Gabriele Ricciardelli

Acquired by the great-great-great uncle of the present owner, probably in the 1920s;
Thence by descent.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has a fairly old lining and stretcher, perhaps from the end of the nineteenth century or turn of the twentieth. The restoration is possibly from the same period. However there has been little apparent intervention otherwise either before or since. The lining was not in response to either loose paint or any damage but it has secured the paint firmly, with a slight imprint of the canvas grain in the texture, but any impasto in the clouds or the sweep of the sky for instance can still be felt. The evident stability of the painting’s background and past life can also be felt in the minimal intrusion of probably a single cleaning a century ago, with retouching confined to the outer edges at the base and the sides. There is some older varnish in the crevices and just two places where the paint is slightly thin: one on the right around the figure of the man carrying meat on a platter on his head (where in fact his brown shirt has been vaguely touched in) and the other place with fainter wear is around the nets on the left. Elsewhere the detail is beautifully preserved throughout, from the minutiae of the architecture on the further coastline to all the cultivation across the hillside. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
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The view is one of four known panoramic snapshots of Naples and the surrounding coastline which Ricciardelli repeated several times, on each occasion making changes in the disposition of the ships and figures. A similarly-sized variant of the composition is in the Alisio Collection, Naples.¹ Another painting of the same view, again of similar dimensions but taken from slightly further in towards Posillipo, is in a private collection in Naples.²  Ricciardelli's views were engraved in 1765 by Antoine Cardon and are known to have enjoyed great success among the English Grand Tourists; another version of the design hangs in the Velvet Drawing Room in Saltram Park, Devon, and was presumably acquired by John Parker, later Lord Boringdon, along with three other works of Naples by the artist.³

Little information is known about Ricciardelli's life. After training with his father Giuseppe and working in Rome with Jan Frans van Bloemen, Ricciardelli returned to Naples where he worked for the Bourbon Court. He is known to have visited Dublin in 1753 and is recorded in London as late as 1777.



1. See N. Spinosa and L. de Mauro, Vedute napoletane del Settecento, Salerno 1999, p. 194, cat. no. 87, reproduced in colour p. 75, fig. 46.
2. See All'ombra del Vesuvio, Napoli nella veduta europea dal Quattrocento all'Ottocento, exh. cat., Naples 1990, pp. 418-19, reproduced p. 134.
3. See A. Negro Spina, Napoli nel Settecento. Le incisioni di Antoine Alexandre Cardon, Naples 1989, pp. 23-28 and 47-54.