18th century Italian Old Master painting This arresting painting depicts an owl with his prey, it is truly exquisite and captivating work of art. The owl has been painted majestically, looking the spectator straight in the eye, as if one just walked into this scenery. The painting is of excellent quality. Giorgio Duranti (1683 – 5 November 1768) was an Italian painter and cleric of the Baroque period, mainly active in Brescia, where he was born. An entry in Dandolo's study of the late Venetian Republic states a 1755 as year of death, and that many of his works were in the Royal Gallery of Turin, which was the nucleus of the Sabauda Gallery. Duranti was also an abbot, count and knight. He studied sciences and music; he was known as an excellent player of the violoncello. He specialized in still life paintings of flowers. Many of those, he donated to the church of Palazzolo sull'Oglio who sold to the royal court of Spain. His brother Faustino (1606–1766), who became abbot after his brother's death, was also a painter specializing mainly in miniature portraits. Works by Duranti can be found in several museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Fondazione Brescia Musei. We would like to thank Dr. Fred Meijer for suggesting the possible attribution to Giorgio Duranti. The oil on canvas measures ca: 37*27cms With the frame ca: 51*40cms Provenance: Private collection UK

This period was a watershed in the development of History Painting. By the end, due to the dull prescriptions of the academies and the semantic confusion between istoria and history, the genre became

About Roman school late 17th - early 18th century - Follower of Niccolò Codazzi (Naples, 1642 - Genoa, 1693) Pair of fantastic architectural whims with classical ruins and figures Oils on canvas, cm. 47 x 60, framed cm. 85 x 68 A suggestive perspective of classical architectural ruins dominates the scene in this beautiful pair of capricci, whose style characteristics appear to be influenced by the models designed by Viviano (1604 - 1670) and his son Niccolò Codazzi (1642-1693), who collaborated in the atelier paternal in Rome before pursuing an independent career. The present pendant, in particular, is the work of an author active between the end of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, very similar to the ways of Niccolò Codazzi in the central period of his Roman production, when he used to collaborate with some bamboccianti, who usually inserted small contour figures to animate the whims. After his youth in Naples and the activity in his father's workshop, Niccolò Codazzi, with his works from the Roman period, began to develop an independent artistic personality, and the present painting represents an excellent model of this process. In his architectural views and inventions he prefers a clear and luminous palette, marked by deep chiaroscuro contrasts and a decisive volumetric rendering. As for the composition, on the other hand, it reproduces the Roman ruins with a faithful analysis, or, if built with imagination, they always had to be based on a level of verisimilitude, with the light that exposed the monumental architectures in ruins, the crumbling arches , the corroded walls, leaning against ancient monuments now invaded by vegetation. Both the canvases and the frames are in good condition, with some signs of aging. The pictorial material is preserved in an excellent way. WORK WITH A PHOTOGRAPHIC AUTHENTICITY CERTIFICATE IN COMPLIANCE WITH LAW (FIMA ITALIA). For more information, please contact us.

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About Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1800, no. 93 What was happening in British history painting in around 1800? In recent discussions of the emergence of a British School of history painting following the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768, this is a question which is rarely posed and one which is not easily answered. Examination of surviving Royal Academy exhibition catalogues reveals a profusion of artists’ names and titles, few of which remain immediately recognizable, whilst endeavours to explain the impact of exhibition culture on painting - such as the 2001 Courtauld show Art on the Line - have tended to focus on the first and second generation of Royal Academician, rather than young or aspiring artists in the early nineteenth century. This makes the discovery and identification of the work under discussion of exceptional importance in making sense of currents in English painting around 1800. Executed by Edward Dayes and exhibited in the Great Room at Somerset House in the summer of 1800, it is a remarkable essay in the aspirations of historical painting and the Reynoldsian ‘grand manner’ from a painter more generally known for his topographical watercolours. It stands simultaneously as a compelling document of Dayes’s attempts to use the apparatus of history painting to advance his career and perfect example of the Academy aesthetic in the decade after the death of Reynolds. Edward Dayes was one of the most highly regarded topographical draughtsman of the second half of the eighteenth century but it was known that towards the end of his career – which was cut tragically short by his suicide in 1804 – he exhibited a number of historical works at the Royal Academy. The appearance of a sketchbook containing over 100 studies for historical compositions raised the possibility that a number of previously unattributed subject-pictures may in fact be by Dayes. Amongst the designs is a small wash study for the Origins of Beauty. Born in 1763, he was apprenticed to the mezzotinter and miniaturist William Pether and entered the Royal Academy Schools on 6 October 1780. He made his début at the academy in 1786, showing in the next few years a mixture of portraits, miniatures, topographical watercolours, and figure subjects; in all Dayes showed sixty-four works at the Royal Academy. Dayes rapidly established himself as a successful draughtsman for the print trade, undertaking commissions at every level. Eleven plates after his works were engraved for the Copper Plate Magazine between 1794 and 1797, and he contributed more than forty scenes for John Aiken's Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles Round Manchester published in 1795. In 1789 Thomas Girtin was apprenticed to Dayes and whilst he is always seen as representing the antithesis of Girtin and Turner’s Romantic approach to watercolour, their earliest works are in fact indistinguishable from Dayes’s. What is more, Dayes's Instructions for Drawing and Colouring Landscapes (1805) suggests he was an innovative thinker on professional practice and on the teaching of watercolour techniques, including sketching in colours from nature. From 1798 Dayes spent an increasing amount of his time painting scenes from the Bible and from the works of Dryden and Milton. His diary for 1798 gives a detailed account of his work on four watercolours, including the striking image of 'The Fall of the Angels' (exh. RA, 1798; Tate collection). The following year he began the present canvas in oils, a move that was a logical progression for Dayes, ambitious for a career as a serious history painter. For the subject matter Dayes turned to the work of the mid-eighteenth century poet, Mark Akenside. In the 1800 exhibition catalogue published by the Academy, Dayes included seven lines from Akenside’s 1744 didactic poem, The Pleasures of the Imagination to inform the subject of the Origins of Beauty. Dayes’s composition was both a literal transcription of Akenside’s account of a standing ‘Venus’ in her ‘pearly car’, surrounded by ‘Tritons’ and ‘cerulean sister[s] of the flood’, and a distillation of the poet’s Platonic concept of beauty itself. The extent of Dayes's ambition was underlined in his theoretical ‘Essays on painting’, published in the Philosophical Magazine for 1801–2, which outlined the ideal method for preparing an historical composition. Dayes commended the young painter to begin with a rough sketch, which he was to ‘prune or add till the whole comes into perfect ordonnance,’ adding finally ‘complete the whole by slightly tinting it.’ A ‘tinted’ drawing of the composition survives in the British Museum sketchbook revealing Dayes’s debt to the Medici Venus in the conception of the figure. But Dayes’s composition had more immediate precedents than the antique. In 1772 James Barry had shown his Venus Rising from the Sea (Dublin City Art Gallery) at the Academy. The study in the British Museum sketchbook, gives an idea of the original composition, which included Cupid seated in the clouds, bow in hand, to the right of Venus. This detail recalled Barry’s composition, where Cupid is seen standing behind Venus on a bank of cloud. Recent analysis has shown that it was an element which Dayes included in his initial execution of the design, along with putti seated in the clouds to the left of Venus, but decided to paint them out before completing the picture. The choice of subject was remarkably in tune with other pictures in the 1800 exhibition. Benjamin West showed Venus at her Birth Attired by the Graces (private collection). West’s Venus is posed very similarly to Dayes’s, with one hand raised to her head and the face shown in profile, although the palette and execution are completely different. Dayes follows his own suggestions as articulated in his essays, that handling and colour should reflect the subject matter of the painting. Thus the figure of Venus is finely modelled, ‘clean and fair’ in a blond palette, whilst the tritons are ‘dusky or muddy’ by contrast painted in a reddish-brown tone. The painting was well placed in the Great Room, but in the end it received relatively little critical notice, its proximity to a canvas by the Academy’s President of a similar subject and format cannot have helped. It was not a propitious moment for Dayes to embark upon a career as a history painter. The apparent opportunities offered by entrepreneurial publishers, such as John Boydell and Charles Macklin, had ended in financial disaster by 1800; a situation compounded by the end of the European market for luxury goods brought about by the Napoleonic wars. Another consequence of which, was that London was flooded with fine old master paintings dislodged from the Continent - the exhibition of the Italian paintings from the Orléans collection in Pall Mall had opened in December 1798 - serving to depress the market for contemporary works. Dayes’s composition exemplified the type of paintings which were being produced for the Royal Academy in around 1800.

1796 Louis Gauffier - Portrait of a man with Florence in the background (Private collection)

La Consolation de l'absence. These charming, sometimes naughty, paintings by Lavreince - is it really any surprise that I use the French version of his name? - are painted in gouache, unless otherwise noted, and were all produced in the 1770s and 1780s. Often rather crude in execution, the compositions and, especially, the details are exquisite. Lady Getting out of Bed. Deux jeunes femmes dans un intérieur lisant une lettre. A Lady Standing in an Interior Preparing to go Out With her Dog. Ha! Le Joli petit chien. Le Lever. Ladies and Gentlemen Making Music in the Open Air. Portrait presumed to be of Louise de Montmorency, princesse de Vaudemont-Lorraine. La Soubrette Confidente. Jeune femme assise dans un parc. L'Amour frivole (attributed to). Jeune femme à sa toilette. The only work here that appears to be painted in oils. Le Repentir tardif. Le Petit conseil. La Lettre. Le Roman. Portrait d'une dame buvant du thé. Le Repentir tardif. Lady Pulling on her Stockings. *** Niklas Lafrensen/Nicolas Lavreince (30 October 1737, Stockholm - 6 December 1807, Stockholm), Swedish genre and miniature painter. The son of the miniature painter Niklas Lafrensen the Elder, he received his earliest training from his father. The years 1762-1769 he spent in Paris, and he returned to the French capital in 1774, where for the next seventeen years he worked under the name Nicolas Lavreince. His genre scenes were very popular, the majority off them being reproduced by numerous engravers; it seems likely that much of his work in gouache was produced specifically for the purposes of profitable reproduction. He returned to Sweden in 1791, forced from France due to the French Revolution. In the latter part of his life he produced few works. *** A few examples of the engravings that were adapted - often quite freely - from his paintings. They're obviously reversed, as engravings usually were at this time. Two versions of La Soubrette confidante. Hand colored engraving of Ha! Le Joli petit chien. Two versions of La Consolation de l'absence. Very different from the painting featured here. *** And, lastly, another detail from La Consolation de l'absence.