Title - Allegorical figure group, with colonnade in the distance C1690
Medium - pen and brown ink and wash, later attribution ''H. Fragonard'' in the lower left, on laid paper without watermark, laid onto paper support, with [?] 18th century blue-paper mount, numbered ''493'' in the lower right corner
Artist - Att Francesco Solimena 1657 - 1747
Size - 15cm x 13cm
This is a scarce example of a work which has been attributed to Francesco Solimena, although it has what appears to be an 18th century pen attribution to Fragonard (worth investigating), the work also has an old inventory number at bottom right. Solimena''s work is very scarce at auction and more so his drawings.
Condition is good.
Francesco Solimena (4 October 1657 – 3 April 1747) Francesco Solimena was born in Canale di Serino, near Avellino.
He received early training from his father, Angelo Solimena, with whom he executed a Paradise for the cathedral of Nocera (a place where he spent a big part of
... his life) and a Vision of St. Cyril of Alexandria for the church of San Domenico at Solofra.
He settled in Naples in 1674, there he worked in the studio of Francesco di Maria and later Giacomo del Po. He apparently had taken the clerical orders, but was patronized early on, and encouraged to become an artist by Cardinal Vincenzo Orsini (later Pope Benedict XIII). By the 1680s, he had independent fresco commissions, and his active studio came to dominate Neapolitan painting from the 1690s through the first four decades of the 18th century.
He modelled his art—for he was a highly conventional painter—after the Roman Baroque masters, Luca Giordano and Giovanni Lanfranco, and Mattia Preti, whose technique of warm brownish shadowing Solimena emulated. Solimena painted many frescoes in Naples, altarpieces, celebrations of weddings and courtly occasions, mythological subjects, characteristically chosen for their theatrical drama, and portraits. His settings are suggested with a few details—steps, archways, balustrades, columns—concentrating attention on figures and their draperies, caught in pools and shafts of light. Art historians take pleasure in identifying the models he imitated or adapted in his compositions. His numerous preparatory drawings often mix media, combining pen-and-ink, chalk, and watercolor washes.
A typical example of the elaborately constructed allegorical ''machines'' of his early mature style, fully employing his mastery of chiaroscuro, is the Allegory of Rule (1690) from the Stroganoff collection, which has come to the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
He apparently hoped to see his son Orazio follow a career in the law, for which he received a doctorate (de Domenici), but also became a painter.
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Internal Reference: SOLIMENA
Antique ID Number (AIDN): SA1178947
Dateline of this antique is 18th Century
Height is 15cm (5.9inches)Width is 13cm (5.1inches)Depth is 1cm (0.4inches)
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