Dwarves gorging on Melons, and a Shipwreck ('Davy Jones’s Locker’)
Faustino Bocchi (1659 - 1741)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
circa 1700
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
864 x 1524 mm (34 x 60 in)
Place of origin
Italy
Order this imageCollection
Scotney Castle, Kent
NT 792030
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, Dwarves gorging on Melons and a Shipwreck ('Davy Jones’s Locker’) by Faustino Bocchi (1659-1741), circa 1700. In a landscape setting on the left, but with a shipwreck on the right, Bocchi's characteristic Callot-influenced dwarves attack two melons, which dwarf them. A slice has already been cut out of the one bottom left, into which a half-dressed dwarf prepares to jump. The other melon, still intact, is scaled by one group of dwarves on a ladder, whilst, from the other side, grasshoppers help another couple of dwarves to pierce the melon with a knife from the air. In front, four or five other dwarves bear away a slice from the first melon. Above, a dwarf in a cape hangs from a tree.
Provenance
Ashburnham collection at Ashburnham Place, Sussex (?until sold Sotheby's June/July 1953); according to John Cornforth in published paper for the Attingham Summer School, dated to 1990 and in the Scotney archive, the painting was brought by Christopher Hussey when he was an undergraduate at Oxford University (in the Dining Room at Froyle, Hampshire, where Christopher and Elizabeth Hussey lived from 1939-1946); bequeathed to Scotney Castle by Christopher Edward Clive Hussey (1899-1970)
Credit line
Scotney Castle, The Hussey Collection (National Trust)
Makers and roles
Faustino Bocchi (1659 - 1741), artist