Family scene in an interior,
oil on canvas, 127.5 x 119.3 cm

Literature: V. Sgarbi, Dell’uomo e della sua fine. Da Antonello a Pirandello, in La ricerca dell’identità da Antonello a De Chirico, ed. by V. Sgarbi, exhibition catalogue,Milan 2003, pp. 53-54, p. 149 ill. 64, p. 282 n. 64 (as Giacomo Ceruti);
S. Pierguidi, in La ricerca dell’identità da Tiziano a De Chirico, ed. by V. Sgarbi, exhibition catalogue, Milan 2004, p. 248 n. 60, p. 149 ill. 60 (as Giacomo Ceruti)
Cristina Geddo has suggested fully attributing the present work to Giacomo Ceruti (Milan 1698-1767) after examination in the original. She believes that the authorship can be fully confirmed on the grounds of the painting’s stylistic and typological features, of its genre painting subject and its sustained pictorial execution.

The painting depicts a scene from everyday life in a domestic interior that is partly illuminated by a leadlight window on the right side, decorated with modest yet impeccably neat and orderly furniture. The dining table in the foreground at which the two protagonists are seated, the cupboard in the background and the print hanging on the wall, depicting a woman stylistically reminiscent of Pittoni, denote the family’s social decorum. Two eggs, a wine cruet and a glass on the cupboard, as well as a milk jug, pumpkin hanging in the upper left corner, characterise the living space as a sober everyday environment. Similarly dignified are the garments of the three figures, especially the young man standing in profile, wearing a rust-coloured tailcoat over a grey waistcoat with red lining, whilst his white apron and hat seem to suggest his belonging to the professional category of craftsmen (bakers, cooks etc.). The young man is staring at the woman bent over the table, her head hidden in her arm. One hand rests on the head of the child at his side, whose eyes are fixed on the man’s other hand pointing at the woman.
The meaning of this scene could be easily misunderstood if one did not take into consideration that one of the topoi of Dutch and Flemish genre painting is the motif of the sleeper. Here, the woman’s loose hand dangling from the table and the child’s gesture of putting his finger on his mouth for silence implies that she is not prostrate with grief but simply asleep.
This can be compared with Nicolaes Maes’s Sleeping man having his pockets picked in the van Otterloo collection (circa 1655). Although the woman here is probably overcome by exhaustion after a long day of work and her sleep is guiltless, a note of criticism condemning laziness is still perceptible both in the allusion contained in the print depicting a Woman stroking a cat, a well-known symbol of laziness that can also be found in Maes’s The idle servant at the National Gallery in London (circa 1655), and in the young man’s surprised look: after his return from work, he finds the woman asleep, neglecting the child.However the artist distances himself from the moralizing, light-hearted and playful versions that are typical of Flemish and Dutch genre painters and of Keilhau’s works, and infuses the scene with new dramatic tension: he creates an impossible dialogue between the two protagonists by means of the marvellous invention of a faceless woman curled up like a snail. The ‘genre’ gains the dignity of history painting thanks to this and other details, such as the size of the canvas, its natural-sized figures and its rigorous composition, structured by a system of perpendicular, diagonal and elliptic lines. The table, which runs parallel to the lower base of the composition, links the painting’s fictional space and reality, offering the viewer an elevated vantage point, as if he were standing at the other side of the same table. The empty space at the centre of the painting, where an inconspicuous, frugal still-life is placed, expresses the dramatic distance between the two figures and focuses the viewer’s attention on the innocent, shiny, sapphire-blue eyes of the child, who constitutes the emotional core of the scene. The distribution of light also plays a key role: the intense ray of midday light coming in from the lateral window pervades the semidarkness of the interior, illuminating portions of the young man’s and the child’s faces, whilst the warm interplay of chiaroscuros reveals the clear influence of Piazzetta. Moreover, the young man’s profile seems to be directly modelled after the young Peasant boy at a market at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, executed about 1715-1720 (A. Mariuz, L’opera completa del Piazzetta, Milan 1982, p. 78 n. 14), originally a pendant to the Sleeping peasant at the Residenzgalerie in Salzburg.

Both this reference to Piazzetta, whom Ceruti had certainly met in Venice (possibly through the mediation of Marshal Schulenburg, who commissioned works from both painters), and the character and social setting of the scene suggest dating the present painting to after Ceruti´s Venetian stay of 1736 that concluded the painter’s great Brescian period characterized by portraits of poor people and beggars (“pitocchi”) (cf C. Geddo, Collezionisti e pittori di genere nel Settecento a Milano e nel Lombardo-Veneto, in Da Caravaggio a Ceruti. La scena di genere e l’immagine dei “pitocchi” nella pittura italiana, ed. by F. Porzio, exhibition catalogue, Milan 1998, pp. 109-111).

In the 1740s, Ceruti expanded the range of his pictorial expression, creating a Lombard version of modern French, English and Venetian conversation pieces, in high demand among clients who were increasingly up to date with the international art scene. This is appears clearly in many of his works, such as the Family scene with small figures at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, similar to Pietro Longhi’s Concertino of 1741 (M. Gregori, Giacomo Ceruti, Bergamo 1982, p. 459 n. 167, plate 167); the four scenes depicting farmers and middle-class settings, from Palazzo Busseti in Tortona -– Farmers dancing, Evening on the square, Women at work in an interior and Family scene (op. cit., plates 186, 195, 199, 224) – which were probably executed during the painter’s stay in Piacenza in the period 1744-1746; The Card Game at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (op. cit., plate 166), which can probably be dated to after the artist’s return to Milan in 1747 (for an account of Ceruti’s travels see V. Caprara, Regesto, in Giacomo Ceruti, il Pitocchetto, exhibition catalogue, Milan 1987, pp. 202–213).
In spite of patent analogies to the aforementioned works, the present painting does not display the same realism as the Family scene in Basel, nor the amused tone and the references to Todeschini that are detectable in the Tortona cycle, or the sophisticated colour palette and the disenchanted aura of international taste that are visible in The Card Game in Raleigh. This suggests the hypothesis of an earlier dating of the painting to Ceruti’s Paduan period (c. 1737-1741) prior to the years in Milan (1742-1744), which seems confirmed also by the stylistic and typological similarities to the altarpieces executed in Padua in 1738 and about 1740-1743 (Gregori, 1982, plates 123-123a, 140-140a), as well as the altarpiece of the parochial church in Rivergaro (Piacenza), which can be dated to about 1740 (M. Lucco, in Giacomo Ceruti, 1987, p. 189 n. 68, plate 68). Further elements suggesting the painting’s belonging to the Paduan period are its bright colours and the blinding intensity of its whites, both of which resulted from the enrichment of the painter’s colour palette during his Venetian period, as well as the palpably soft, ‘creamy’ shaping of the figures and a thickening of the forms and of cloths that becomes especially evident in the intense three-dimensional quality of the hat, in contrast with the evenly painted, flat background that is typical of this painter.

On the basis of the aforementioned considerations, the Family scene in an interior could be dated to the period between the late 1730s and the early 1740s, and could henceforth be regarded as a valuable testimony to an experimental phase of transition from traditional genre scenes with half-figures of lower-class origin, based on the models provided by Keilhau and Cipper, to modern milieu scenes with an anecdotal content and a middle-class setting.

We are grateful to Cristina Geddo for her help in cataloguing the present painting.