cambiaso’s Flagellation of Christ (c. 1570–1575) belongs to the final phase of the artist’s activity in Genoa, immediately preceding his summons in 1583 to the court of Philip II of Spain at the Escorial. Born in Moneglia in 1527 and trained by his father Giovanni Cambiaso, the artist developed within a milieu that encouraged the assimilation of both local and central Italian models. His formation reflects a synthesis of the monumental figural conception of Michelangelo, the luminist innovations of Correggio and Parmigianino, and the compositional strategies of Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga, Domenico Beccafumi, and Pordenone, whose works he encountered through Genoese commissions and during his probable stay in Rome (c. 1547–1550). By the 1560s, Cambiaso had established himself as the leading painter in Genoa, receiving major commissions from the city’s principal patrician families.

From around 1570, his work underwent a marked process of formal reduction and conceptual clarification, characterised by an increasing emphasis on monumentality, legibility, and emotional immediacy. This development corresponds to broader artistic currents of the later sixteenth century, in which religious imagery was reformulated to achieve greater clarity of narrative and directness of affect. The Flagellation of Christ forms part of a wider group of Passion scenes produced during this mature phase, including the Christ before Caiaphas (Genoa, Accademia Ligustica), the Christ Disrobed by his Tormentors, and the Ecce Homo (Blanton Museum of Art), through which Cambiaso developed a more concentrated and austere pictorial language.

The dissemination of this compositional type is attested by related works and graphic translations. A simplified version of the subject, the Christ at the Column (Palazzo Bianco, Genoa), reflects the artist’s practice of reworking successful inventions, while a corresponding woodcut (preserved in several impressions, including one at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and a preparatory drawing in the Albertina, Vienna, demonstrate the circulation of the design and the economy of Cambiaso’s graphic method, characterised by rapid pen work and tonal washes .

The painting’s provenance is documented from the nineteenth century. By 1847 it was recorded in the collection of the Genoese entomologist Massimiliano Spinola, as noted by Federico Alizeri in his Guida Artistica per la Città di Genova. It subsequently passed to Castello Tassarolo and remained within the Spinola family until the late twentieth century, before entering its present collection.

Willem Adriaensz Key, The Crucifixion, ca. 1550, oil on panel (102 × 74 cm), signed on the cross “W. KAY.”

In the Low Countries, the representation of the Passion developed along different lines, shaped by the interaction between local pictorial traditions and Italian influence. In Antwerp, this synthesis is exemplified in the work of Willem Key. Key’s Crucifixion constitutes a rare surviving example of the artist’s work in the field of large-scale religious painting, a category that forms only a small part of his extant œuvre. Active in Antwerp during the mid-sixteenth century, Key was among the most highly regarded painters of his generation. Born in Breda around 1515/16, he trained in Antwerp in the workshop of Pieter Coecke van Aelst before working in Liège with Lambert Lombard (c. 1538–39) where he engaged more directly with Italian Renaissance models. By the time of his return to Antwerp in 1542, he had established a pictorial language that brought together Netherlandish precision and an increasingly assured assimilation of Italian forms.

Although best known for his portraits, Key also produced a number of religious compositions, many of which were lost during the Iconoclastic Fury, a widespread wave of iconoclastic violence that swept through the Low Countries in the summer of 1566. Contemporary records attest to important commissions for civic and ecclesiastical buildings in Antwerp, now destroyed, which give some indication of the scale and ambition of this aspect of his production. The present Crucifixion consequently assumes particular significance.

The painting has been identified as part of a group of related compositions and is likely to represent an autograph version of a larger altarpiece now lost. The existence of multiple variants, as well as later adaptations, suggests that the design was widely disseminated and that Key himself may have originated the compositional type, previously associated with Jacob de Backer. The production of such repetitions is consistent with his documented practice, while the more modest scale of the panel suggests a function within a private context.

In stylistic terms, the work reflects Key’s characteristic synthesis of Northern and Italian elements. The palette and modelling remain rooted in Netherlandish practice while the more robust conception of the figure of Christ points to an engagement with Italian ideals of form, particularly those associated with Michelangelo. At the same time, the composition is articulated through a structured symbolic programme including the serpent, the skeleton of Adam, the pelican, and the phoenix, which serves to elaborate themes of sacrifice, redemption, and resurrection.

Key’s career unfolded within the broader artistic milieu of Antwerp, one of the principal centres of artistic production in sixteenth-century Europe. The Crucifixion, as a rare survival of his religious work, offers important insight into a dimension of his practice largely obscured by the loss of major commissions.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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The current international exhibition, organised by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and travelling to the Royal Academy of London, marks a decisive moment in this process. By assembling works that span the breadth of Wautier’s production, it situates as a central and intellectually engaged participant in her milieu. Her paintings reveal a great engagement with contemporary artistic currents, from Caravaggesque naturalism to the study of the human figure, combined with an independent approach to subject and composition that resists easy categorisation.

It is within this context of ongoing reassessment that new attributions assume particular significance. The identification of previously unrecognised works not only enlarges the known corpus but also refines our understanding of the artist’s development, thematic concerns and working methods. Diogenes Reading, now presented by Colnaghi, belongs to this category. Rediscovered through the research of Jahel Sanzsalazar and published in 2024, the painting represents a mature and highly distinctive contribution to Wautier’s œuvre, one that brings into focus her engagement with philosophical subject matter and her singular approach to the representation of intellectual life.

Michaelina Wautier (Mons 1604 – ca. 1689 Brussels), Diogenes Reading, ca. 1650, oil on canvas, 48.5 × 45 cm (19.09 × 17.71 in); remains of a signature (?) along the edge of the cover of the closed book: […] W […] fecit; inscribed lower centre below the bookmark of the open book: diogene; inscribed on the reverse: A[l]lievo di de la Tour / Michelin (Te[s?]to[lin?].

The figure of Diogenes occupies a particular place within seventeenth-century pictorial culture. Associated with Cynic philosophy and the rejection of material convention, he was frequently represented as an emblematic figure defined by a limited number of recognisable attributes, most notably the lantern carried in his search for an honest man. In many such representations, the emphasis falls on the performative or paradoxical aspects of his persona. Wautier’s treatment departs from this tradition. The philosopher is shown seated, half-length, and absorbed in reading, with no indication of movement or outward address. The composition is organised around this single activity, and the reduction of narrative incident directs attention towards a state of concentration.

The presence of the lantern, placed behind the figure and unlit, introduces a significant shift in meaning. Rather than an active attribute, it becomes a residual one, subordinated to the act of reading. As discussed by Sanzsalazar in their 2024 article, this modification allows the image to be understood in relation to the intellectual dimension of the subject, suggesting that the search traditionally associated with Diogenes is here resolved or displaced. The extinguished lantern may be read as indicating that the object of the search (whether truth, knowledge, or moral clarity) has been found elsewhere. In this context, the book assumes a central role as the primary site through which the philosopher’s inquiry is conducted.

This reorientation of the subject corresponds closely to Wautier’s broader treatment of figures engaged in acts of reading or contemplation. In Saint Joachim Reading, a comparable emphasis is placed on the inward withdrawal of the figure, whose attention is directed entirely towards the text before him. The parallels between the two works extend beyond iconography to include the construction of the figure in three-quarter profile, the handling of light across the face, and the articulation of the brow and eyes. In both cases, reading is not presented as a narrative detail but as a condition that defines the figure’s relation to the world.

The painting also demonstrates the extent to which Wautier’s work is grounded in close observation. The features of the philosopher are rendered with a degree of specificity that suggests the use of a live model. The skin is described without idealisation and with particular attention given to the structure of the face and the modulation of tone. The hands, prominently placed within the composition, are treated with equal care. Their foreshortened position, the delineation of veins and joints, and the presence of small imperfections, including traces of dirt beneath the nails, contribute to the sense of physical immediacy that characterises the work. Such details are consistent with Wautier’s practice in other paintings and form part of a broader commitment to the representation of the body as both a visual and material presence.

At the same time, the painting reflects Wautier’s engagement with artistic models that circulated within the Southern Netherlands during this period. The representation of philosophers, particularly in half-length format, is closely associated with painters such as Jusepe de Ribera, whose works were known through both original paintings and copies. Certain elements such as the neutral background, the emphasis on a single figure, and the concentration on facial expression, find parallels within this tradition. However, Wautier’s interpretation differs in its emphasis on stillness and continuity, avoiding the more dramatic contrasts or expressive gestures that often characterise such works. The result is a composition in which the philosophical dimension of the subject is conveyed through detailed attention rather than through overt symbolism.

Material features further support the attribution of the painting. Several inscriptions are present within the work, including the word ‘diogine’, written in small script beneath the bookmark placed within the open book. A second inscription, partially legible along the edge of the closed volume, includes the word ‘fecit’, suggesting the presence of a signature. As noted by Sanzsalazar, such forms of micro-inscription occur in other works by Wautier, where text is incorporated into the painted surface in a manner that is equally discreet and intentional. Additional writing on the reverse of the canvas, likely added at the time of relining, refers to the artist’s name, albeit in altered form, indicating an earlier awareness of the attribution.

The painting’s provenance reflects the difficulties that have historically accompanied the identification of Wautier’s work. Over the past two decades, it has appeared at auction under a succession of attributions, including to French and Italian schools, as well as to various Caravaggesque circles. These shifts are indicative not only of the painting’s stylistic complexity but also of the absence, until recently, of a sufficiently defined corpus against which such works could be measured. The publication of the painting by Jahel Sanzsalazar in 2024 has provided the necessary framework for its reassessment, allowing it to be placed within the context of Wautier’s mature production.

The dating of the work to the early to mid-1650s is supported by its close relationship to other paintings from this period, including Saint Joachim Reading and The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne. In each case, similar facial types and approaches to the modelling of the figure can be observed. These correspondences suggest that Diogenes Reading belongs to a phase in which Wautier had fully developed her approach to the representation of the human figure and to the organisation of complex pictorial ideas.

The presentation of this painting coincides with a moment in which Wautier’s work is receiving renewed institutional and scholarly attention, particularly through the exhibition at the Royal Academy of London. Within this context, Diogenes Reading contributes to a more detailed understanding of the range of subjects addressed by the artist and of the conceptual frameworks within which she operated.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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If the pre-war studio had functioned, however imperfectly, as a fixed site of continuity, its postwar counterpart is marked by instability. In many cases it is no longer a permanent space but a temporary arrangement, subject to relocation, reduction, or loss altogether. The destruction of cities, the scarcity of materials, and the reorganisation of artistic networks all contributed to a situation in which the conditions of production had to be renegotiated at a fundamental level. This instability is further compounded by the experience of exile, which shaped the lives and work of a significant number of artists across Europe in the interwar and postwar periods. Exile did not only entail geographical displacement, but disrupted systems of training, patronage, and affiliation, often severing artists from the institutional and cultural frameworks that had previously sustained their practice.

At the same time, exile could bring artists into contact with new systems of training, exhibition and patronage, exposing them to different formal approaches and working methods. In this sense, displacement did not only interrupt practice but in certain cases, contributed to its reorientation, as artists adapted to the conditions and expectations of new artistic contexts. The four works currently in Colnaghi’s hands allow for a more precise examination of these conditions.

Gussy Hippold-Ahnert (Berlin 1910–2003 Dresden), Studio Corner (Atelierecke), 1927, monogrammed lower right and titled, dated, and signed on the reverse, oil on panel, 92 × 67.5 cm (36¼ × 26½ in.).

Painted in 1927, Atelierecke must be understood within the broader cultural and artistic realignment of Weimar Germany, where the aftermath of the First World War prompted a decisive shift away from the subjective intensity of Expressionism toward the more controlled, observational modes associated with New Objectivity. This transition, widely noted in the scholarship of the period, has been linked to a broader climate of social and psychological recalibration, in which clarity and detachment came to be valued as responses to the instability of the postwar years. Although the work predates Hippold-Ahnert’s formal training under Otto Dix in the early 1930s, it nevertheless emerges from this milieu, anticipating the approach to form and perception that Dix and his contemporaries would come to codify.

The prominence of cacti aligns the work with a recurring motif in interwar German art. Walter Riezler described such forms in 1930 as ‘atonal’ and ‘ungraspable’, qualities that made them particularly suited to modern modes of seeing. As Rainer Stamm has shown, the Kakteenfenster became a recognisable feature of Weimar visual culture. Comparable works by Georg Scholz and Rudolf Wacker demonstrate how these forms were taken up within the language of New Objectivity.

Hippold-Ahnert’s later trajectory underscores the extent to which artistic practice in this period remained subject to external pressures. Her training under Dix at the Dresden Academy in the early 1930s placed her within one of the central circles of the period, yet this development was curtailed by the tightening cultural restrictions of the National Socialist regime, which led to the closure of her studio and a shift in the conditions under which she could work. After the 1930s, she relocated to Radebeul, where she and her husband supported themselves through a family corset business during the war years. She remained in Saxony after 1945, continuing to work alongside these constraints in what became East Germany.

Mainie Jellett (Irish, 1897–1944), Composition, circa 1922, sepia (ink) wash, 23 × 18 cm.

Mainie Jellett (Irish, 1897–1944), Composition, circa 1922, gouache, 23 × 18 cm.

Trained initially in Dublin and London, Mainie Jellett relocated to Paris in the immediate postwar period, where she studied under André Lhote and, more decisively, Albert Gleizes. It was under Gleizes that she encountered a systematic approach to Cubism, grounded not only in experimentation but in a theoretical framework that sought to re-establish order through structure and proportion following the disruptions of the war.

Executed around 1922, these works belong to the earliest phase of Jellett’s mature engagement with Cubism, and must be situated within this Parisian context. Gleizes’ teaching emphasised the construction of pictorial space through interlocking planes and rhythmic organisation, an approach outlined in his theoretical writings of the period, including Du Cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre (1920). Jellett’s adoption of this language marks a decisive departure from both academic naturalism and the expressive modes that had dominated prewar modernism. Instead, form is treated as something to be built, stabilised through relation rather than derived from observation.

Following her return to Ireland in the early 1920s, Jellett exhibited abstract work of this kind at the Society of Dublin Painters where it met with a largely hostile reception, her paintings described by an Irish Times reviewer as ‘an insoluble puzzle’, while another critic referred to her work as ‘sub-human art’. In this respect, her work forms part of the early transmission of Cubist practice into an Irish context, registering the movement of modernist form across distinct artistic environments in the years following the First World War.

Françoise Gilot (1921–2023), L’Accordion, signed lower left and titled on the verso, pencil and pastel on paper, 21 × 26.4 cm (8¼ × 10⅜ in.).

A later iteration of these conditions can be found in the work of Françoise Gilot. Born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, she began painting at an early age alongside studies in law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, before turning fully to artistic practice in the early 1940s. Her first exhibitions took place in Paris during the German occupation, situating her formation within the constraints of wartime production.

In 1943, she met Pablo Picasso, with whom she remained associated until 1953. During this period, she worked within the Parisian artistic milieu centred around Picasso and the Galerie Louise Leiris, a gallery closely connected to the legacy of Cubism and its postwar continuation. By the early 1950s, she was exhibiting there, placing her work within an established network that linked prewar modernism to its postwar reception.

Executed in 1952, L’Accordéon belongs to this context. The work forms part of a broader group of drawings and works on paper in which Gilot employed pencil and pastel to develop compositional structures. The continued use of a Cubist-derived vocabulary at this date reflects the persistence of these methods within postwar Paris, where they had become embedded within artistic practice rather than operating as a position of rupture.

In the years following this period, Gilot’s career extended beyond France, with exhibitions in Europe and the United States, reflecting the increasingly international circulation of artists and artworks in the postwar decades.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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In a different form, the annual meeting of collectors, scholars and dealers at TEFAF continues this long history. For Colnaghi, the fair offers an opportunity to present works shaped by distinct artistic traditions and historical circumstances, bringing together objects whose origins span several centuries and geographies. The presentation ranges from a nineteenth-century Fang reliquary head from Gabon, created within the ritual context of the byeri ancestor cult and later entering European collections through the dealer Paul Guillaume, to a rare mid-seventeenth-century portrait by Alonso Cano painted during his Valencian period, and a recently rediscovered signed portrait by Lavinia Fontana depicting the Bolognese noblewoman Isabella Ruini Angelelli, a sitter who appears repeatedly within the artist’s circle of aristocratic patrons.

Jacopo Robusti, called Il Tintoretto (Venice 1518–1594), Portrait of a Gentleman, c. 1549–1550, oil on canvas, 63 × 49 cm (24 3/4 × 19 1/4 in.).

A highlight among the paintings is a Portrait of a Man by Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto (1518–1594), dating to around 1549–1550, a decisive phase in the artist’s career when he was actively measuring his work against that of Titian. Recently rediscovered and identified by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo, the painting belongs to a small group of portraits executed in the late 1540s that reveal Tintoretto’s increasingly ambitious engagement with Venetian portrait conventions. Technical examination has shown that the canvas was reused from an earlier composition, beneath which appears the head of a female figure, a practice consistent with the artist’s known working methods. Shown half-length against a dark ground, the sitter, probably in his forties, is presented with a psychological intensity characteristic of Tintoretto’s most accomplished portraits of this period. The work belongs to a moment when the young painter was translating Titian’s gravity and illumination into a more urgent and condensed language. Together with comparable examples in Oxford and New York, the painting marks a moment of particular concentration in Tintoretto’s activity around the end of the 1540s, just before the freer handling that would characterise his production in the following decade.

Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (1587–1625), The Sorrows of Aminta, oil on canvas, 82.5 × 106.5 cm (32 1/2 × 41 7/8 in.).

Another highlight is Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s Sorrows of Aminta, painted during the second decade of the seventeenth century and representing one of the most refined treatments of a composition central to the artist’s Roman Caravaggesque phase. The subject derives from Torquato Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta, first published in 1573, and is identified through the musical score placed on the table, which scholars have recognised as the madrigal Dolor che sì mi crucii, based on the Ovidian story of Pyramus and Thisbe and set to music by Erasmo Marotta in 1600. In the painting two youths are absorbed in grief and recollection: one plays a flute while the other rests pensively beside a violin and tambourine, surrounded by grapes and vine leaves arranged as an elaborate still life. The composition exemplifies the Caravaggesque interest in emotionally charged half-length figures and the naturalistic depiction of objects, while also demonstrating Cavarozzi’s particular refinement in the rendering of surfaces and textiles. Born in Viterbo in 1587, Cavarozzi moved to Rome at a young age, where he trained with Cristoforo Roncalli and entered the circle of the Crescenzi family, becoming one of the earliest Roman painters to adopt Caravaggio’s naturalistic manner while developing a softer and more lyrical interpretation of it. The present painting belongs to a group of versions of the subject known today and is considered one of the most accomplished examples of the composition.

Central: Diego Velázquez (Sevilla 1599 – Madrid 1660), Portrait of Don Sebastián de Huerta, c. 1628–1629, oil on canvas, 121 × 101 cm (47 5/8 × 39 3/4 in.).

Equally among the works presented this year is a portrait by Diego Velázquez dating to around 1628–1629, executed shortly before the artist’s first journey to Italy and belonging to his formative Madrid period at the court of Philip IV. The painting depicts Sebastián García de Huerta (1576–1644), an ecclesiastical jurist from La Guardia near Toledo who rose through the patronage networks of Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas before entering the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office in 1616 and, in December 1629, being appointed Secretary to Philip IV. Commissioned at the height of his career, the portrait was closely connected to García de Huerta’s programme of self-commemoration in his native town, where he endowed a funerary chapel in the parish church of La Guardia. The work thus records a figure whose career moved between ecclesiastical administration and royal government, reflecting the institutional structures of early seventeenth-century Castile. Technical examination has also revealed that the canvas was reused from an earlier devotional composition, probably a representation of the Virgin, a practice documented elsewhere in Velázquez’s early production. Preserved for centuries within the García de Huerta family, the painting represents a rare and historically significant example of Velázquez’s portraiture from the years immediately preceding his Italian sojourn.

Centrall: Miguel Jacinto Meléndez (Oviedo 1679 – Madrid 1734), Portrait of Philip V, King of Spain (1683–1746), oil on canvas, in a painted oval, 134 × 155 cm (52 3/4 × 61 in.).

A later moment in Spanish court portraiture is represented by Miguel Jacinto Meléndez’s Portrait of Philip V, King of Spain, painted during the first decades of the eighteenth century as the Bourbon ruler consolidated his authority following the War of the Spanish Succession. Born in Oviedo in 1679, Meléndez established himself in Madrid as a painter of religious works before being appointed Painter to the King in 1712, becoming one of the principal artists responsible for shaping the official image of the new monarch. Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV, had ascended the Spanish throne in 1700 after the death of Charles II brought the Habsburg line to an end, a succession that triggered a prolonged European conflict before his rule was finally secured. In the present portrait the King appears wearing the insignia of both the French Order of the Saint-Esprit and the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, visual elements that deliberately linked Bourbon dynastic identity with the historic symbols of Spanish kingship. Meléndez produced numerous versions of Philip’s likeness for circulation across the Spanish territories and diplomatic networks of Europe, disseminating an image of the monarch that balanced martial authority with courtly refinement. The present composition, notable for the staff of command and the distant cavalry engagement indicated in the background, participates in this programme of dynastic representation and reflects the broader effort to stabilise Bourbon legitimacy through the language of state portraiture.

To the right: Head of a Young Man, Roman, Imperial Period, ca. mid-2nd century A.D., marble, h. 23 cm (9 1/8 in.).

The presentation also includes a Roman marble Head of a Young Man, dating to the mid-second century A.D. and representing a fine example of portraiture from the Antonine period, when Roman representations of individuals increasingly adopted the aesthetic conventions established by imperial imagery. The young man is depicted with thick, tightly curled hair arranged in dense locks across the forehead and crown, carved with the running drill that became characteristic of Antonine sculptural practice. His features, lightly bearded chin and deep-set eyes correspond closely to portraits inspired by the youthful images of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, whose official likenesses circulated widely across the Roman Empire and shaped the appearance of private portraiture. This stylistic shift marked a significant departure from the clean-shaven and closely cropped portraits associated with the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties, reflecting instead the philhellenic ideals promoted by the emperor Hadrian and continued by his successors. The present head, carved in marble and remarkably well preserved despite minor losses to the nose and ears, retains the delicately rendered beard and much of the original detail of the curling hair, the stone itself acquiring a warm surface tone through burial. Comparable examples of this Antonine portrait type survive in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the Louvre in Paris, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, situating the present sculpture within the broader development of Roman imperial portraiture during the middle decades of the second century.

To the left: Fang Artist, Betsi Group, Reliquary Head (Añgokh-Nlô-Byeri) mounted on a Kichizô Inagaki (1876–1951) base, Gabon, 19th century, wood, 31.8 × 13.3 × 8.9 cm (12 1/2 × 5 1/4 × 3 1/2 in.); with base: 39.7 × 11.7 × 10.5 cm (15 5/8 × 4 5/8 × 4 1/8 in.).

A different sculptural tradition is represented by this Fang reliquary head (Añgokh-Nlô-Byeri), produced in Gabon in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and originally forming part of the byeri complex through which Fang communities maintained an active relationship with their ancestors. Carved in wood and placed above a container holding the relic bones of a lineage ancestor, often skull fragments or long bones, the sculpture functioned as a mediator between the living and the dead and played a central role in ritual consultation and protection. The present example is distinguished by its refined modelling and exaggeration of form: a broad domed forehead marked by incised scarification lines, arched brow ridges, and a face tapering into a delicately pointed chin above a long, elegant neck. Traces of wear around the mouth and nose likely result from ritual scraping, a practice through which small particles were removed for use in protective or propitiatory substances. Such heads were not simply guardians of relic containers but integral participants in ritual life, embodying the presence and authority of ancestral spirits within the community. The sculpture’s later history reflects its early recognition within Western collections: it passed through the collection of the Parisian dealer Paul Guillaume and was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark 1935 exhibition African Negro Art, an event that played a decisive role in establishing Central African sculpture within the canon of modern art history.

Paul Gauguin (Paris 1848 – Atuona 1903), Head of a Tahitian, monogrammed upper right P. Go, numbered verso No. 79-13, coloured chalks and pastel heightened with touches of gold, 31 × 21.2 cm (12 1/4 × 8 1/2 in.).

At Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings this year we present a work by Paul Gauguin that belongs to the formative period of the artist’s first stay in Tahiti following his arrival on the island in 1891. Gauguin travelled to the South Pacific in deliberate opposition to European artistic conventions, seeking what he believed to be a more elemental and spiritually authentic culture. During this early phase, before embarking on the major painted compositions that would define his Tahitian oeuvre, he devoted himself intensively to drawing, producing numerous portrait heads and figure studies as a means of visual research and experimentation. The present sheet, Head of a Tahitian, executed in coloured chalks and pastel and heightened with touches of gold, stands apart within this group for the refinement of its surface and the clarity of its conception, suggesting that it was intended as an autonomous work rather than a preparatory study. The simplified profile, with its closed eyes and monumental calm, reflects Gauguin’s attempt to capture what he described as the essential character of Tahitian physiognomy, departing consciously from European ideals of beauty. A small bird- or lizard-like form hovering above the head links the drawing conceptually to Gauguin’s painting Te Nave Nave Fenua (1892), where a related creature appears beside a standing female figure, an image often interpreted as an allusion to temptation within the artist’s personal mythology. Closely related to imagery found in the Cahier pour Aline, the illustrated notebook Gauguin assembled for his daughter between 1892 and 1893, the drawing occupies an important place within the artist’s early Tahitian production and stands among the most accomplished portrait head studies of this pivotal moment in his career.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery, or visit our Online Viewing Room.

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Yet these moments of recognition did not necessarily translate into a continuous or widely acknowledged presence within the formal histories of art. Women appear only rarely within this framework, their contributions often shaped by the particular circumstances that allowed them access to training and patronage. The result is a historical record that is at once revealing and incomplete, one in which the presence of women artists is unmistakable, yet seldom given the same sustained visibility as that of their male contemporaries.

Recent decades have seen a renewed effort to address this imbalance as museums, scholars and collectors reassess the achievements of women artists whose work played a significant role in the artistic culture of their time. At Colnaghi, recent years have offered the opportunity to participate directly in this ongoing reassessment, placing important works by women artists into major public collections. Among these are paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and a sculpture by Luisa Roldán, each acquired by leading museums, while a significant work by Lavinia Fontana will be presented at TEFAF Maastricht in the coming week.

Artemisia Gentileschi (Rome 1593–1653 Naples), Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, c. 1623–5, oil on canvas, height 81 cm (31 7/8 in.).

A recent example of this reassessment is our sale of Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy by Artemisia Gentileschi to the National Gallery of Art, where it now enters the national collection as the museum’s first work by the artist. Rediscovered in 2011 and subsequently offered at Sotheby’s in Paris in June 2014, the painting had previously been known only through an early black-and-white photograph and its reappearance marked an important moment in the reassessment of Gentileschi’s oeuvre.

Born in Rome in 1593, Artemisia was trained in the workshop of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, one of the leading painters active in the city during the early decades of the seventeenth century. From an early age she was immersed in the practical and intellectual culture of painting, and by 1610, at just seventeen, she had already produced the remarkable Susanna and the Elders (Pommersfelden, Schloss Weißenstein). Her career unfolded in circumstances that were exceptional for a woman of her time: excluded from the Roman Accademia di San Luca and operating within a professional sphere overwhelmingly dominated by men, she nevertheless achieved a level of visibility and patronage rarely accorded to female artists.

Following the highly publicised trial of 1612 against the painter Agostino Tassi, Artemisia relocated to Florence in 1613 with her husband Pietro Antonio Stiattesi, where she entered the cultural orbit of the Medici court and secured the patronage of figures such as Cosimo II de’ Medici and Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger. During these years she was admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, a remarkable distinction that made her one of the first women to gain membership of the institution.

Over the course of a long and cosmopolitan career that took her between Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples and London, Gentileschi attracted the patronage of some of the most powerful courts in Europe, including those of Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England. Celebrated by contemporary writers and admired for the emotional intensity with which she reimagined biblical and historical subjects, she remains one of the most significant painters of the Baroque period. As she famously wrote to the Sicilian nobleman Don Antonio Ruffo in 1649, asserting her confidence in the face of persistent scepticism: “I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.”

Luisa Roldán, called La Roldana (Seville 1652 – 1706 Madrid), Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, c. 1690–1706, terracotta, polychromed; on an octagonal parcel-gilt, polychrome wood base with scrolling feet, 52 cm (20 ½ in.) high; 73.7 cm (29 in.) high overall.

If Artemisia Gentileschi represents one of the most significant female painters of the Italian Baroque, a parallel figure emerges in the sculptural tradition of Spain’s siglo de oro. A remarkable terracotta of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception by Luisa Roldán, known to contemporaries as La Roldana, was recently sold by Colnaghi to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where it now enters one of the most important collections of Spanish art in the United States. Born in Seville in 1652, Roldán trained in the workshop of her father, the sculptor Pedro Roldán, whose studio was responsible for some of the most significant sculptural commissions in Andalusia. From this environment she acquired the technical skill and workshop experience that would allow her to pursue an independent career, an unusual achievement for a woman working within the highly structured artistic culture of seventeenth-century Spain. Over the following decades she established a reputation for sculpted figures intended for altarpieces, processional imagery and devotional groups, first in Seville and later in Cádiz, where she produced important works for the cathedral between 1684 and 1687. Her growing reputation eventually brought her to Madrid, where in 1689 she was appointed Escultora de Cámara (Sculptor to the Court) to King Charles II of Spain, a distinction virtually unprecedented for a woman artist of the period.

The small terracotta of the Immaculate Conception, probably produced during her Madrid years, belongs to a group of works in which Roldán explored the potential of polychromed terracotta as a medium for devotional sculpture. In seventeenth-century Spain the subject of the Immaculate Conception occupied a particularly charged place within religious and political culture, as the Spanish monarchy championed the doctrine long before its official proclamation as dogma. Roldán’s interpretation participates in this rich visual tradition while revealing the qualities that distinguish her work: a very refined sense of scale, delicate modelling and an ability to convey devotional intensity within an intimate format. The sculpture thus stands as a testament not only to her artistic accomplishment but also to the increasingly recognised role of women within the artistic culture of early modern Europe.

Lavinia Fontana (Bologna 1552–1614), Portrait of Isabella Ruini Angelelli with a Lady-in-waiting, 1592, signed on the jewellery box “Lavin. Fon. Facies,” oil on canvas, 69.5 × 65.5 cm (27 1/2 × 26 in.).

Looking ahead to the coming week, this engagement with the work of early modern women artists will continue at TEFAF Maastricht, where Colnaghi will present a significant painting by Lavinia Fontana. Born in Bologna in 1552, the daughter of the painter Prospero Fontana, Lavinia established one of the most remarkable artistic careers open to a woman in late sixteenth-century Italy. Active within the vibrant intellectual culture of Bologna where academies, literary circles and aristocratic salons fostered unusually prominent roles for women, she developed a flourishing practice that encompassed portraiture, mythological subjects and large-scale religious commissions. Contemporary sources attest to the esteem in which she was held: the Bolognese historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia later recorded that the noblewomen of the city vied with one another to receive the painter in their homes and to be seen in her company at public gatherings, recognising her both as an accomplished artist and as a cultivated participant in the city’s learned society.

The painting to be shown at TEFAF belongs to a remarkable sequence of portraits Fontana executed of the Bolognese noblewoman Isabella Ruini Angelelli, produced between approximately 1586 and 1593. Born in 1568 into one of Bologna’s most prominent senatorial families, Isabella was the daughter of the scholar and statesman Carlo Ruini, author of the influential treatise Dell’anatomia e dell’infermità del cavallo, a foundational text in the early history of veterinary science.

Her marriage in 1586 to Giovanni Angelelli united two powerful Bolognese lineages and introduced her to the circle of aristocratic women who formed an important part of Fontana’s clientele. Within this milieu the painter produced several images of Isabella across different contexts and functions: a small wedding portrait painted on copper around the time of her marriage (now in Besançon), an allegorical portrait representing her as Venus with Cupid dated 1592 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), the portrait with a lady-in-waiting presented here, and finally the celebrated official portrait of 1593 now in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Together these works chart the social trajectory of a young Bolognese noblewoman from newly married bride to prominent member of the city’s aristocracy, while also demonstrating Fontana’s remarkable ability to adapt portraiture to differing social and symbolic functions.

Documentary evidence preserved in the inventories of the Angelelli family offers further insight into the historical context in which these portraits were originally displayed. By the early seventeenth century paintings representing Isabella and her husband formed part of the picture gallery in the family palazzo in Piazza Calderini in Bologna, where portraits of relatives and distinguished figures were arranged within the principal reception rooms. Although the precise identification of each portrait within the inventories remains uncertain, records from the seventeenth century confirm that images of Isabella continued to circulate within the family collections across several generations before eventually dispersing. The later history of the related portraits also reflects the wider European reception of Fontana’s work: Isabella’s portrait as Venus, for example, entered French collections by the nineteenth century and ultimately reached the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen.

Seen within this broader historical framework, the painting exemplifies the close relationships that Lavinia Fontana cultivated with the aristocratic women of Bologna, whose patronage helped sustain one of the most successful artistic careers available to a woman in Renaissance Europe. At the same time, it forms part of a rare and historically significant group of portraits that illuminate the social networks, cultural ambitions and dynastic identities of Bolognese noblewomen at the end of the sixteenth century.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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But what happens when this relationship enters the studio? How does the authority of the father inflect the authority of the painter? And what kind of subject is produced when the sitter is also a child within the artist’s own household?

These questions frame the group of works currently in our hands at Colnaghi: five portraits, each depicting a daughter painted by her father. Considered together, they offer an opportunity to examine how artists have approached this particular subject across time. What follows looks at each in turn.

Charles-André van Loo, called Carle van Loo (Nice 1705 – 1765 Paris), Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter Marie-Rosalie Van Loo, canvas transferred to panel, 24.2 × 19 cm (9½ × 7½ in.), framed 43.4 × 38.5 cm (17⅛ × 15⅛ in.).

This small bust-length portrait depicts Marie-Rosalie van Loo (1737–1762), the artist’s only surviving daughter, probably in the 1740s, when she was still a child. Executed on canvas and later transferred to panel, the work adopts a strict profile format against a plain ground. The composition is economical. There is no setting, no allegorical device, and no indication of rank. The emphasis falls entirely on the structure of the head and the description of the child’s features. The modelling of the face is careful and controlled, particularly across the forehead and cheeks, while the treatment of the hair is handled with greater freedom. The pearl earring introduces a single accent of light.

Marie-Rosalie was not an occasional sitter. Van Loo appears to have returned to her likeness repeatedly. Contemporary accounts and later scholarship note that he depicted his daughter both in independent portraits and as a model within larger compositions. The most prominent instance is the figure of a child representing Music in the Four Arts series painted in 1752–53 as overdoors for Madame de Pompadour’s château de Bellevue. In the canvas personifying Music, now in San Francisco, the profile type and coiffure correspond closely to those seen here. The association suggests that the present portrait may have functioned as a study for that more ambitious commission or, at minimum, that the same model underlies both images.

The circulation of her likeness extended further. A related pastel on blue paper repeats the profile and details of the hair, and the motif was later adapted by Louis-Marin Bonnet in a print dedicated to van Loo around 1764, where the identification of the sitter as Marie-Rosalie is explicit. Such reiterations indicate that the image moved beyond the confines of the family.

Joseph-Auguste Brunier (Chambéry 1860 – Lyon 1929), Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter, Françoise Brunier, stamped lower left with the artist’s studio sale mark (Lugt 5806) and lower right with the collector’s mark of Étienne Grafe (Lugt 3927), black chalk with white highlights, 32.5 × 25.3 cm.

Executed in black chalk with white highlights, this portrait represents Françoise Brunier, one of the artist’s most frequent models. The emphasis is on observation rather than display. There is no setting and no accessory beyond what is necessary to stabilise the composition.

Brunier trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon under Michel Dumas and continued his formation in Paris in the ateliers of Alexandre Cabanel, Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. His education situates him within the academic tradition of the late nineteenth century. Contour, proportion, and tonal gradation was central to that formation. This portrait reflects that training. The structure of the head is carefully articulated and the white heightening is used sparingly to articulate the bridge of the nose, the brow, and the eyes.

Following his marriage in 1891, Brunier repeatedly portrayed his wife and daughter in multiple media. Unlike the Rococo precedent seen in van Loo, Brunier’s treatment avoids allegory and decorative framing. The work also has a clear history of private transmission. It remained within the artist’s family until the dispersal of the estate in 1980 before entering the collection of Étienne Grafe in Lyon.

Théodule Ribot (Saint-Nicolas-d’Attez 1823 – 1891 Colombes), Portrait of a Young Girl, possibly the Artist’s Daughter Louise, c. 1870, signed lower right “t. Ribot,” brush with black ink and wash on paper, 25 × 18.8 cm (9¾ × 7½ in.).

This brush and wash portrait, signed ‘t. Ribot’ at lower right can be placed in the early 1870s, a period in which Ribot frequently employed ink and wash as an autonomous medium. The sitter is thought to be Louise Ribot, the artist’s daughter. The identification rests on comparison with the documented Portrait of Louise Ribot of 1884 in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims and with a related ink and wash sheet of 1872 in the Morgan Library; in both cases, the physiognomy, most notably the cleft chin, corresponds closely.

The drawing is constructed through tonal mass rather than linear definition. The ground is dark and unarticulated and the head emerges from shadow, the modelling achieved through gradations of wash and reinforcement with the brush. This approach aligns with Ribot’s engagement with Spanish seventeenth-century painting, particularly Velázquez, whose example was noted by Théophile Gautier in 1861.

Ribot’s position within nineteenth-century French art was marked by independence. Admired by figures such as Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin, who characterised him as an ‘artiste indépendant’, he remained resistant to stylistic categorisation and experienced repeated rejection by the Salon jury before eventual acceptance in 1861. Drawing, throughout his career, functioned as an end in itself and provided the artist with a space for investigation outside the constraints of large-scale exhibition painting.

If the sitter is indeed Louise, the sheet records the daughter within this experimental sphere. Unlike the more controlled academic portrait, the image does not stabilise the figure through detailed costume or setting. The emphasis falls on the head and the gaze. Ribot’s children Louise and her brother Germain, both of whom later became artists under his instruction, appear repeatedly in his work.

Sir Francis Grant (Edinburgh 1803 – 1878 Melton Mowbray), Mary Isabella Grant, ca. 1850, inscribed on the verso “Mary Isabella Geary (Lady Geary) / Daughter of / Sir Francis Grant, painted / by him.”, pencil and charcoal on paper, 24.2 × 16.6 cm.

This pencil and charcoal drawing represents Mary Isabella Grant (1831–1854), the eldest daughter of Sir Francis Grant, and is inscribed on the verso identifying her as such. Executed around 1850, the sheet shows the sitter in profile, her head inclined slightly forward. The composition is spare. Contour defines the profile, while charcoal modelling gives weight to the hair and cheek. There is no background elaboration.

The drawing is closely related to the oil painting Mary Isabella Grant Knitting a Shawl, now in the Government Art Collection, and is likely preparatory for that larger work. The essential elements of pose and physiognomy are already established here. The study clarifies Grant’s working method. Likeness and compositional structure were secured on paper before the introduction of colour and narrative detail in paint.

Grant’s position within British art differs from that of his French contemporaries. Largely self-trained, he built his reputation through portraiture embedded in aristocratic and sporting society rather than through academic formation abroad. By the late 1830s he had established a successful portrait practice, and he would later serve as President of the Royal Academy. His public commissions are characterised by composure and social ease. By contrast, drawings such as the present sheet operate outside the sphere of exhibition portraiture.

Mary Isabella was a recurring subject in her father’s work; he painted three known oil portraits of her, one exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850. Her subsequent marriage in 1852 and early death in 1854 at the age of twenty-two give the image a biographical frame. The drawing likely predates her marriage.

Franz von Stuck, Mary Stuck in Traditional Münchner Dress, ca. 1912, oil over pencil on octagonal cardboard, in the original frame designed by the artist, 35 × 35 cm (13¾ × 13¾ in.), Tettenweis 1863 – 1928 Munich.

This octagonal oil over pencil portrait of Mary Stuck, executed around 1912, presents the artist’s daughter in traditional Münchner dress. The format is immediately striking: the eight-sided support, retained in the original frame designed by the artist, reinforces the work’s objecthood and decorative intent. Mary faces the viewer directly. The composition is tightly contained; there is no background articulation. Instead, her head and shoulders fill the surface, emerging from the warm tone of the cardboard ground. Pencil underdrawing remains perceptible beneath the oil, particularly in the contours of the face, while the darker handling of the hair and bodice provides weight and emphasis.

Unlike the mythological femmes fatales for which Franz von Stuck is best known, the present work locates its subject within a specifically regional identity. The traditional costume situates Mary within Munich’s bourgeois culture, aligning her image with notions of Heimat and continuity. Yet the portrait is not folkloric in any sentimental sense. The frontal gaze is steady, almost neutral, while her costume operates less as narrative than as structure, framing the face and anchoring the composition in passages of dark paint.

Mary Franziska Stuck (1896–1961) occupied a complex position within her father’s artistic and social world. Born out of wedlock and formally adopted by Franz von Stuck and his wife in 1904, she was both private daughter and public image. From early childhood she appeared repeatedly in his work, becoming one of the most continuous presences in his portrait production. Her image circulated not merely within the domestic sphere of the Villa Stuck but within the broader Munich art world, where Stuck had established himself as a leading figure of Symbolism and Secession culture. In this respect, Mary’s likeness participated in the construction of artistic identity and lineage; she was simultaneously as family member, model, and extension of the artist’s cultivated milieu.

By the time this portrait was painted, around 1912, Mary was entering adulthood in a Munich still shaped by Wilhelmine cultural conservatism yet increasingly conscious of modern identity and regional tradition. Her marriage to Albert Heilmann in 1917 would align her with a prominent Munich family, and after Stuck’s death she played a role in preserving and managing his legacy, including involvement with the Villa Stuck. The present work thus belongs to a pivotal moment, before marriage, before war, and before the transformation of Stuck’s house into a site of memory. Seen in this light, the portrait records not only filial intimacy but also a historical threshold. It is a portrait of the daughter of a fin-de-siècle master situated on the eve of political and social rupture.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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Within this context, the figure of Saint Francis acquired renewed prominence. Franciscan spirituality grounded in poverty, humility, contemplation of Christ’s Passion and preparation for death, aligned closely with post-Tridentine devotional priorities. By the late sixteenth century Toledo housed numerous Franciscan foundations, and the Third Order extended Franciscan ideals into lay society. El Greco and his workshop responded to this demand with consistent production. Scholars have identified roughly two hundred works connected to Franciscan imagery, including paintings by the master himself, his son Jorge Manuel, workshop assistants, and later followers. Among these, the composition of Saint Francis and Brother Leo in Meditation became one of the most successful and widely replicated types.

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, called El Greco (and workshop) (Crete 1541–1614 Toledo), Saint Francis and Brother Leo in Meditation, early 17th century, inscribed “160(7)?” verso, oil on canvas, 78 × 57 cm (30 3/4 × 22 1/2 in.).

The structure of the image is austere. Saint Francis kneels before a skull accompanied by Brother Leo in prayer. The setting evokes Mount La Verna, where, according to tradition, Francis received the stigmata in 1224. The skull placed prominently in the foreground functions as a conventional memento mori, directing both saint and viewer toward contemplation of mortality. Brother Leo reinforces the devotional act, situating the scene within Franciscan narrative tradition and anchoring the composition in shared prayer.

The painting satisfies Tridentine clarity. These are two figures with legible gestures and minimal distraction. Yet its force lies in something more complex than mere didacticism. El Greco’s training in Crete and Italy is evident in the distinctly Mannerist vocabulary of the work. The saint’s elongated body forms a severe vertical axis, reinforced by the rope cincture and the cascading folds of the habit. Moreover, space is compressed rather than naturalistic. The cave does not open outward but presses forward and light enters diagonally, while the small patch of blue sky interrupts the sombre tonality.

The composition proved exceptionally durable. Numerous versions are preserved in major public collections and more than sixty examples of this specific type are known today. The recurrence of the image also reflects the consolidation of a stable and effective devotional formula capable of meeting the ecclesiastical demands of the time.

El Greco’s studio operated according to standard early modern workshop practice. Assistants and his son collaborated under the master’s supervision. Replication of successful compositions was an integral part of large studio organisation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. In the case of Franciscan imagery, workshop practice ensured continuity of a recognisable compositional model while allowing for variation in handling and surface.

Technical examination has further illuminated the painting’s material history. X-ray analysis has revealed an earlier portrait beneath the present composition, bearing resemblance to the so-called Portrait of Manusso Theotokopoulos, traditionally identified as the painter’s brother. The presence of the underlying portrait situates the work securely within the orbit of El Greco’s studio and rules out the possibility of a later, unrelated copy. More than 60 examples of this specific type are known today, though it is likely that additional works remain in unknown locations or were lost during the tumultuous history of Spain. The enduring appeal of this iconography is further attested by its early reproduction in engravings, the earliest extant example being a print by Diego de Astor, which El Greco commissioned, dated 1606.

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From its emergence as an independent genre, still life occupied a marginal position within academic theory, consistently ranked below history painting, portraiture, and religious narrative. Early modern treatises justified this hierarchy by arguing that still life relied on imitation rather than intellectual invention. Yet this marginal status also meant that the genre developed with relatively little iconographic prescription. In the Spanish context, where visual culture was strongly shaped by Counter-Reformation values, still life offered a way of engaging with material objects that could accommodate moral reflection without overt allegory. Early Spanish still lifes, particularly those associated with Juan Sánchez Cotán in Toledo, reflect these conditions. Foodstuffs and vessels are set within shallow architectural recesses and dark backgrounds, producing a space that isolates objects and distances them from everyday use, in contrast to the abundance and density typical of Flemish and Dutch painting.

By the second quarter of the seventeenth century, still life in Spain diversified in response to changing social and artistic contexts. At court, painters such as Juan van der Hamen y León produced more elaborate compositions that reflect aristocratic collecting practices and the circulation of luxury goods. In parallel, artists working in regional centres such as Seville and Valencia adapted still life to local traditions. Paintings such as Juan de Zurbarán’s Basket of Plums and a Slice of Melon (c. 1640) and Pedro de Camprobín’s Plate of Figs (c. 1656) combine naturalistic description with heightened attention to surface and texture.

Juan de Zurbarán (Llerena 1620–Seville 1649), Basket of Plums and Slice of Melon, 1640–1650, oil on canvas, 25.5 × 28.8 cm (10 × 11⅜ in.).

Pedro de Camprobín (Almagro 1605–Seville 1674), Plate of Figs, c. 1656, oil on canvas, 25 × 30 cm (9⅞ × 11¾ in.).

Floral painting assumed increasing importance during the later seventeenth century, culminating in those of Juan de Arellano. This development signals a gradual shift in the function of still life, as decorative considerations became more prominent. While symbolic and moral associations remained operative, the genre was increasingly integrated into the culture of interior decoration and collecting. The emphasis on flowers reflects both changing taste and the growing role of still life as an ornamental form suited to domestic and courtly settings.

Juan de Arellano (Santorcaz 1614–Madrid 1676), Basket of Flowers, c. 1670, signed lower right, oil on canvas applied to panel, 57 × 71 cm (22½ × 28 in.).

Our exhibition also includes a pair of still lifes with sweets, fruits, and flowers by Josefa de Ayala, known as Josefa de Óbidos, recently identified through attributional research. These paintings belong to a corpus of Iberian still-life production that has long circulated within the orbit of Spanish Baroque painting, often through unstable or incorrect attributions. Their inclusion allows a more precise assessment of the permeability of still-life conventions across Spain and Portugal in the later seventeenth century. Both compositions are organised according to established bodegón conventions. Objects are arranged along a narrow ledge before a dark, voided background, and the juxtaposition of edible goods, ceramic vessels, and botanical elements recalls practices associated with painters active in Seville and Madrid during the middle decades of the century. At the same time, the prominence of confectionery and floral ornament introduces a register that departs from the austerity of early Spanish models. Unlike courtly still lifes centred on luxury display or market abundance, these works foreground perishable goods whose appeal is inseparable from their ephemerality. Floral elements, rendered with precision and distributed across the field, serve both structural and decorative functions, mediating between the solidity of vessels and the softness of edible forms.

Josefa de Ayala y Cabrera, called Josefa de Óbidos (Seville c. 1630–Óbidos 1684), Pair of Still Lifes with Desserts, Fruits and Flowers, oil on canvas, 110 × 70 cm (43¼ × 27½ in.).

Josefa de Ayala y Cabrera, called Josefa de Óbidos (Seville c. 1630–Óbidos 1684), Pair of Still Lifes with Desserts, Fruits and Flowers, oil on canvas, 110 × 70 cm (43¼ × 27½ in.).

The eighteenth century intensified these developments. The expansion of manufacturing industries, particularly in Valencia and Barcelona, created demand for botanical imagery that could be translated into ornamental repertoires for textiles, ceramics, and other applied arts. Artistic academies incorporated botanical and floral studies into their curricula, not solely as exercises in observation but for their practical application in ornamental production. Still life thus occupied a position at the intersection of fine art, scientific observation, and industrial design, reflecting Enlightenment interests in classification, material knowledge, and the ordering of the natural world. Still life, in this sense, is anything but motionless.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery, or visit our Online Viewing Room.

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