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WELCOME TO PELHAM GALLERIES |
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| A Pair of Piedmontese Chinoiserie Pictures, representing Courtly Ladies engaged in domestic activities with their servant
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One panel signed PM 1759 FEC for Pietro Massa, Turin
Oil on canvas heightened with gilding
Each framed: 3 ft. 9 ½ in. x 2 ft. 6 in. (116 x 76 cm)
Provenance: Possibly the Marchesi Medici del Vascello, Piedmont, Italy;
Pietro Accorsi, Turin
Exhibited: Mostra del Barocco Piemontese, Palazzo Carignano, Turin, 1937
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The fashion for chinoiserie that swept across 18th-century Europe found a particular resonance in Northern Italy. This was particularly true of Piedmont, and such was the popularity of the style that no fewer than twenty-seven fully documented interiors alla China survive in the former royal palaces and other private residences in and around Turin (see Lucia Caterina and Cristina Mossetti, Villa della Regina. Il riflesso dell’Oriente nel Piemonete del Settecento, Turin 2005). Chinese interiors were created using either wallpaper or silk panels imported directly from China or by painting and lacquering chinoiserie scenes directly on to walls, dados and ceilings.
Massa was the leading creator of Chinese interiors in Turin during the mid 1700s, and his most famous surviving work is the painted decoration of exotic flowers, birds and Chinese figures on the walls and ceilings of the four gabinetti alla China at each corner of the Villa della Regina in Turin, carried out between 1732 and 1735. Massa also produced similar chinoiserie work in 1744 for the doors and dado panels of the Galleria delle Battaglie in the Palazzo Reale, Turin, completed in 1744 (ill. in Caterina and Mossetti, p.470-73); the panelling of the Gabinetto Cinese in the Palazzo Graneri, Turin, c.1740-1750 (now in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Schloss Köpenick, Berlin, ill. Caterina and Mossetti, p.552-56), and the red-ground decoration commissioned by San Martino d’Agliè di Garessio for the Gabinetto of the Palazzo Parato in Grugliasco outside Turin, now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.
The same monogram PM appears on four occasions in Massa’s extant work at the Villa della Regina, including on the fans of a Chinese man and woman in the Gabinetto verso mezzo giorno, e Ponente alla China (illustrated in Caterina and Mossetti, fig.29, p.147, and figs. 16-17, p.329).
This pair of canvases originally formed part of a larger suite decorating a Chinese room, and a photograph of the 1937 exhibition Mostra del Barocco Piemontese in the Palazzo Carignano, Turin (reproduced in Caterina and Mossetti, p.412), shows a partial view of a room decorated entirely with chinoiserie paintings of various sizes, in which one of these canvases is visible. A larger painting illustrated in the photograph is also one of a pair that is now serendipitously with Pelham. Neither of the larger canvases is signed, but both bear the label of the Marchese Medici del Vascello, to whom this smaller pair may also have belonged. It is not known whether the larger pair of panels was in the possession of the Medici del Vascello family when they were exhibited in 1937, nor when the entire ensemble was dispersed.
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