Circle of Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, called Pietro Perugino

Gherardi collection, Florence;
From which acquired by Anatole N. Demidoff (1812-1870), 1st Prince of San Donato, in 1836, and subsequently hung at the Palazzo di San Donato in Polverosa, Florence;
François Nieuwenhuys, his deceased sale, Paris, Féral-Pillet, 28 April 1881, lot 15, for 11,500 francs (as Perugino);
Possibly Lucile de Nolleval (according to a label on the reverse).

S. Avery-Quash, The Travel Notebooks of Sir Charles Eastlake, The Walpole Society 2011, p. 603, as 'Perugino? Madonna & Child' hanging at San Donato (quoting from Charles Eastlake's NG 22/30 notebook, 1862, folio 21r).

The composition is evidently inspired by a Perugino invention as the pose of the Madonna and Child echoes in reverse that in a number of paintings by Perugino and his circle: for example, the painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington; a painting formerly in a German private collection, attributed to Andrea di Aloigi (called Andrea d'Assisi); and a picture in the National Gallery, London, also attributed to Aloigi due to the presence of the monogram 'A.A.P.'. The position of the Christ Child recalls that in a painting attributed to Perugino showing The Madonna and Child with two female saints in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, and most closely resembles that of Christ in Giannicola di Paolo's Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine and Roch.

However, the painting that is most directly relevant to the present work is a panel attributed to the workshop of the Master of the Schleißheim Madonna in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, in which the Madonna and Child are seated beside an apple and before a similar parapet, sculpted in bas-relief with putti. The two paintings are certainly not by the same hand but the inclusion of certain details in both works - for example, the Christ Child sitting on a cushion, the star on the Madonna's right shoulder, and the gold threads around her neck (possibly once an edging of a veil) - suggest that they may have had a common source.

According to the 1881 Niewenhuys sale catalogue, this painting once hung at Prince Anatole Demidoff's residence, the Palazzo di San Donato in Polverosa, just outside Porta al Prato in Florence. Anatole Demidoff inherited the wealth amassed by his family in the previous century supplying iron and weapons to the Russian Imperial armies. His father Nicolas had collected art before him, with a special penchant for French 18th-century painting: he owned twenty-three paintings by Greuze, eleven by Boucher, and Fragonard's Fountain of Love (Wallace Collection, London). In the early 1820s the recently-widowed Nicolas moved to Tuscany with his children and began building the Palazzo San Donato outside Florence. Anatole took over its construction after his father's death in 1828 and greatly increased the scale of the project: by the time the building was complete, it was three storeys high, fifteen bays wide and surmounted by a dome.¹  As well as patronizing contemporary French artists - Paul Delaroche, François-Marius Granet, Ary Scheffer and Eugène Delacroix among them - Anatole also collected Dutch 17th-century paintings and French 18th-century decorative arts (many of which found their way into the Wallace Collection).² 

The present painting was seen in 1862 in the Palazzo San Donato by Charles Eastlake, the then director of the National Gallery in London, and is described by him in his notebook of that year: "Perugino? Madonna & Child - The colour rich & like him M's head more like Pinturicchio in character..." (NG 22/30 notebook, 1862, folio 21r). The picture evidently remained at San Donato and was not included in the 1880 sale of the contents of the Palazzo so one can only assume that it had been sold previous to that date, perhaps around the time of the Prince's death in 1870. Although Prince Demidoff made the majority of his purchases in Paris, this picture was acquired in 1836, directly from the Gherardi collection in Florence, and it evidently bore an attribution to Perugino throughout the 19th century. An old label on the reverse reading 'M. de Nolleval/ 170/ Vierge et / enfant Jesus/ Par le Perugin' suggests that the painting may have been owned by Lucile [de] Nolleval, who was collecting Italian and Spanish paintings in the late 19th century, some of which ended up at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

The elaborate carved and gilt wood frame was almost certainly made to Demidoff's order in Florence, and may be an adaptation of an earlier cassetta frame (the carvings at the corners being likely 19th-century adaptations). The frame may be the work of Félicie de Fauveau (1801-1866), the French sculptress in exile for much of her life in Florence, employed by Demidoff as both a sculptress and frame-maker.³  She was responsible for the elaborate carved frame on Ary Scheffer's Francesca da Rimini, formerly in Demidoff's collection and today in the Wallace Collection, London.⁴ 

 

1. F. Haskell, in Anatole Demidoff, Prince of San Donato (1812-1870), exhibition catalogue, London, Wallace Collection, 10 March - 25 July 1994, pp. 10-11, figs. 2-4.
2. Prince Demidoff acquired Delaroche's The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (National Gallery, London) at the Paris Salon of 1834 and owned Granet's Death of Poussin (Reims, Musée des Beaux-Arts).
3. De Fauveau carved the elaborate frame on Ary Scheffer's Francesca da Rimini formerly in Demidoff's collection and today in the Wallace Collection, London. See S. Mascalchi, "Félicie de Fauveau e i Demidoff. Un'artista riconsiderata e una cornice ritrovata", in DecArt, no. 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 51 ff.
4.  See Anatole Demidoff... (op. cit.), exhibition catalogue, 1994, pp. 37-38, cat. no. 1, reproduced in its frame.