Carlo Francesco Nuvolone

With Pandora Fine Art;

By whom sold, New York, Sotheby's, 28 May 1999, lot 80A (as Francesco del Cairo);

With Rob Smeets, Milan, by 2001 and until at least 2003;

With Whitfield Fine Art, London, 2008;

From whom acquired by Aso O. Tavitian.

F. Frangi, in Giovanni Battista Discepoli detto lo Zoppo da Lugano, Un protagonista della pittura barocca in Lombardia, exhibition catalogue, F. Frangi and A. Bernardini (eds.), Rancate 2001, p. 138, cat. no. 29, reproduced;

F.M. Ferro, Nuvolone: Una famiglia di pittori nella Milano del '600, Soncino 2003, p. 179, cat. no. cf44, reproduced pl. VIII.

Rancate, Pinacoteca Cantonale Giovanni Züst, Giovanni Battista Discepoli detto lo Zoppo da Lugano, Un protagonista della pittura barocca in Lombardia, 14 September - 25 November 2001, no. 29.

Among the most prominent painters in mid-seventeenth-century Milan, Carlo Francesco Nuvolone executed this expressive depiction of a woman seen in profile in the 1640s. Following the pictorial tradition of the Lombard painters Giulio Cesaro Procaccini, Daniele Crespi, and Francesco Cairo (to whom the present painting was erroneously attributed in the past), Nuvolone incorporates passages of brilliant color: the dark background offsets the woman’s golden locks and scarlet robe. Nuvolone's painterly fluidity gives the work the immediacy of an oil sketch and imbues it with a certain dolcezza, or sweetness, that renders the evocative image both spiritual and sensual.