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Lot Essay
This hitherto unpublished picture by Carlo Maratti is a significant addition to his oeuvre, having been known for over two centuries only through a precise engraving, in reverse, made by Louis Deplaces (Paris 1682-1739; see fig. 1), when the canvas was in the collection of the Prince de Monaco during the first quarter of the eighteenth century (according to the inscription: 'Diane et Acteon Tableau du Cabinet de Monseineur [sic] Le Prince de Monaco Peint sur toile par Ch. Marat haut de 1 pied 7 pouces sur 2 pieds [...]'). The picture was probably last seen in public at the Pourtalès sale in 1865 (see provenance) where it was thus described in the catalogue: 'Diane et Actéon - Diane, accompagnée de deux nymphes, a dépouillé ses vêtements et prend le plaisir du bain dans une grotte traversée d'un cours d'eau. Surprise par l'imprudent chasseur, le déesse se hâte de relever une partie de la draperie sur laquelle elle est à demi couchée: près de la sont déposées sa tunique et ses armes. Haut., 48 cent.; larg.,65 cent.'
James-Alexandre, Comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier (1776-1855) was one of the most notable collectors of his generation. He was the son of a French Huguenot, who had emigrated to Switzerland, where he soon amassed a considerable fortune through commerce. James-Alexandre was able to return to Paris, where he spent his vast inheritance building up an art collection that was famed for its diversity and high quality. It was housed initially in a mansion in the Place Vendôme, and subsequently in the hôtel designed for him by Fèlix-Jacques Duban, in the Renaissance style, at 7 rue Tronchet where the posthumous sale of his collection took place.
His collection encompassed antiquities, sculpture, ivories, Medieval and Renaissance enamels, glass, engraved gems, Chinese bronzes and Japanese lacquer, as well as pictures. Among those of the Italian Schools were two Bronzinos - one of which, Portrait of a Man, was at the time attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo (now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris), and the other was a Portrait of Lodovico Capponi (now in the Frick Collection, New York) - Antonello da Messina's Portrait of a Condottiere (Musée du Louvre, Paris), as well as works by Bellini, Titian, Palma il Vecchio, Veronese and Domenichino, and drawings by the Carracci, all of which were sold alongside the Marratti in Paris in the Spring of 1865. However, the most celebrated picture in the sale (lot 158) and the most expensive at 51,000 francs was Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier (Wallace Collection, London) purchased by the 4th Marquess of Hertford in a famous bidding stand off against James de Rothschild. The sheer size of the Pourtalès collection is made clear by the fact that it took almost two months, in a series of auctions between 6 February and 4 April, to dispose of it.
The present painting is a typical example of both Maratti's pictorial style around the early 1690s and his tendency to rework certain motifs culled from his earlier pictures. At the time, he was catering to the more intimate taste for Arcadian scenes that emerged with a new generation of exacting patrons in Italy and abroad, for whom Maratti had become (even before the death of Bernini in 1680) the major representative of the Roman School and the most famous painter in Europe. In this case the artist refers back to one of his figures executed in the 1660s for a much larger vertical landscape by Gaspard Dughet, depicting the same subject with a quantity of nymphs (Chatsworth, The Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement: see S Rudolph, Niccolò Maria Pallavicini e L'Ascesa al Tempio della Virtù attraverso il mecenatismo, Rome, 1995, fig. 10). The reclining female figure in the lower right corner of that canvas is here employed, in the same pose, as Diana herself thus becoming the new focal point of the scene. Two nymphs are added to the right, in a close-up detail that radically changes the entire perspective of Dughet's picture, in which the vast grotto structure of the landscape has been reduced to a distant background view framing the figure of Actaeon and furnishing a dark foil of rocks and foliage. The foreground waterfall serves to enhance the luminous flesh tones, the drapery and the quiver of arrows; passages executed with the looser, rapid brushstrokes characteristic of the master's work towards the end of the seventeenth century.
A contemporary autograph sheet of studies containing a preparatory drawing for a nymph in the Kunstmuseum of Düsseldorf may be associated with the elaboration of this composition (cf. Schaar in A. Sutherland Harris - E. Schaar, Die Handzeichnungen von Andrea Sacchi und Carlo Maratti, Düsseldorf, 1967, INV.FP 8289, cat. 46, pp. 156-7). It is worth mentioning that Maratti, in those very years, had extrapolated yet another figure of a nymph from the earlier Chatsworth picture (at the centre, seated with her feet in the stream) to create a similar small close-up and more intimate version of Diana surprised while bathing (Rudolph, op. cit., 1995, fig. 37, pl. 10).
Dr. Stella Rudolph
James-Alexandre, Comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier (1776-1855) was one of the most notable collectors of his generation. He was the son of a French Huguenot, who had emigrated to Switzerland, where he soon amassed a considerable fortune through commerce. James-Alexandre was able to return to Paris, where he spent his vast inheritance building up an art collection that was famed for its diversity and high quality. It was housed initially in a mansion in the Place Vendôme, and subsequently in the hôtel designed for him by Fèlix-Jacques Duban, in the Renaissance style, at 7 rue Tronchet where the posthumous sale of his collection took place.
His collection encompassed antiquities, sculpture, ivories, Medieval and Renaissance enamels, glass, engraved gems, Chinese bronzes and Japanese lacquer, as well as pictures. Among those of the Italian Schools were two Bronzinos - one of which, Portrait of a Man, was at the time attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo (now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris), and the other was a Portrait of Lodovico Capponi (now in the Frick Collection, New York) - Antonello da Messina's Portrait of a Condottiere (Musée du Louvre, Paris), as well as works by Bellini, Titian, Palma il Vecchio, Veronese and Domenichino, and drawings by the Carracci, all of which were sold alongside the Marratti in Paris in the Spring of 1865. However, the most celebrated picture in the sale (lot 158) and the most expensive at 51,000 francs was Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier (Wallace Collection, London) purchased by the 4th Marquess of Hertford in a famous bidding stand off against James de Rothschild. The sheer size of the Pourtalès collection is made clear by the fact that it took almost two months, in a series of auctions between 6 February and 4 April, to dispose of it.
The present painting is a typical example of both Maratti's pictorial style around the early 1690s and his tendency to rework certain motifs culled from his earlier pictures. At the time, he was catering to the more intimate taste for Arcadian scenes that emerged with a new generation of exacting patrons in Italy and abroad, for whom Maratti had become (even before the death of Bernini in 1680) the major representative of the Roman School and the most famous painter in Europe. In this case the artist refers back to one of his figures executed in the 1660s for a much larger vertical landscape by Gaspard Dughet, depicting the same subject with a quantity of nymphs (Chatsworth, The Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement: see S Rudolph, Niccolò Maria Pallavicini e L'Ascesa al Tempio della Virtù attraverso il mecenatismo, Rome, 1995, fig. 10). The reclining female figure in the lower right corner of that canvas is here employed, in the same pose, as Diana herself thus becoming the new focal point of the scene. Two nymphs are added to the right, in a close-up detail that radically changes the entire perspective of Dughet's picture, in which the vast grotto structure of the landscape has been reduced to a distant background view framing the figure of Actaeon and furnishing a dark foil of rocks and foliage. The foreground waterfall serves to enhance the luminous flesh tones, the drapery and the quiver of arrows; passages executed with the looser, rapid brushstrokes characteristic of the master's work towards the end of the seventeenth century.
A contemporary autograph sheet of studies containing a preparatory drawing for a nymph in the Kunstmuseum of Düsseldorf may be associated with the elaboration of this composition (cf. Schaar in A. Sutherland Harris - E. Schaar, Die Handzeichnungen von Andrea Sacchi und Carlo Maratti, Düsseldorf, 1967, INV.FP 8289, cat. 46, pp. 156-7). It is worth mentioning that Maratti, in those very years, had extrapolated yet another figure of a nymph from the earlier Chatsworth picture (at the centre, seated with her feet in the stream) to create a similar small close-up and more intimate version of Diana surprised while bathing (Rudolph, op. cit., 1995, fig. 37, pl. 10).
Dr. Stella Rudolph