STILL LIFE PAINTER FROM THE 18TH CENTURY
Group of four floral compositions
oil on canvas, cm 54×72
These fresh floral images, of a slightly rustic taste and great pictorial spontaneity, feature luxuriant bunches of different flowers collected in porcelain vases or, as an alternative, in baskets of woven straw. These images are intentionally quite limited in palette, something which reinforces their sober and spontaneous appearance and suggests that they may originally have hung in an area used by all inhabitants of a prestigious country home. The fact that they form a group of four made these paintings very well suited for symmetric and highly decorative wall compositions.
The still lives we are presenting belong to a genre of compositions typical of the early Eighteenth century, which was diffused all over Italy but which may however be retraced, at least ideally, to the Venetian school. Examples of paintings that are to some extent comparable to these in terms of compositive taste and rendition may be retraced to a Guardesque environment, in the large group of works by different artists united by Salerno (1984) with the common denominator of Pseudo Guardi.