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Lot Essay
Pompeo Batoni’s enchanting portrait, unpublished until now, has been only recently discovered and presents an exciting new addition to the artist’s corpus of work. The identity of Batoni’s beguiling sitter remains unknown but she is presented here as the goddess Flora, holding a basket of carnations, ranunculi, roses and jasmine, with further flowers and strands of pearls braided through her tall, powdered coiffeur. Batoni had painted Katherine Durnford (born 1729) in the guise of Flora much earlier in his career, in 1751 (fig. 1), but with its mannered elegance and delicate palette, the present portrait is archetypal of the artist's late works.
In gold lettering, the artist boldly signed and dated his work, 'POMPEO BATONI. 1775', on the blue, gold-trimmed armband, holding up the sleeve on her left arm. The armlet is a direct quotation from Raphael, who signed and dated his iconic semi-nude, La Fornarina, in the same manner, on a blue and gold armlet on the sitter’s left arm, pressed against her bare flesh (fig. 2). Raphael’s portrait was painted in 1518-19, shortly before the artist’s death and is traditionally thought to depict his lover, the baker Margarita Luti. In adopting Raphael’s signature motif, it seems Batoni sought to elevate himself to the level of the exalted Renaissance painter. It is no surprise then, that Batoni chose to sign his personification of Painting, the artist’s favorite muse, in the same way, using Raphael’s signature armlet (fig. 2).
Batoni’s Painting dates to the same year, 1775, and is stylistically very close to the present portrait. Like many of his paintings from the period, the figure is similarly posed, her body shown at a three-quarter angle, head turned in the opposite direction and both arms crooked so as to be included within the picture plane. The half-length portrait format proved extremely successful for the artist, who exploited its design to produce close cropped images and play on the intimacy it provided between sitter and viewer. The firm, oval face of the muse is more idealized, with less character than the finely observed face of the present sitter. Although the costume of the latter is imagined and her pose staged, Batoni captures her personality through the carefully observed depiction of her face, lending a certain immediacy and veracity to the portrait overall. The young lady looks off to the right but her gaze is not distant and she smiles shyly as though conscious of the artist's attention as he paints her. While her powdered hair, piled high, reflects the fashion of the period, the sitter is dressed in classical-style robes similar to those of the muse, with two ropes of pearls bordering her neckline, a scrolling gold brooch with a ruby and droplet pearls, and a voluminous shawl around her shoulders. These costume motifs appear repeatedly in Batoni’s portraits (in his 1772 Painting, for example, and in his Portrait of a Lady as Cleopatra (figs. 3 and 4), both in private collections) and their recurrence suggests these garments were likely studio props.
The sitter had at one time been tentatively identified as Alexandrine-Eftkhevna Demidoff, née Safonova (1745-1778), third wife of the illustrious Russian State Councilor and industrialist, Prince Nikita Akinfiyevich Demidoff (1724-1789), who traveled on a Grand Tour to Rome with her art-patron husband in 1773. The identification is based on that of the aforementioned Portrait of a Lady as Cleopatra from an Eastern European Royal collection which sold at Sotheby’s Monaco, 5 December 1992, lot 57. The owner was apparently a descendant of Demidoff and the portrait had long been presumed to depict their ancestor. In his 2016 catalogue raisonné, however, Edgar Peters Bowron rejected the identification to Alexandrine-Eftkhevna Demidoff. Dating the Cleopatra portrait to 1782-83 on the grounds of style, Bowron notes that the Demidoffs had traveled to Rome a decade earlier and, since Alexandrine-Eftkhevna had died in 1778, four or five years prior to its execution, it was unlikely that she could have been the sitter represented in the portrait (E.P. Bowron, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, New Haven, 2016, pp. 588-89, no. 460). Since the identification of the present sitter as Flora was based solely on her physical similarity to that of Cleopatra, the identification remains conjecture.
In gold lettering, the artist boldly signed and dated his work, 'POMPEO BATONI. 1775', on the blue, gold-trimmed armband, holding up the sleeve on her left arm. The armlet is a direct quotation from Raphael, who signed and dated his iconic semi-nude, La Fornarina, in the same manner, on a blue and gold armlet on the sitter’s left arm, pressed against her bare flesh (fig. 2). Raphael’s portrait was painted in 1518-19, shortly before the artist’s death and is traditionally thought to depict his lover, the baker Margarita Luti. In adopting Raphael’s signature motif, it seems Batoni sought to elevate himself to the level of the exalted Renaissance painter. It is no surprise then, that Batoni chose to sign his personification of Painting, the artist’s favorite muse, in the same way, using Raphael’s signature armlet (fig. 2).
Batoni’s Painting dates to the same year, 1775, and is stylistically very close to the present portrait. Like many of his paintings from the period, the figure is similarly posed, her body shown at a three-quarter angle, head turned in the opposite direction and both arms crooked so as to be included within the picture plane. The half-length portrait format proved extremely successful for the artist, who exploited its design to produce close cropped images and play on the intimacy it provided between sitter and viewer. The firm, oval face of the muse is more idealized, with less character than the finely observed face of the present sitter. Although the costume of the latter is imagined and her pose staged, Batoni captures her personality through the carefully observed depiction of her face, lending a certain immediacy and veracity to the portrait overall. The young lady looks off to the right but her gaze is not distant and she smiles shyly as though conscious of the artist's attention as he paints her. While her powdered hair, piled high, reflects the fashion of the period, the sitter is dressed in classical-style robes similar to those of the muse, with two ropes of pearls bordering her neckline, a scrolling gold brooch with a ruby and droplet pearls, and a voluminous shawl around her shoulders. These costume motifs appear repeatedly in Batoni’s portraits (in his 1772 Painting, for example, and in his Portrait of a Lady as Cleopatra (figs. 3 and 4), both in private collections) and their recurrence suggests these garments were likely studio props.
The sitter had at one time been tentatively identified as Alexandrine-Eftkhevna Demidoff, née Safonova (1745-1778), third wife of the illustrious Russian State Councilor and industrialist, Prince Nikita Akinfiyevich Demidoff (1724-1789), who traveled on a Grand Tour to Rome with her art-patron husband in 1773. The identification is based on that of the aforementioned Portrait of a Lady as Cleopatra from an Eastern European Royal collection which sold at Sotheby’s Monaco, 5 December 1992, lot 57. The owner was apparently a descendant of Demidoff and the portrait had long been presumed to depict their ancestor. In his 2016 catalogue raisonné, however, Edgar Peters Bowron rejected the identification to Alexandrine-Eftkhevna Demidoff. Dating the Cleopatra portrait to 1782-83 on the grounds of style, Bowron notes that the Demidoffs had traveled to Rome a decade earlier and, since Alexandrine-Eftkhevna had died in 1778, four or five years prior to its execution, it was unlikely that she could have been the sitter represented in the portrait (E.P. Bowron, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, New Haven, 2016, pp. 588-89, no. 460). Since the identification of the present sitter as Flora was based solely on her physical similarity to that of Cleopatra, the identification remains conjecture.