Oil painting, 'Two Gentlemen of Verona', Angelica Kauffman, 1788

Four figures dressed in Renaissance fashion in a forest, a man rescues a woman from another while a young man on the left watches the scene.

Bequeathed by Miss E. M. M. Eaton

Bequeathed by Miss E. M. M. Eaton, 1949

Historical significance: Angelica Kauffman's pictures were particularly popular in England and were used in interior decorations such as murals and designs painted on furniture, mostly in cooperation with the architect Robert Adam. Her designs were also often distributed as prints. The present composition has been engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti for publication as plate VII of volume 1 of Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery dated 1 August 1792. The two figures in the right background do not appear in either of the engraving or finished version.
The episode depicted is from Shakespeare's Gentlemen of Verona, Act 5 scene 4, at the climax of the play when Valentine rescues Silvia from Proteus in presence of Julia (as Sebastian).
When this oil sketch was executed, Angelica Kauffmann was back in Rome but she did not interrupt her links with the London print publishers. A list her husband established revealed that in the ten years that followed her departure from London, she provided about 22 pictures for engraving.

An oil sketch is a type of painted work of small dimensions that first appeared in the 16th century. It derives from the Renaissance practice of preparatory drawings in pen and ink and is generally executed as a preparatory study in mixed oil and tempera for a finished larger work as an alternative to drawings. The finish of these studies, often called modello, can be more or less refined. The earliest known oil sketches are by Polidoro da Caravaggio (ca. 1497-ca. 1543) but the technique spread quickly among the artists including Federico Barocci (1528-1612), Cristofano Allori (1577-1621), Tintoretto (1519-1594 ) and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-1664 ) and became an important feature of the Baroque art. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) for example is one of the greatest examples of Baroque artists' use of the oil sketch and contributed to introduce its practice in Flanders. This method benefits to both artists and patrons as not only the artists were able to present and promote their work through these support but the patrons could also request an oil sketch to evaluate a project at an early stage. Sometimes considered as a works of art in se, oil sketches were also offered by the artists to connoisseurs. Oil sketches were still favoured during the Rococo and the Romantic period but at the end of the 19th century, the artists tent to paint more and more directly on the support, abandoning thus gradually the oil sketch in its function as a preparatory study.

Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807) was born in Switzerland and was seen as a child prodigy. She soon specialised in history and portrait paintings while in Italy (especially Florence, Rome and Naples, Bologna, Parma and Venice) she was influenced by the nascent Neo-classical style. She became a member of the Roman Accademia di San Luca at the age of 23. She arrived in London in June 1766 and remained there for 15 years before moving back to Italy with her second husband the painter Antonio Zucchi (1726-1796). In London, she was a founder-member of the Royal Academy. All her life, she enjoyed international patronage such as the family of George III in Britain, Grand Duke Paul and Price Nikolay Yusupov in Russia, Queen Caroline of Naples and Emperor Joseph II of Austria among others. She died in Rome where her funeral was arranged by the Neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822).

This painting is an oil sketch, i.e. a preparatory study for the finished composition The Two Gentlemen of Verona, signed and dated 1788, commissioned by Josiah Boydell for his Shakespeare Gallery and currently in the Davis Museum and Cultural Centre, Wellesley College, Massachusetts. It is a fine example of Neo-classical art drawing from literary sources from the Renaissance as well as classical subject matters.

P.32-1949