Alessandro Longhi
Portrait of a Young Man
Oil on canvas (relined). 99.5 x 81.5 cm.
In Venice in the 18th century Alessandro Longhi was the leading painter of portraits - a genre for which there was a comparatively small market in the city. He was the son of Pietro Longhi and was taught to paint by his father alongside the portraitist Giuseppe Nogari. Alessandro Longhi was also an art historian, and his collection of biographies of Venetian artists “Compendio delle Vite de' Pittori Veneziani Istorici piu rinomati del presente secolo” was published in 1762.
The great portrait of the dramatist Carlo Goldoni in the Casa Goldoni in Venice is among Longhi's most famous works. Filippo Pedrocco dates the present piece to around 1788. It depicts an as yet unidentified young aristocrat in a brown coat and holding a tricorn, and remained erroneously attributed to Alessandro's father Pietro for some time. The piece was painted just a few years prior to the fall of Serenissima to Napoleon and after the Congress of Vienna.
Certificate
Dr. Filippo Pedrocco, Venice, 3.12.2000.
Provenance
The Ross Collection, USA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (inv. no. 17.588). - Private ownership, Italy. – Lempertz auction 1029, 17.5.2014, Cologne, lot 1248. - Private collection, Rhineland.
Literature
L. Brosch, in: Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, begr. v. Ulrich Thieme u. Felix Becker, Leipzig 1929, p. 357-8 (as: Pietro Longhi). - Terisio Pignatti: Pietro Longhi (=Profili e saggi di arte veneta 6), Venice, 1968, p. 132 (not attributed to Pietro Longhi). - Burton B. Fredericksen u. Federico Zeri: Census of pre-nineteenth-century Italian paintings in North American public collections, Cambridge 1972, p. 108 (not as Pietro Longhi). - Filippo Pedrocco: Il Settecento a Venezia. I Vedutisti, Milan 2001, p. 24, illus. (attributed to Alessandro Longhi).