(Antwerp 1631–1697 Naples)
(Canale di Serino 1657–1747 Barra)
A young woman taking a flower from a vase,
oil on canvas, 99 x 94.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
art market, London;
art market, Paris;
where acquired by the present owner

Literature:
N. Spinosa, Francesco Solimena (1657–1747) e le arti a Napoli, Rome, 2018, vol. I, p. 574, n. 302.

We are grateful to Nicola Spinosa for confirming the attribution of the present painting after examination of the original.

We are grateful to Alberto Cottino for confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a high-resolution digital photograph. He will include this work in his forthcoming monograph on Abraham Brueghel.

We are also grateful to Klaus Ertz for independently confirming the attribution after examination of the present painting in the original (written communication).

This picture represents a young woman with her gaze turned to a point beyond the picture plane. She is gathering flowers from a terracotta vase placed on a stone plinth and placing them in a wicker basket that she holds in her lap. It is possible that the painting alludes to the flower of youth, a typical theme of the baroque period, tied to ideas then broadly diffused in Europe, concerning the brevity of life as an admonition to proper comportment inspired by religious principles. During the latter half of the seventeenth century however this allegorical meaning was tending to wain.

The painting is the result of a collaboration between two painters in accord with a frequent practice for still life paintings with figures made during the baroque age. The brilliantly coloured and highly realistic flowers, including tulips, anemones and chrysanthemums, are by the hand of Abraham Brueghel, while the maiden, depicted with soft brushstrokes of luminous clear colour that already prelude the eighteenth century, is a notable autograph work by the young Francesco Solimena.

During the mid-1670s the two artists collaborated on several occasions in Naples. Indeed, close stylistic comparisons can be made between the present painting and other collaborative works of the early 1680s, such as the Maiden in a garden among fruits and flowers gathering a bunch of grapes or the Flowers, fruits and a youth who places a flower in a terracotta vase both of which cannot currently be located (see op. cit. N. Spinosa, 2018, p. 575, nos. 303 and 304) as well as the paintings representing figures in a garden conserved in the Palazzo Interiano Pallavicino, Genoa (see L. Trezzani, in: Il Palazzo Pallavicino e le sue raccolte, ed. by P. Boccardo, A. Orlando, Turin 2009, pp. 118-19). A date of 1680-1682 for the present painting can be confirmed on the basis of stylistic comparisons with other compositions by Brueghel of the period, while the handsome and graceful figure of the young woman, the real protagonist of this composition, presents the same formal and colouristic solution as the celebrated paintings executed by Francesco Solimena soon after 1680, and at almost the same time as his frescoes in the choir of the church of Donnaregina Nuova at Naples.

The composition of the present painting revisits that of works with maidens, fruits and flowers, made by Brueghel at Rome in collaboration with such important figure painters as Carlo Maratti, Giacinto Brandi and above all Guillaume Courtois called il Borgognone. Abraham Brueghel was born at Antwerp of Jan Brueghel the Younger and was a descendent of the celebrated family of Flemish painters. He moved to Italy at the close of the 1640s when he is recorded as active in Sicily, later he asserted himself in Rome where he his documented from 1659. He was elected a member of the prestigious Accademia di San Luca in 1670. In the early 1670s he settled permanently at Naples, thereby furthering the establishment of still life painting as a specialist genre of sumptuous and theatrical effect. Here he collaborated for the figurative inserts in some of his pictures with local artists including Paolo De Matteis, Nicola Vaccaro and the young Francesco Solimena. The latter, after an initial training with his father, Angelo, moved from Nocera to Naples in 1674 to complete his formal training in a realist vein. Solimena asserted himself as an independent author while he was still very young, working both in fresco and on canvas, on figurative compositions of sacred as well as secular subjects; on several occasions he also made still life paintings of his own, and additionally he frequently supplied the figurative inserts for collaborative still life paintings, as is the case with the present work.