Claude Fer, called Claudio Lorenese

An old relining is well done and the paint surface is still supple. Under a very dirty varnish. There is a horizontal canvas seam visible to naked eye in the lower portion of the composition. Overall this picture is in good condition, particularly well retained in the figures where brighter colors and heavier paint were used and applied in very loose, fluid brushstrokes. The dark areas which were more thinly painted to begin with have flattened out somewhat although some may have been the artist's original intention. The varnish is very dry causing it to become cloudy in some areas. ultraviolet light reveals some restorations in the face of the figure at right and some along parts of the canvas seam. some retouches to damages at left along the stretcher bar. This painting would benefit from a light cleaning and re-varnishing, and a re-addressing of the old restorations. In an elaborately carved and gilt Florentine style frame with some nicks.
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The artistic personality of Claude Fer (or Feria), an artist from Lorraine who was active in Lombardy in the middle decades of the 17^th Century, has only recently come into focus.  A small number of signed works have allowed a group of paintings by the artist to be identified, whose style is clearly indebted to Milanese artists such as Montalto; his eccentric artistic idiom, however, has lead to the confusion of his works with the Cremese painter Gian Giacomo Barbelli (see below).

A signed painting of Tancred and Clorinda (formerly art market), dated 1641, and an Annunciation of 1661 in the church of San Michele in Busto Arsizio form the certain chronological boundaries of the artist's known oeuvre.¹  A number of other works have been attributed to him based on stylistic grounds by Francesco Frangi and others.²  The present Good Samaritan fits particularly well into the known—and apparently growing—corpus of the artist's work; a number of homogeneous paintings of this subject with very much the same elements in each, but of differing compositions and formats, of this very subject are known by the artist.  These have in the past been attributed to Barbelli.   One is of horizontal format and shows a similar figure of the good Samaritan, leaning over and anointing the wounds of the injured traveler (Private Collection, Crema, see L'estro e la realtà, exhibition catalogue, Martellago 1997, pp. 106-7, cat. no. 2. reproduced, as Barbelli).  Another example, however, closer in conception to the present example, but of vertical format and more open in composition was formerly with Finarte, Milan (Sale: November 21, 1996, lot 23, as by Montalto), and is now in a private collection (see L'estro e la realtà, pp. 108-9, cat. no. 3, reproduced, as by Barbelli.).  Yet another example, again vertical but closest to the present canvas was sold at Sotheby's, London, April 3, 1985, lot 202 (as circle of Morazzone).   

We are grateful for Nancy Ward Nielson for first suggesting an attribution to Fer, and for Francesco Frangi for confirming the attribution and providing additional information on the artist.

1.  See Galleria d'arte Armoni, Brescia, Antologia di antichi maestri,, Trento 1992, no. 17, reproduced; and G. Pacciarotti  Arte nella pieve di Busto Arsizio: Pittura e scultura dal '500 al '700 , exhibition catalogue, Milan 1993, p. 98, reproduced, respectively.
2.  See F. Frangi, Francesco Cairo, Turin 1998, p.85, footnote 47; F. Frangi, Pittura a Milano dal Seicento al Neoclassicismo, Cinisello Balsamo 1999, p. 21; and most recently and fully in M. Marubbi, "Postilla cremonese per Claudio Ferit" in Dedicato a Luisa Badera Gregori: saggi di storia dell'arte, Cremona 2004, pp. 127-138.