Follower of Antoine Rivalz

Anonymous sale, Marseille, Hotel des Ventes Prado-Borde, 26 October 1991, lot 467 (as Italian School);

Where acquired by Stanley Moss.

J. Penant, Antoine Rivalz 1667-1735, Le Romain de Toulouse, Paris 2004, p. 201, under cat. no. 297 (as a copy after the prime in the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse).

This dramatic depiction of Cleopatra’s suicide derives from one of the most celebrated and widely reproduced compositions by the Toulouse painter Antoine Rivalz. The prime version, preserved in the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse (inv. no. 88 1 1), is regarded as one of Rivalz’s greatest successes and inspired numerous repetitions, workshop replicas, and academic copies throughout the eighteenth century.

The present painting, reduced in scale compared to the Toulouse prototype, belongs to the large group of contemporary and later replicas produced after Rivalz’s invention. Such copies were made both within the artist’s workshop and by students at the Académie in Toulouse during the second half of the eighteenth century, attesting to the enduring fame of the composition, which became the most frequently reproduced of all Rivalz’s paintings.