Portrait of a Young Lady C.1700, Studio or Circle of Fra Galgario..

Oil on canvas in a giltwood frame.

While standard portraits of this period tended to be pleasing and superficial Fra Galgario’s are dark, brooding, almost Goya-like in their intensity and with a sense of drama; this is evident in this fine portrait with its sense of suddenly stilled movement.

Fra Galgario is the author of some of the most astonishing portraits of the late Baroque period. Full of character and remarkable for their expressive poses, these images are both dramatic and sympathetic.

He is said to blend the attention to colourism and glamour that captures Baroque portraiture in Venice, with the realism of Milanese art, such as that of Moroni.

Fra’ Galgario, born Giuseppe Vittore Ghislandi, and also called Fra’ Vittore del Galgario, was born 4 March 1655, and though much of his work has been lost or forgotten, he was a successful and busy portraitist mainly active in the Bergamo and Milan art markets.

Born to an artist father, Domenico Ghislandi, Galgario initially entered the studio of Giacomo Cotta, then Bartolomeo Bianchi, and finally the studio of Sebastiano Bombelli in Venice of the 1690s. He also reported to have trained with the German portrait artist Salomon Adler in Milan.

After a period of initial training in his native city with painters of purely local renown, Ghislandi continued his education in Venice between 1675 and 1688. There he became a lay brother in the monastery of San Francesco di Paolo, though writers who have doubted the seriousness of his vocation have insinuated that he did so merely in order to gain financial support for his studies. According to early sources, he studied the works of Titian and Veronese above all. This initial contact with the great tradition of portraiture proved decisive for his later development, and Ghislandi became best known as a portraitist, although he also painted a number of history paintings, no longer extant, in Venice and Bergamo.

In 1688, Ghislandi returned briefly to Bergamo before returning again to Venice, where he was assistant to the portraitist Sebastiano Bombelli (1635-1719) for the next twelve years. During this second Venetian period Ghislandi painted the portraits of important Venetian noble families, and apparently became something of a rival to Bombelli, as the sources related that he left the studio under the cloud of the master's envy.

He was made a member of the Accademia Clementina of Bologna after a trip to that city in 1717. He died in Bergamo in 1743.

SIZE: 51 x 35 inches including the frame.

PROVENANCE: London private collection.