Enfilade

Joseph Wright of Derby, Portrait of a Young Boy with a Drum, inscribed with the letter ‘R’, ca. 1780, oil on canvas, 28 × 36 inches / 70 × 91 cm
(Courtesy Ben Elwes Fine Art)

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Press release for London Art Week, via Art Daily:

London Art Week, Summer 2018
28 June — 6 July 2018

A major rediscovery from the mature period of Joseph Wright of Derby is among many important paintings being unveiled at London Art Week Summer 2018, open now through Friday 6 July at forty galleries across Mayfair and St. James’s. Presented by Ben Elwes Fine Art, the painting by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) depicts a young boy with a drum and a landscape beyond. It shows the artist’s virtuosity as a masterful and empathetic portrait painter—he excelled at children—and a superb landscape artist. It dates from around 1780, a period, following Wright’s return from an Italian soujourn in 1775, when his art, across genres, brimmed with confidence.

Antonacci Lapiccirella Fine Art (new LAW participants from Rome) is exhibiting a sensational rediscovery of a work famed in art history circles; a painting by Antonio Canova thought to have been lost for two centuries. In a daring trick played by Canova on the greatest artists in Rome, he presented Self-Portrait of Giorgione to his peers as an original by the revered Venetian 16th-century painter. Whist all acclaimed it as a truth, a year later Canova announced that he himself had painted the portrait as a practical joke.

Maurizio Nobile, from Bologna, presents an extraordinary discovery, a large altar-piece by Gaetano Gandolfi (1734–1802) of The Holy Family and Saint Augustine dated 1761. Scholars were only aware of the existence of the work thanks to a photo published in the monograph dedicated to the painter by D. Biagi Maino (Turin, 1995). For the first time, this painting can be viewed by the public at large.

Further highlights among paintings offered at London Art Week include:

• At Colnaghi: A rarely-seen depiction of Saint Francis by Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco (1541–1614). The Stigmatisation of Saint Francis is a powerful and dramatic composition which was first published in 1908, and last seen in public in 1999 at the major show on the artist held at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

• At Martyn Gregory: A rare view of China by William Daniell RA (1769–1837), the most important rediscovery in Daniell’s oeuvre for fifty years.

• At Robilant+Voena: A rare, signed, full-length male portrait of Antoine de Ville, a military engineer, by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c1654) one of the most highly regarded female artists of the Baroque. This work is a very important addition to the few portraits known in the oeuvre of this 17th-century artist who is famed mainly for her powerful depictions of Old Testament heroines, though contemporary sources testify that she was also celebrated for her portraits.

• At The Weiss Gallery: A rare Friesland School early Dutch portrait of a young boy aged three, painted 1603, is one of the earliest examples of a portrait incorporating a kolf club, used to hit a stuffed leather ball in the Dutch game of het kolven, an early form of golf.