Pier Francesco Mola

Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater (1736-1803) and by descent through the 1st Duke of Sutherland to John Sutherland Egerton, 5th Earl of Ellesmere (1915-2000), later 6th Duke of Sutherland, Bridgewater House;
His sale, London, Christie's, 18 October 1946, lot 118, where purchased by Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy (1913-1994);
His deceased sale, New York, Christie's, 10 January 1996, lot 97.

London, Royal Academy, Works by Holbein and other Masters of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1950-51, no. 200.

W.Y. Ottley and P.W. Tomkins, Engravings of the Most Noble the Marquis of Stafford's Collection of Pictures in London, London 1818, vol. I, p. 21, no. 30, reproduced plate 13 (as G.B. Mola);
Catalogue of the pictures belonging to Lord Francis Leverson Gower at Bridgewater House, London 1830, p. 16, no. 73;
Catalogue of the Bridgewater collection of pictures: belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere, at Bridgewater House, Cleveland Square, St. James's, London 1851, p. 7, no. 28;
R. Cocke, Pier Francesco Mola, Oxford 1972, pp. 16, 49, no. 20, reproduced plate 28;
J. Pope-Hennessy, Learning to Look, New York 1991, p. 88;
C.R. Puglisi, Francesco Albani, New Haven and London 1999, p. 188, under cat. no. 105;
S. Loire, L'Albane, exhibition catalogue, Paris 2000, p. 101, under note 100.

The following condition report is provided by Rebecca Gregg who is an external expert and not an employee of Sotheby's. The original canvas appears in good condition, lined onto an open weave additional support, the adhesion between these two layers appeared stable. There is a repair, visible on the reverse of the lining canvas, in the upper left quadrant. There are no obvious planar deformations and the overall tension is good. The paint layers are in good condition. There are no recent damages or loss and the adhesion between the paint and ground layers and the support appears good. There is scattered over-paint from at least two distinct restoration campaigns. The older campaign visible below the varnish layer can be identified strengthening the figures in the background and appears slightly glazy in appearance. This layer also covers some abrasion in the area of the sky. The more recent retouching is above the varnish layer and appears more defined. There is a thick, strongly fluorescing varnish layer present. This appears evenly applied across the paint surface. The painting was examined in the frame.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This painting can with some certainty be dated to the second half of the 1640s, a period of the artist's development about which we know relatively little, on account of its reliance on Francesco Albani's work of the same subject (Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts).¹ Mola was with Albani in Bologna from 1645-47, when he returned to Rome, and this painting manifests Albani's influence more than any other. Making only minor changes Mola has borrowed the central figure group from Albani and, in broad outline, the classical setting, but has changed the palette, lightened the tonality and simplified the mise-en-scène into something less cluttered and more impactful than Albani's prototype. It thus seems highly probable that this painting was conceived and executed during, or very shortly after, the artist's two-year sojourn in Bologna.

Richard Cocke identified a drawing that he considered preparatory for this work (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum).²  Previously he had considered it a later independent study but it may, in fact, represent Mola's first development of Albani's own version of the subject. Cocke suggests that the boatman seen to the right of the drawing appears in the left background of the painting. The central figure group, however, seems somewhat disconnected from the finished painting.

The painting was owned for almost fifty years by the scholar and connoisseur Sir John Pope-Hennessy (1913-1994) (fig. 1). His collection comprised of old master drawings, paintings, furniture, objects and oriental works of art. Pope-Hennessy chose his profession – or 'vocation' as he liked to call it – of art history very early on in life and began collecting drawings in the 1920s and '30s. Although perhaps best remembered for his invaluable contributions to the study of Renaissance sculpture, his knowledge spread far wider and he wrote on varied subjects. He worked for many years at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, joining in 1938 and returning as Keeper after the war (1954-66) and then director (1967-73). He followed this with a directorship at the British Museum (1974-76) and position of consultant chairman of the department of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1977-86). Pope-Hennessy's first opportunity to buy important pictures occurred in 1946 when most of the baroque paintings from the Ellesmere collection at Bridgewater House, which had been bombed, came up for sale. Along with the Mola, he acquired an Annibale Carracci and a Domenichino, all of which cost him a total of £109: he sold the Carracci when he left London and the Domenichino when he left New York, but the Mola remained in his collection until his death (and was included in his posthumous sale in 1996). Pope-Hennessy was appointed an honorary citizen of Siena in 1982 and of Florence in 1994, the year in which he died.

1. See Cocke, under Literature, reproduced fig. 144.
2. Inv. no. N.M.555/1863.