Still Life Depicting A Vase Of Flowers

Painting, oil on canvas, measuring 60 x 50 cm without frame and 88 x 74 cm with a refined and elegant frame, depicting a vase of flowers by the painter Gaspare Lopez ( Naples 1650 - Florence 1740 ).

This elegant Vase of Flowers, consisting of a luxuriant and assorted bouquet - with carnations, tulips, roses, snowballs, bellflowers - luxuriantly emerging from a ceramic vase resting on a stone balustrade, is a typical example of Gaspare Lopez. An authorship that can be clearly deduced by comparing it with several of his paintings, generally of varying inventiveness but always set ‘in the open air’, and in which similar pots are included, with a few flowers and racemes falling onto the shelf.

It is worth mentioning one of his paintings in the San Martino Museum in Naples; two verticals published by L. Salerno (La natura morta italiana, Bocchi ed, Rome 1984, nos. 66-4 and 66.5); one recently sold at the Dorotheum in Vienna (auction 24.04.07, no. 90); the beautiful vertical painting sold many years ago at Christie's in London (auction 16.97.71, no. 130), with a similar vase of flowers and a reversed fruit bowl, as well as the similar version, but horizontal, published in Naturalia (ed. by G. and U. Bocchi, Allemandi ed., Turin 1992, pp. 324-25, table 116).

Even in this delicate canvas, Lopez happily displays his most peculiar qualities of pictorial immediacy and freshness, based on a bright chromaticism, well supported by a constructive luminism, which makes his agile and dynamic compositions airy. Lopez, also known by his nickname ‘Gasparo dei Fiori’, was enrolled in the Neapolitan painters' guild in 1717, as reported by De Dominici, who says he was a pupil of A. Belvedere but also of the Frenchman J.B. Dubuisson, who introduced Monnoyer's taste and his elegant presentations of refined decorativism and scenographic setting to Naples. Two ascendants that Gaspare was able to combine spontaneously, relying on his fervid inventive imagination, establishing himself as a worthy, albeit disengaged follower of Belvedere, the last great representative of the great seventeenth-century chapter of Neapolitan ‘still life’.

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.

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Mr. Riccardo Moneghini
Art Historian