LOMBARD SCHOOL, CIRCA 1550 | Two women holding a cat together with a young man and an elderly man

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 15 June 1983, lot 106 (as Milanese school, first half of the 16th Century); 
With Galerie Jean-Max Tassel, Paris, where acquired by the current owner;
Private collection, France.

B. Meijer, 'Esempi del comico figurative nel Rinascimento Lombardo',  in: Arte Lombarda, vol XVI, 1971, pp. 263-5, reproduced fig. 6 (as Lombard School, 16th Century; present location unknown).

The present composition belongs to a small number of pictures of similar composition and subject that Bert Meijer grouped together in 1971, and which have at various moments been ascribed to Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1600), Niccolò Frangipani (1555-1600) and to the circle of the Campi family. The present picture shows at far right the profile figure of a turbaned grotesque old man, with his jutting jaw, heavy bottom lip and bent nose. In its grotesque depiction of this figure it is clearly inspired by the caricatures of Leonardo da Vinci, and indeed the two women in the painting similarly betray his influence. Other examples, with some differences in the composition of the figures and changes in detail of costume are in the Galleria dell'Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti, Genoa, and one formerly in the Museo Civico, Novara (before 1974).

Like the present picture, all of these pictures are of half-length format depicting a group of four people. Of this group, there is one picture, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers, which parallels the present panel quite closely, with the male figure at left and the two women of which the left one is holding the cat, but with differences of detail, hair and costume. It also switches out the caricatured figure at right for a clean shaven young man.