Bernardo Polo

In the collection of the present owner's family for at least five generations.

Both canvases are unlined. The paint surface is beginning to flake in both and there are very few, very small, scattered areas of paint loss in both. Both paint surfaces are quite dirty. In the latter, a vertical crack in the paint surface can be seen near the left margin, running the height of the painting. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals an uneven varnish. No retouchings are revealed and both works therefore appear to be entirely free of retouchings. Both works are offered in narrow simple wood frames.
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The composition of the central portion of the former follows that of the only signed work by the artist, discovered in Spain in 2009.¹ Polo used this motif regularly, often flanking it, as here, with urns, bowls or planters filled with fruit and flowers.² The discovery of the signed work permitted the identification of a corpus of over forty still lifes by the same hand which had hitherto been grouped under the pseudonym the 'Pseudo-Hiepes' by Dr. William Jordan and Dr. Peter Cherry on account of the paintings’ stylistic affinities with the work of the Valencian still-life painter Tomás Hiepes (1595–1674).³

Bernardo Polo is recorded as working in Zaragoza, the capital of Aragón, during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. According to the contemporary biographer Antonio Palomino, he had a ‘very special skill’ for painting floreros and in his Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes de España, published in Madrid in 1800, the Spanish writer Juan Agustín Céan Bermúdez observed that 'he was distinguished for painting flowers and fruit from life: his canvases are high prized in that city (Zaragoza) and Madrid, where they hang in the galleries of private collectors'.⁴ Polo must have run a prodigious workshop answering the many calls for the decorative still lifes they produced; each painting under the nomenclature 'Bernardo Polo' is, as William B. Jordan has pointed out, likely the product of more than one hand as the workshop would most probably have had specialist painters for certain parts of each composition.

1. See W.B. Jordan, 'El Pseudo-Hiepes es Bernardo Polo', in Archivo Español de Arte, Madrid, October–December 2009, LXXXII.
2. See, for example, the work offered London, Sotheby's, 10 July 2014, lot 209.
3. See W.B. Jordan and P. Cherry, Spanish Still Life from Velázquez to Goya, exhibition catalogue, London 1995, pp. 124–28.
4. See J.A. Céan Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en España, Madrid 1800, vol. IV, p. 105.