Attributed to Antonio Joli

In the collection of the present owner for over 30 years.

This impressive capriccio appears to be a version, in landscape format, of a work by Antonio Joli sold at Sotheby's London in 2008.¹ In his monograph on the aritst, Ralph Toledano dates the latter to circa 1762, when the artist relocated to Naples.²

Though born in Modena, Joli spent most of his life travelling throughout Italy where he enjoyed a successful career as a painter of vedute and capricci, aimed particularly at the English Grand Tourists. As a young man he travelled to Rome where he studied the paintings of Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691–1765), under whom he almost certainly trained and whose works clearly influenced his own. The foreground architecture and statuary in the present composition are almost identical to those which appear in three works by Panini in private collections.³

We are grateful to Ralph Toledano for endorsing the attribution to Antonio Joli based on digital images.

¹ Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 8 December 2004, lot 48; https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2004/old-master-paintings-part-one-l04033/lot.48.html

² R. Toledano, Antonio Joli, 2006, p. 116, no. C.XXIV.

³ F. Arisi, Gian Paolo Panini e i fasti della Roma del '700, Rome 1986, pp. 242–43, nos 52–54, reproduced.