Simone del Tintore

John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquess of Bute (1881-1947), London (as Ribera);

Thence by descent until sold, ("Old Master Pictures from Houghton"), London, Christie's, 8 December 1994, lot 51 (as Attributed to Pietro Paolini);

Where acquired by Stanley Moss.

G. Cirillo and G. Godi,  Le nature morte del 'Pittore di Carlo Torre' (Pseudo-Fardella) nella Lombardia del secondo Seicento, Parma 1996, p. 19;

F. Baldassari, Una Natura Morta di Simone Del Tintore, caravaggesco di Toscana, Sinalunga 2014, p. 17, reproduced, fig. 22, p. 25, footnote 31.

The artistic personality of the Lucchese painter Simone del Tintore has only come into focus in the recent past: first in the 1960s as a painter of still lifes, and only in the 1990s as a figure painter. The present work is a fine example of the latter. It depicts a bald, muscular man, dressed in a pelt and holding a shallow glass dish of wine. He is posed next to his dog before a drape opening onto a landscape, and his left arm resting on a “piva,” or set of bagpipes, an instrument with rustic, or arcadian, associations. The exact subject of the painting has been somewhat elusive—he has been called a philosopher (possibly Diogenes), an anchorite, or shepherd. It seems, however, that he simply represents a general type, similar to other such bald, rustic figures in Tintore’s own corpus, as well as in that of Pietro Paolini, Tintore’s master.

This painting was formerly in the collection of the Marquess of Bute, where it was considered a work of Jusepe Ribera. It was sold with a small group of pictures by the 6^th Marquess at Christie’s, London in 1994 (see provenance), when it was catalogued as “Attributed to Pietro Paolini.” It was first recognized and published as by Simone del Tintore by Giuseppe Cirillo and Giovanni Godi (see literature), a position also suggested tentatively (and apparently independently) by Mina Gregori who thought it likely by Simone del Tintore (or perhaps his elusive brother Francesco).¹ More recently, Andrea G. De Marchi has noted that the figure of the bald man appears in a number of works by the artist, and that the figure of the dog, with his head turned sharply and up to the right, also appears in full figure but in the same position in a larger Rest from the Hunt in a private collection, Lucca.²

¹ In a private communication to the owner, dated 16 November, 1998.

² See, G. and U. Bocchi, Naturaliter. Nuovi contributi alla natura morta in Italia settentrionale e Toscana tra XVII e XVIII, Calenzano 1998, p. 488, fig. 621).