Caption

Since its recognition as a Carracci, the attribution of this picture has swung between Annibale and his cousin Lodovico (1555 - 1619). It is one of a number of early paintings by them in which Saint Francis plays a prominent role. The cherries and rose that the Christ Child holds in his left hand are symbols of the Sin (the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge) that Christ overcame through the Cross that he touches with his right, and of the Virgin, respectively. The picture almost certainly once belonged to John Julius Angerstein, the purchase of whose large paintings in 1824 laid the foundation of the National Gallery.

Summary

Oil painting on canvas, The Holy Family with Saint Francis by Annibale Carracci (Bologna 1560 – Rome 1609) or Lodovico Carracci (Bologna 1555 - Bologna 1619), circa 1583/85. The scene depicts the Holy Family with Saint Francis with a landscape behind.

Full description

Had this picture only been a little larger, it might be hanging permanently, rather than for the duration of the In Trust for the Nation (1995) exhibition, in the National Gallery. For, as Christie's stencil on the stretcher reveals, it was amongst the remnants of the collection of John Julius Angerstein (1735-1823) that were sold at Christie's in 1874 by his younger grandson, William Angerstein (1844-1892) of Weeting Hall, Norfolk, many years after his death. It had been the threat of the dispersal - and possible sale abroad - of Angerstein's collection immediately after he had died in 1823, that had given the decisive focus to the efforts of those who had long been agitating for the creation of a permanent national gallery of old master paintings. Chief amongst these was the great connoisseur and guru of the art world, Sir George Beaumont (1753 - 1827), who, to overcome the Government's reluctance to spend public money on such an object, offered the gift of sixteen pictures from his own, more modest, but still precious collection as a bait: "Buy Angerstein's collection, and I will give you mine" . The Prime Minister, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool, negotiated with Angerstein's heirs, and, as a result, in 1824, 38 of the 42 paintings proposed for sale, chiefly "large pictures of eminence", were ceded to the nation for £57,000. These pictures are all but four of those which are in John Young's bilingual catalogue, illustrated by engravings, purporting to be of the totality of the collection, but which in fact only comprised some of those pictures that Angerstein's will had instructed should be sold . Negotiations with Christie's having failed because of the latter's extortionate demands for a 12½% commission, Young's catalogue, with the French texts preceding those in English (no doubt to fan the fears of its being sold abroad) was rushed out to publicise the collection, and to encourage sales by private treaty. Angerstein's will had stipulated that the pictures, &c. from both his town house, 100 Pall Mall, and his suburban villa, Woodlands, at Blackheath, should be sold, and that only those elsewhere (which would have included Weeting Hall and Brandon Hall, in Norfolk and Suffolk respectively) should pass to his son, John . In the event, only these 38 larger pictures appear to have been selected from both houses and sold to the Nation, and 100 Pall Mall itself was taken over, and became the first premises of the National Gallery, although it was over-crowded with pictures and ill-lit from the start. In 1831 larger temporary premises were found at 105 Pall Mall, and between 1833 and 1838 the nucleus of the present National Gallery was built, on the north side of Trafalgar Square, to keep it "in the very gangway of London" . No catalogue nor inventory of Angerstein's pictures beyond that written by John Young appears to be known. It is thus difficult to be sure of the provenance of the present painting. But for John Julius Angerstein to have bought it, we can be fairly sure of two things: that it would have been expensive, and that it would have been certified by expert opinion or by an illustrious provenance. It so happens that the only painting by any of the Carracci representing the Holy Family with Saint Francis of the right size and character, that has so far come to light as having been sold in Britain during the period when Angerstein has been identified as collecting (c.1789 to c.1811) , or earlier , fulfils both these criteria. For the fourth and last day of the main posthumous sale of Sir Joshua Reynolds's extensive collection of paintings included one ascribed to 'L. Carrache' described as: "The Holy Family with Saint Francis, much in the stile of Corregio [sic]", which sold for 100 guineas, to Arthur Champernowne. Champernowne was a marchand-amateur with a seat at Dartington Hall, who was for a time associated with the great dealer William Buchanan's partner in Italy, James Irvine . He might have sold the painting on to Angerstein at any time. "In the stile of Corregio" is precisely how 18th century connoisseurs would have described an early work of the Carracci such as this. We also know that Angerstein not only took advice from Reynolds - as later from West and Lawrence - in forming his collection, but that he also bought four pictures directly from Reynolds's collection, on the fourth and main day of the painter's posthumous sale, including Van Dyck's George Gage offered an Antique sculpture by two companions (National Gallery; the others did not form part of the foundation collection acquired for it). Even 100 guineas was a substantial sum to pay for a painting in 1795, and (with the subsequent inflation both in the value of money and in the price paid for pictures) would correspond to a price of around £100,000 today. Although the picture had an illustrious name, and a distinguished previous owner when John Julius Angerstein acquired it, these had evidently been forgotten when it came to be sold in 1874, for it was then ascribed to a lesser but interesting figure, the Parmesan painter Bartolomeo Schedoni (1578-1615). The attribution to Schedoni, and the presence of the picture in a country house, long helped to keep the picture unknown to scholars. It was really only the photographing of the collection by the Photographic Survey of the Courtauld Institute (a most valuable service established by Anthony Blunt, with which the National Trust has collaborated since its earliest days) in 1971, that helped to bring it to wider scholarly attention - though not to a scholarly consensus. Nicholas Turner was the first both to notice it, and to identify it as an early work by Annibale Carracci, though he subsequently went back on this, and published it as by Lodovico , saying that his opinion was supported - on the basis of a photograph - by Denis Mahon, Michael Jaffé, Juergen Winkelmann, and Mario Di Giampaolo (although an undated note on the mount of the Photographic Survey photo of this in the Witt Library by this last ascribes it to Agostino Carracci). Alessandro Brogi's article of the previous year , attributing it (in ignorance of either Nicholas Turner's original opinion or its reversal) to Annibale, seemed rather outgunned. So things remained until, by a fortunate chance, a fresh piece of evidence appeared: a double-sided drawing by Annibale, now in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto . The original recto of this is a study for the figure of Saint Jerome, in a painting dated 1583 or 1585, whose attribution has similarly oscillated between Lodovico Carracci and the young Annibale (Banco Popolare dell' Emilia, Modena) , and in which the head of the saint is particularly close in character to that of the Saint Joseph in the present picture, whilst his drapery is handled like that of the Madonna. The original verso of the drawing has, however, two studies of a hand holding a violin-bow, which settle the attribution, for they are for that of an angel in Annibale's signed and dated Baptism of Christ of 1585 in SS. Gregorio e Siro, Bologna. Prior to the discovery of the drawing this altarpiece, which Turner calls "Annibale's most Lodovico-like work .... something of an anomaly in his oeuvre", had been regarded as an ambiguous yardstick; but, by providing a basis for the attribution to Annibale of the Saint Jerome as well, the drawing shows that such was indeed Annibale's own manner around the years between 1583, when the altarpiece was commissioned, and 1585, when it was finally completed . A yet earlier altarpiece, dated to the beginning of this period - 1583 - the Crucifixion and Saints formerly in S. Nicolò di S. Felice, and now in S. Maria della Carità, Bologna, which was Annibale's first major public commission, contains a kneeling figure of St. Francis possibly drawn from the same model as the one in the present painting . A number of similar depictions of the saint by Annibale date from these years: the half-length St Francis meditating upon a crucifix laid on a skull (Galleria Capitolina, Rome) ; the Head of St. Francis holding a skull and crucifix (Galleria Borghese, Rome) ; the half-length St. Francis displaying the crucifix with skull and books (Galleria dell' Accademia, Venice) ; and the recently-discovered oblong Saint. Francis adoring the crucifix, with skull and book. Such a concatenation of representations of Saint Francis, all shown with skull and crucifix, and his introduction into the present picture with a crucifix that the Christ Child actually reaches out to touch, is most unusual. To some extent, it is a reflection of the ways in which "The Carracci Reform of Painting" was bound up with the Counter-Reformation, and - specifically - with the idea that images should be used to promote meditation upon the central mysteries of the faith: Sin (represented by Death, in the form of a skull) and Redemption (represented by the Crucifix). Gabriele Paleotti (1521/2-1597) to whom the Council of Trent had delegated the task of drawing up guidelines for the production of art, was, after all, a Bolognese, and Cardinal-Archbishop of Bologna . But, beyond that, there is clearly some significance in the fact that it was St. Francis who was time and again depicted as the vehicle of such notions, and who recurs in a number of other paintings and engravings by Annibale's elder brother Agostino and his cousin Lodovico, as well as by Annibale himself. It is clearly not enough to point to Barocci's influential paintings of the saint and his visions, and to suggest that it was simply a matter of these artists' personal choice. What it indicates instead - since these are all very clearly intense devotional images, and not simply painted to adorn some gallery or cabinet - is some significant degree of Franciscan patronage behind the beginnings of the Carracci, and behind Annibale in particular. Now that Malvasia's idea that the latter's first major commission, for the Crucifixion with Saints in S. Nicolò di S. Felice was just passed on to him by Lodovico has been discredited, the question of the identity of the actual commissioners of the painting surely deserves closer scrutiny than it has, to the best of my knowledge, yet received. Not only are two Franciscan saints, St. Francis himself and St. Bernardino, depicted in the Crucifixion, on the right hand of Christ, with the Virgin Mary, but the painting also stood on an altar whose patronage was transferred from the Machiavelli to the Mendicanti: i.e. to the Franciscan Friars . St Francis is shown bare-footed - which might suggest that these were from the Observantine, or strict reform branch of the Order, to which St Bernardino himself had belonged — and with skull and book beside him, as in so many of Annibale's other representations, which also suggests that these and the crucifix were the Observantine's regular aids to meditation. The inference must surely be that altarpiece, portrayals of St Francis, and the present picture, in which the Christ Child touches the crucifix held by St Francis: all derive from the patronage of the branch of the Franciscan Order . Notes: (i) Quoted by Agar Ellis, and cited in exh. cat. 'Noble and Patriotic':The Beaumont Gift:1828, National Gallery, London, 1988, p.11. (ii) John Young, A Catalogue of the Celebrated Collection of Pictures of the Late John Julius Angerstein, Esq. containing a finished etching of every picture, London (in French & English), July 1823. The catalogue contains the 38 pictures acquired by the Nation, together with a Reynolds of Mrs. Angerstein and her daughter, and three Fuselis, evidently excluded as a family portrait and as by a living artist, respectively. (iii) For these and other details about Angerstein and his collection, see the excellent catalogue of the exhibition held at his former house, John Julius Angerstein and the Woodlands: 1774-1974, Woodlands Art Gallery, Blackheath, 1974. (iv) The phrase is that of another of the main promoters of the National Gallery, the politician, connoisseur, and collector, George Agar Ellis, 1st Baron Dover. (v) Exh.cat.cit., 1974, p.35. (vi) No such picture has been found, either in Houlditch's ms. transcriptions of London sale catalogues 1711-59 in the National Art Library, or in Algernon Graves's - admittedly very patchy - Art Sales from Early in the Eighteenth Century to Early in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols.k, 1918-21, reprinted as 1 vol., 1973. The 'Lodovico Carracci' in Mrs. Harrittz's sale, Christie's, 16 June 1810, lot 64, was too small, and anyway sounds like a version of the Annibale Carracci formerly in the Orléans, Bridgewater, and Pope Hennessy collections, and now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa. Pictures in the Christie's sales of General Craig, 18 April 1812 (lot 62) and John Roberts, 10 March 1815 (lot 58), are insufficinelty characterised. The one serious alternative, in view of the fact that the present picture was sold as 'Schidone' in 1874, is the similarly attributed painting of approximately equal dimensions that was in the Dutatre sale in Paris on 19 March 1804 (lot 7), and then in the ?Delahante sale at Phillips, 3 March 1810 (lot 64; b.i. at 70 gns.). (vii) Cf. Hugh Brigstocke, William Buchanan and the Nineteenth-Century Art Trade, London, 1982, passim. (viii) "I am old enough to have a sort of paternal feeling for the Pall-Mall Collection, as Sir Joshua or Mr. West would have had ... " (D.E. Williams, The Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence, Kt, 1831, vol.II, p.171). (ix) Letter of 1 May 1980. (x) 'Two paintings attributed to Lodovico Carracci', The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXVII, Nov. 1985, pp.795-96 & fig. 96. (xi) 'Aggiunte al giovane Annibale Carracci', Paragone, vol. XXXV, July 1984, pp.44f., 49 n.26 & pl.57. (xii) Exh. cat. Italian Drawings 1500-1800, Kate Ganz Ltd., London, 1987, no.14. (xiii) Exh. cat. Italian Paintings & Sculpture, Heim, London, 1966, no.1 (as by Annibale); Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590, London, 1971, vol. II, p.77 (as by Lodovico); Gianfranco Malafarina, L'opera completa di Annibale Carracci, Milan, 1976, no. 166 (as by Lodovico); exh. cat. Selected Baroque Paintings from the Italian banks, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1990, pp.16-19 (exhibited as by Annibale). (xiv) For the progress of the S. Gregorio picture, cf. esp. exh. cat. Bologna 1584: Gli esordi dei Carracci e gli affreschi di Palazzo Fava, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, 1984, no.106. (xv) Posner, 1971, no. 6; Malafarina, 1976., no.6, p.88 & col. pls. I & II; exh. cat. The Age of Correggio and the Carracci, National Gallery of Art, Washington, &c., 1986-87, no.87. (xvi) Posner, 1971, no. 20; Malafarina,1976., no.21. (xvii) Posner, 1971, ii, no.28; Malafarina, 1976., no.27. (xviii) Posner, 1971,ii, no.29; Malafarina, 1976, no.28. (xix) Exh. cat. Treasures of Italian Art, Walpole Gallery, London, 1988, no.12 (previously sold at Sotheby's, Monaco, 20 June 1987, lot 313, as by Lodovico Carracci). (xx) A.W.A. Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in Bologna: Visible Reality in Art after the Council of Trent, The Hague, 1974, esp. Chs. 7 & 8, vol.I, pp.121-155. (xxi) Antonio di Paolo Masini, Bologna perlustrata, Bologna, 3rd edn., 1666, vol.I, p.343 (still calling it the Altar de' Machiavelli); Mario Fanti et al., S. Maria della Carità in Bologna:Storia e Arte, Bologna, 1981, p.115, no.17. (xxii) It is perhaps worth taking this opportunity to suggest that a further painting, very similar in size and character to the present one, and showing, not St Francis, but The Holy Family with SS. Elizabeth and John the Baptist, sold by Ader Picard Tajan at the Hôtel Georges V, Paris, 22 June 1990, lot 9, with an ascription to Lodovico Carracci, based in part upon Nicholas Turner's attribution to him of the present picture, should also be ascribed to Annibale instead. [Since this was written, the picture - which has been acquired by the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes - has indeed been so reattributed]. (adapted from author's version/pre-publication, Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation, exh. cat., 1995)