Head of a Boy
Provenance
Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 20 May 1927, lot 18; sold to
Paul Bureau
Wildenstein & Co., New York, by 1930; acquired by
Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, The Ella Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund
Exhibitions
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, Italian Art of the Sei- and Settecento, 22 January–5 February 1930
New York, Kleinberger Galleries, Italian Baroque Painting and Drawings, 10–22 October 1932
New York, College Art Association, September 1932–October 1933
Poughkeepsie, Vassar College, 1935
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, 1937
New York, Wildenstein & Co., The Child Through Four Centuries, February 1945
Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, Behold the Child, 7 November–3 December 1950
Poughkeepsie, Vassar College Department of Art, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian Paintings, 21 November–9 December 1956
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, Masters of French Painting 1290–1920 at the Wadsworth Atheneum, 19 October 2012–27 January 2013
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy, 6 March–16 June 2013
Bibliography
‘Baroque Art Exhibit Opens at Atheneum’, The Hartford Courant, Hartford, 1930, p.17.
Henry Russell Hitchcock, Jr., ‘Italian Baroque Art at Hartford’, International Studio, New York/London, 1930, p. 22.
Behold the Child, Baltimore, 1950, no. 5 (as ‘French School, 17th Century, Follower of Caravaggio’)
Art News, February 1, 1930, reproduced p. 23.
Regina Schoolman and Charles Slatkin, The Enjoyment of Art in America, Philadelphia/New York, 1942, reproduced pl. 330.
Mina Gregori, ‘Alcuni aspetti del Genovesino’, Paragone, no. 59, 1954, pp. 16 and 27 (as Francesco del Cairo).
Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée, eds., I Caravaggeschi Francesi, Rome, 1973, exh. cat., p. 250, Paris, p. 258 (as French follower of Saraceni).
Benedict Nicolson, ‘Caravaggio and the Caravaggesques: Some Recent Research’, The Burlington Magazine, London, 1974, vol. 116, no. 859, p. 612.
Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Pierre Rosenberg, ‘Saraceni et la France’, Revue du Louvre, Paris, 1978, p. 195, no. 3.
Benedict Nicolson, The International Caravaggesque Movement, Oxford, 1979, p. 36, reproduced pl. 66.
Pierre Rosenberg, France in the Golden Age: Seventeenth-Century French Paintings in American Collections, New York, 1982, exh. cat., p. 364, no. 2.
Robert Fohr, Tableaux français et italiens du XVIIe siècle, Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1982, p. 134.
Paul Huys Janssen, ‘Dated and More or Less Dated Works by Jan van Bijlert’, in Hendrick ter Brugghen und die Nachfolger Caravaggios in Holland, Braunschweig, 1987, p. 160, reproduced fig. 205.
Benedict Nicolson, Caravaggism in Europe (Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by Luisa Vertova), Turin, 1990, vol. I, pp. 87, 228, no. 780, reproduced fig. 780.
Thierry Bajou, in The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, no. 20, p. 738.
John Lishawa, A Journey Through Taste, London, 2004, under no. 25.
Eric M. Zafran, Masters of French Painting 1290–1920 at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 2012, exh. cat., pp. 34–35, reproduced no. 5.
Tommaso Borgogelli, ‘Il San Girolamo di Madignano di Bartolomeo Manfredi e qualche novità caravaggesca: da Nicolas Tournier al Mastro delle bocche aperte’, in Bartolomeo Manfredi tra conferme e nuove attribuzioni. Atti giornata di studio 4 novembre 2022, Ostiano, 2024, pp. 33–34, reproduced fig. 17.
This painting is presented for the first time since its recent conservation. Cleaning has revealed greater detail in the dark areas such as the hat, a wider range of color in the flesh tones and more atmospheric warmth in the background.
Essay
A man sporting a feathered hat that appears to indicate that he is of some minor social standing, seeks to attract viewer’s attention, looking them straight in the eye, his mouth half-open as though he is about to speak.
Purchased by the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut in 1930 as an original by Caravaggio, this painting is one of the most important works in the small group of paintings which Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée, writing in 1973, attributed to a hypothetical French pupil of Carlo Saraceni.[1] The group comprised four stylistically similar paintings depicting young children or teenagers, sometimes in pairs or presented in the guise of figures from the Bible, with surreal, summarily executed facial features, most prominently their elongated eyes and open mouths. On that occasion, the curators drew a comparison between the present painting and two circular pendant panels depicting David with the Head of Goliath (fig. 1) and Jacob and Esau[2]; a second version of the David is known to have been in the Adanero collection in Madrid in 1950. In 1974, Benedict Nicolson not only added a further painting to the artist’s corpus of works, a Boy with a Feathered Hat (fig. 2) now in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University but also devised a name for the painter, calling him the ‘Master of the Open-Mouthed Boys’, a sobriquet still used today which clearly refers to the distinctive facial expression the artist gave his young male and open-mouthed protagonists. In the two editions of his historical overview of Caravaggesque painting, Nicolson added to the group assigned to the Master of the Open-Mouthed Boys works previously assigned to the ‘Master K’, attributing to the former a Boy Frightening a Girl with a Crab in the Joseph Kaplan collection in Chicago.[3] The Master of the Open-Mouthed Boys, whose identity and nationality remain open questions, has also been recently credited with several further paintings by Tommaso Borgogelli, who moreover highlighted the various Roman aspects of the painter’s Caravaggesque style.[4]
Regardless of whether or not one subscribes to all of the attributions made to the so-called Master of the Open-Mouthed Boys, the existence of this fascinating figure is confirmed by the undeniable stylistic consistency appreciable in most of the works attributed to him. He seems moreover not simply to have been a pupil close to Guy François in Saraceni’s workshop, but rather a painter with a more diverse background and frame of reference, whose training must have included some time in Manfredi’s circle, and in the ambient of Nicolas Tournier, Valentin de Boulogne, Bartolomeo Mendozzi, and Spadarino.
Of particular interest in the more recent history of the painting is the impression it made after it arrived in Hartford in 1930. ‘Chick’ Austin’s friend, the famous American master of collage Joseph Cornell was intrigued by the image. As Zafran writes ‘He might have seen the original on an early visit to Hartford, but in 1953 he requested a photograph of it from the Atheneum. He then compulsively made copies of it, and incorporated the boy’s head into several of his Medici Slot Machine boxes of the 1950s’. Examples can be found in public collections such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2015.19.3915), and Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit (1993.77).❖
Yuri Primarosa