A pair of Italian oil on canvas painted and parcel-gilt chinoiserie panels, one panel signed 'PM 1759 FEC' for Pietro Massa, Turin, Piedmontese

of rectangular form, representing courtly ladies engaged in domestic pursuits with their servants, within later cream and green painted wooden frames, the fan of one of the ladies signed and dated 'PM 1759 FEC' 

Possibly the Marchesi Medici del Vascello, Piedmont, Italy;
Pietro Accorsi, Turin

Mostra del Barocco Piemontese, Palazzo Carignano, Turin, 1937.

Both canvasses have firm relinings, the paint surfaces are stable with clean and clear varnishes. As to be expected with canvasses of this size, there is a scattering of retouchings of old minor damages and some strengthenings throughout, visible under ultra violet light, and a handful of very minor pinprick losses along the lower margins. They are offered in gilt wood frames and ready to hang.
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Comparative Literature:
Lucia Caterina and Cristina Mossetti, Villa della Regina. Il riflesso dell’Oriente nel Piemonete del Settecento, Turin, 2005,  fig. 29, p. 147, and figs. 16-17, p. 329, p. 412, p. 470-73 and p. 552-56.

The taste for chinoiserie that swept through Europe in the 18^thcentury found a particular resonance in Northern Italy, especially in Piedmont. Such was the popularity of the chinoiserie style, that no fewer than twenty-seven fully documented interiors alla China survive in the former royal palaces and other private residences in and around Turin, see Lucia Caterina and Cristina Mossetti, op. cit. Chinese interiors were created using either wallpaper or silk panels imported directly from China or by painting and lacquering chinoiserie scenes directly on to walls, dados and ceilings.

One of the leading exponents of Chinese interiors in Turin during the mid 1700's, was the ornameniste Pietro Massa, who specialised in chinoiserie lacca decoration and his most celebrated surviving work is the painted decoration of exotic flowers, birds and Chinese figures on the walls and ceilings of the four gabinetti alla China at each corner of the Villa della Regina in Turin, executed between 1732 and 1735, see Caterina and Mossetti, op. cit.,

Massa also produced similar chinoiserie work in 1744 for the doors and dado panels of the Galleria delle Battaglie in the Palazzo Reale, Turin, completed in 1744, illustrated by by Caterina and Mossetti, op. cit., p.470-73; the panelling of the Gabinetto Cinese in the Palazzo Graneri, Turin, circa 1740-1750, now in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Schloss Köpenick, Berlin, illustrated by Caterina and Mossetti, op. cit., p. 552-56, and the red-ground decoration commissioned by San Martino d’Agliè di Garessio for the Gabinetto of the Palazzo Parato in Grugliasco outside Turin, now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. 

The same monogram PM appears on four occasions in Massa’s extant work at the Villa della Regina, including on the fans of a Chinese man and woman in the Gabinetto verso mezzo giorno e Ponente alla China, illustrated by Caterina and Mossetti, op. cit., fig. 29, p.147, and figs.16-17, p. 329.

This pair of canvases originally formed part of a larger suite decorating a Chinese room, and a photograph of the 1937 exhibition Mostra del Barocco Piemontese in the Palazzo Carignano, Turin reproduced by Caterina and Mossetti, op. cit., p. 412, shows a partial view of a room decorated entirely with chinoiserie paintings of various sizes, in which one of these canvases is visible (see lot 28).

A larger painting illustrated in the photograph is also one of a pair (see lot 28).  Neither of the larger canvases is signed, but both bear the label of the Marchese Medici del Vascello, to whom this smaller  pair may also have belonged.  It is not known whether the larger pair of panels was in the possession of the Medici del Vascello family when they were exhibited in 1937, nor when the entire ensemble was dispersed.