Nicolas Mignard (1606–1668), Avignon, 1658, Portrait of Scipion du Roure, aged 30 (1628 – 1696). Oil on canvas, 67 cm (26 ¼ in.) high, 53 cm (20 ¾ in.) wide. Signed and dated “N. MIGNARD PINXIT / AVENIONE 1658” on the back of the original canvas. Provenance: Scipion du Roure (1628-1696), Mas de Tressauses, Camargue, France thence by descent through the du Roure family, Marseille, France, until 2017. © Tomasso Brothers

NEW YORK, NY.- A rare survivor of the acclaimed ancien régime portraits executed by French master Nicolas Mignard (1606-1668), the majority of which are now lost, is to be unveiled by Tomasso Brothers Fine Art at the preview tomorrow, 27 October 2017, of TEFAF New York Fall 2017. 

The previously unseen portrait, with a continuous line of provenance, depicts Scipion du Roure (1628-1696) of Nîmes, aged 30. It is signed on the reverse of the original canvas N. MIGNARD PINXIT / AVENIONE 1658. Many of Mignard’s portraits of the aristocracy went missing during the French Revolution, and are known today only through engravings. 

Scipion du Roure, an officer of the Auvergne regiment, returned from military campaigning to his family seat in the South of France and married in 1650. Nicolas Mignard had settled in Avignon in 1637 after studying in Fontainebleau, and then Rome, where he admired the frescoes of Annibale Carracci and the luminous palette of Francesco Albani. In Avignon, Mignard was highly regarded for religious commissions, mythological paintings, and most famously for portraits. The artist’s famous depiction of Molière as Caesar, circa 1650, is now in Paris at the Musée Carnavalet. 

Dino Tomasso, partner, Tomasso Brothers Fine Art, commenting on the work, says: “Mignard has perfectly captured the vivid presence of a man fully confident of his status: as a successful military campaigner and a scion of a well-established landowning family. The portrait is characterised by an intensity of expression, the fine, clear definition of facial features and fabrics, and the vivid, saturated palette typical of Mignard. It is a magnificent and captivating work, and has remained, remarkably, in the du Roure family for 369 years.” 

Shortly after he painted Scipion du Roure, Mignard was summoned by Cardinal Mazarin to Paris. In 1661 he painted portraits of the young King Louis XIV and his Queen Maria Theresa, of which the contemporary historian André Félibien wrote: “Their Majesties were so satisfied, that the King ordered him to make several copies and to send them to all foreign courts. Most of the lords also wished to have the copies of them, and desired to be painted by Nicolas Mignard”. 

Raffaello Tomasso, partner, Tomasso Brothers Fine Art, explains that “Mignard’s images of the “lords” of the ancien régime were lost during the French Revolution, with only a handful known today thanks to engravings. This makes the present signed and dated portrait, which has survived in an excellent state of conservation and with an uninterrupted line of provenance, a rare and highly important testimony of the work of one the masters of French seventeenth century painting.” 

Recognised as leading dealers in the field of European sculpture, Tomasso Brothers Fine Art also specialises in Old Master paintings and objets d’art. At TEFAF New York Fall 2017 the gallery will display a number of magnificent paintings, including works by Il Guercino (1591-1666) and Pietro Fabris (active Naples 1756-1792), alongside important and collectable sculptures in bronze and marble dating from classical antiquity to the early 19th century. 

Tomasso Brothers Fine Art is exhibiting at Stand 8 on the upper level of The Park Avenue Armory, in what was originally Company G Room, designed in the 1880s by leading NY architects Pottier & Stymus. With elevated ceilings decorated in a Renaissance Revival manner, this is a distinctive period setting for the gallery’s presentation of fine and Old Master works.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Cento 1591-1666 Bologna), Saint Jerome in Prayer, circa 1650. Oil on canvas, 119.5 x 99.5 cm (47.3 x 39.5 in.) © Tomasso Brothers.

Standing out against a turbulent sky and a rocky landscape, Saint Jerome is portrayed half length, in the act of adoring a crucifix. His crimson-coloured cloak has slipped to the side, revealing a muscular torso, seemingly untouched by old age. Behind the saint sit an inkwell with a feather, propped on a shelf-like rock, and a book, presumably Jerome’s translation of the Bible (the so-called Vulgate), which he has temporarily interrupted to dedicate himself to prayer.

This painting, distinguished by a very high level of quality, was certainly executed by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri and can be dated on stylistic grounds to the end of the 1640s or the early 1650s, when the master from Cento was working in an increasingly elegant manner and with a lighter palette, influenced by the example of Guido Reni and Domenichino. In its refined choice of colours and sharp execution, our canvas is closely related to Guercino’s Lot and his Daughters, executed in 1650 for Girolamo Panessi (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), or to his Vocation of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga painted in 1650–51 for the Theatine order at Guastalla (now Metropolitan Museum, New York). Both are also characterized, notwithstanding their differing original locations, by closely comparable lighting (see L. Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, nos. 275 and 276 respectively).

These considerations indicate that, despite the recurrence of the present subject in Guercino’s Libro dei Conti, our painting is to be identified either with the “Saint Jerome half-length” for which the artist received payment from Girolamo Panessi 27 October 1648 or with one of the two “half-length figures”, including a Saint Jerome, for which the Count of Novellara paid Guercino, through Giovanni Battista Tartaglioni, on 29 November 1652 (see Il libro dei conti del Guercino, 1629–1666, ed. B. Ghelfi, Bologna, 1997, p. 140, no. 397, and p. 159, no. 462, respectively). Both works are yet to be identified with known paintings by the master and their descriptions closely match the present canvas.

The present composition was previously known through a version owned by the Museo di Capodimonte, currently in the Palazzo Reale in Naples, which can be attributed to Guercino’s workshop. Photographic comparison alone can reveal the superiority of the present canvas, which, also thanks to its excellent state of conservation, clearly displays the pictorial quality that the great master from Cento had developed in the course of his maturity. Treating a subject that he had already painted in his youth drove Guercino to seek new compositional solutions, which can be particularly appreciated in the emotional élan that pervades the image and in the vivid highlights that animate the palette. 

The rediscovery of this painting constitutes an important addition to the established catalogue of works by Guercino, whose supreme mastery of expression is the cause of endless wonder.

Professor Daniele Benati, Bologna, 18 November 2016

Provenance: Probably commissioned by Girolamo Panessi, Genoa, 1648
or Camillo II or Alfonso II Gonzaga, Counts of Novellara, 1652; private collection, Italy.

Nicholas Stone (Attributed to) (1586-Exeter-1647), A set of four English alabaster swans,  Second quarter of the 17th century. Alabaster. Height 56.5 cm (22.25 in.) Width 66.7 cm (26.25 in.) Depth 39.5 cm (15.5 in.). © Tomasso Brothers.

These four swans represent an exceptional survival of secular genre sculpture from the 17th century, a period when an indigenous English school of sculpture was virtually non-existent. A tradition of alabaster carving of international stature had been well established in England since the Middle Ages, thanks to large quarries in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, but the upheavals of the Reformation and dynastic conflicts in the mid-16th century effectively eradicated major ecclesiastic and courtly patronage of the arts for several generations, and until the 18th century English sculpture was "very largely a question of tombs and monuments" (Whinney, p.26). During the Jacobean and Carolean periods most English sculpture was therefore produced by stonemasons rather than trained artists, and patrons with higher pretensions for their commissions would normally turn to foreign artists, such as the French expatriate Hubert Le Sueur (circa 1580-1658) who became official court sculptor to Charles I. 

The one notable exception to this penury of native-born talent was Nicholas Stone, born in Exeter and apprenticed at a young age to Isaac James, a Dutch-born stonemason in Southwark. In 1606 he travelled to Amsterdam to work for the Dutch sculptor Hendrik de Keyser (1567-1621), where he spent seven years, marrying de Keyser’s daughter and probably building the portico of the Westerkerk in Amsterdam. Upon his return to London, he established a thriving workshop in Covent Garden providing funerary monuments. He soon became associated with the rising young court architect Inigo Jones, with whom he would collaborate on numerous royal commissions throughout his career, including Banqueting House, Somerset House, the Queen’s House Greenwich and Windsor, where Stone was named "master mason and architect" in 1626, before becoming Master Mason to Charles I in 1632. Stone also participated in many prestigious non-royal architectural projects including York House Water Gate in London and the monumental gates to the Botanical Gardens and the south porch of St Mary’s, both in Oxford. At the same time Stone remained a prolific supplier of funeral sculpture to both London and country parish churches, including Westminster Abbey.

It has been suggested that these swans may have formed part of a tomb monument, possibly atop a canopy or at the four corners of a pedestal. This appears unlikely, however, as the use of heraldic animals on such a large scale and quantity is unprecedented in English funerary sculpture; at most, heraldic beasts appear as part of a crest that figures prominently but not predominantly in the overall composition, and the size of monument required to accommodate these four swans would have been prohibitive in all but the grandest of chapels. If the swans were conceived as a heraldic element, it is more plausible they would have been used in a secular setting, like the 16th-century large polychrome wood Dacre Beasts (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), or the pair of large stone leopards possibly made for Henry VIII’s palace in Dartford (exhibited Treasures of the Royal Courts. Tudors, Stuarts and The Russian Tsars, Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2013, no.56). One earlier parallel to these swans does survive, the large alabaster pelican feeding her young at Lumley Castle, County Durham (ill. Henderson, p.190, fig.218, and below) now mounted on a square fountain pedestal but depicted atop a round marble basin in a watercolour that appears in Folio 29 of the inventory of the celebrated Elizabethan collection of Sir John Lumley (1533-1609), whose coat of arms incorporated the mother pelican.

The swans have no signs of former fixation holes suggesting they were attached to an architectural canopy. Moreover, they show signs of oxidization to a degree consistent with having been in partially-sheltered outdoor environment, making it highly probable they served a more bucolic function, as part of a fountain, garden or - most likely of all - a grotto. The latter option is further supported by the swan’s provenance from a scion of the Herbert family who resided in the village of their principal seat: Wilton House.

Upon acceding to the title in 1630, Philip Herbert, Fourth Earl of Pembroke set about updating the Tudor house built by his grandfather the First Earl in the 1550s, adding the celebrated South Front in the new Palladian style designed by Inigo Jones and his assistant Issac de Caus (1590-1648), a French Huguenot architect and landscape designer, who worked at Somerset House and was along with his brother Salomon responsible for introducing the latest technological innovations in garden hydraulics into England. Isaac published a most significant treatise on the subject of the hydraulic movement of sculptures, Nouvelle invention de level l’eau plus hault que sa source avec quelques machines mouvantes par le moyen de l’eau, et un discours de la conduite d’icelle (London,1644) although a significant part of the book was a reworking of Salomon’s own treatise, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes published in 1615

During the 1630s, de Caus also re-designed the gardens at Wilton, which the diarist John Evelyn would describe as "esteem’d the noblest in all England," with innovative French parterres and a complex system of fountains and waterworks that culminated in a celebrated grotto, one of the first of its kind in Britain, with spouting marine creatures, a table with hidden jets to shower unsuspecting visitors, and hydraulics that simulated "the singing and chirping of Birdes." The gardens attained such notoriety that the writer John Aubrey remarked, "Charles I did love Wilton above all places, and came thither every summer."

It was natural that de Caus turned to Nicholas Stone in this endeavour, as Stone had already worked on the grotto at Banqueting House designed by Inigo Jones and fountains for the gardens at Somerset House, as well as outdoor sculpture for private clients like Sir William Paston at Oxnead, Norfolk. Moreover, it has recently emerged that Stone executed the sculpture for the grotto designed by de Caus for the Earl of Bedford at Woburn Abbey at the same period. Thus as Stone’s nephew Charles Stoakes wrote in Stone’s Note-book and Account Book, his uncle "designed & built many curious works for the Earle of Pembrock at his Hons. House att Wilton, near Salisbury & well paide." The Wilton garden design proved hugely influential and was disseminated through Isaac de Caus’ volume of engravings Hortus Penbrochianus: le Jardin de Vuilton, published by Thomas Rowlett circa 1645. Unfortunately this publication does not provide a comprehensive visual record of the original layout of all the statuary, and the garden itself was significantly altered in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly during the tenure of the 9th ‘Architect Earl’ Henry Herbert (1693-1749), who designed the Palladian Bridge in the park. In the absence of surviving documentation it is impossible to draw up a definitive inventory of the garden sculpture; nevertheless, the Herbert family provenance of the swans, and the virtuosity of the subject and their execution, strongly militates in favour of their attribution to Nicholas Stone at Wilton and their forming part of the statuary in the celebrated grotto. 

Provenance: Probably the Earls of Pembroke, Wilton House; by descent to Lady Juliet Duff (1881-1965), niece of the 13th and 14th Earls.

Literature: D. Duggan, ‘Isaac de Caus, Nicholas Stone and the Woburn Abbey grotto,’ Apollo, August 2003; M. Evans, ed. The Lumely Inventory and Pedigree (London 2010); P. Henderson, The Tudor House and Garden (London 2005); W. L. Spiers, 'The Note-book and Account Book of Nicholas Stone', in A. J. Finberg ed., The Walpole Society, 1918-1919, VII (Oxford 1919, reprinted 1969); M. Whinney, Sculpture in Britain 1530-1830 (London 1964, rev.J. Physick 1988).