Giacomo Ceruti

Giuseppe Cerruti, Genoa;
With Alessandro Morandotti, Rome;
Acquired from the above by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Fund, 1954 (acc. no. 54.14).

Rome, Palazzo Massimo, Cinque pittori del Settecento: Ghislandi, Crespi, Magnasco, Bazzanti, Ceruti, April 1943, no. 81.

 

A. Morandotti, Cinque pittori del Settecento: Ghislandi, Crespi, Magnasco, Bazzanti, Ceruti, exhibition catalogue, Rome 1943, p, 108, no. 81;
"Further Acquisitions, 1952-1954", in Bulletin of the Art Division. Los Angeles County Museum, vol. 6, no. 3, supplement, Summer 1954,  p. 8;
B. Fredericksen and F. Zeri, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections, Cambridge, MA 1972, pp. 51, 592;
M. Gregori, Giacomo Ceruti, Milan 1982, p. 441, cat. no. 84, reproduced p. 237 (as from the last years of his Brescian period);
S. Schaefer et al, European Painting and Sculpture in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1987, p. 29, reproduced.

Painting has been relined and the surface has been a bit pressed as a result. old discolored repaired tears can be seen in the upper background at right and left, and another old retouch at upper center. there is also what appears to be an old repaired puncture (?) on the baby's left hand and another old repair with retouching on woman's right forearm. in general, the paint surface on the figures has been well retained, but a bit flattened in the impastos as mentioned. ultraviolet light shows the retouches as mentioned above, most of which are visible to naked eye. In an elaborately carved and gilt rectangular frame with stylized leaf pattern. a few nicks and cracks.
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Although the name of Todeschini has been occasionally associated with this intimate depiction of a mother and her young child, the painting has been attributed to Ceruti with certainty by all modern scholars. Gregori, who included the work in her seminal catalogue on Ceruti's oeuvre in 1982, dates the painting to the last years of his stay in Brescia, circa 1730. An extremely similar oval of the same subject, and which possibly even uses the same model, is reproduced in G. Testori, Giacomo Ceruti, exhibition catalogue, Milan 1966, pp. 14-15, no. 6.