Couple Of Kitchen Interiors '700

Pair of paintings, oil on canvas measuring 48 x 73 cm without frame and 58 x 83 with frame, depicting two curious kitchen interiors by painter Antonio Crespi ( Bologna 1704 - 1781 ).

The paintings we are examining are shining examples of 18th-century Emilian painting and without a shadow of a doubt can be attributed to the painter Antonio Crespi ( Bologna 1712 - 1781 ); the painter depicts a theme very dear in 17th- and 18th-century painting and with a wholly personal taste puts pots, jugs, plates and various foodstuffs in the foreground; Everything is put on display and not depicted as a kitchen was really arranged. Not surprisingly, the working housewives seem to entrench themselves behind this barrier of objects.

Antonio Crespi, son of the great early 18th-century painter Giuseppe Maria, grew up in his father's workshop and endeavored to assimilate the style as it was evolving in the 1920s, supported and aided supremely by a far superior and significant approximation to life.

Works executed by Antonio alone are fully and easily explicated by that somewhat easy and crude italicity that immediately jumps out at the eye but also by that feverish commitment in the ornaments and minute descriptions of clothing and objects or physiognomic features.

The paintings in question are an important document of Crespi's best vein because he exhibits a luministic impetus of brilliant skill; this happens because undoubtedly the best part of our painter's activity is that which concerns the portraiture of both characters and objects, which he carried on with constant commitment, arriving at a peculiarity of manner that marks a significant phase in the development of the genre, with lucid anticipation of the executive finesse of the neoclassicists, due also to a breadth of impasto and a perspicuity of definition that are all typical prerogatives of great Italian painting and of Antonio himself.

The two canvases we are looking at here seem to hark back to the naturalist taste of the last decades of the eighteenth century thanks to a diligent and very accurate painting of these two kitchens and to a painstaking scrupulousness in the depiction of the housewives.

Crespi was a great lover of humble painting, that is, of canvases depicting food or objects inherent to the kitchen, giving us the image of a self-confident, cheeky artist, free from pre-prepared schemes indeed he develops a new way of painting capable of bringing out the taste of tactile values.

The paintings and works of art published here are my exclusive property and therefore are always available to be viewed, by appointment, in my exhibition sites located in Sanremo and Brescia.

This item , like all our objects, is sold accompanied by a photographic certificate FIMA of authenticity and lawful origin; this document identifies the object by adding more value to the article.
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Mr. Riccardo Moneghini
Art Historian