Matters Of The Heart

Another Old Master is discovered in a country house and two of Sir William Nicholson’s Sussex Downs paintings reach contrasting prices

- Huon Mallalieu

It was a pity that the March sale at Brightwells of Leominster could not have been organised a couple of days earlier, when it would have fallen on the 19th, the feast of Saint Joseph. the top price, £93,536, apparently the highest for an art sale in the house’s history, was paid for the latest in an encouraging trickle of Old Master paintings coming out of old family or country-house collections: a 6in by 4½in painting on copper of Saint Joseph reading (Fig 1) by the Bolognese Gaetano Gandolfi (1734–1802).

Many have been genuine discoveries, but this could not quite be described as one, because Donatella Biagi Maino, the artist’s biographer, had been aware of it and published an illustration in 1995. However, she had thought that it was on canvas and did not know where it was —seemingly, in a private collection in Herefordshire.

Prof Biagi Maino particularly noted ‘the drawing of the hands... a real test of skill in contrast with the falling drapes of the mantle…’ and dated it to the mid 1770s. Against his shoulder is one of the saint’s principal symbols, a flowering rod. According to early apocryphal accounts, when Mary was to be found a husband, all the males of the House of David were called to the temple and when they put their staves on the altar, Joseph’s burst into flower.