Richard Van Bleeck

Portrait of a Boy with Parrot

1732

Oil on canvas 50 x 40 inches; 127 x 101.6 cm Framed dimensions: 151.5 x 127 cm Inscribed on plinth: ‘VOTIS X ET XX’ Not signed Painted c.1748 Collections: Christie’s London, 23rd December 1954, lot.272; J. Singer; Somerville Simpson Ltd, London, by 1985; The Matthiesen Gallery, London; Richard Feigen, New York; Matthew Rutenberg, New York to 2019; Lowell Libson and Jonny Yarker Ltd. Literature: Stella Rudolph, La Pittura del’ 700 a Roma, Milan, 1983, reproduced pl.133; Jacob Simon, Handel, a celebration of his life and times 1685-1759, exh. cat. London, (National Portrait Gallery), 1985, no.196; Catherine Whistler, Baroque Later Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, London, 2016, pp.102-105, reproduced p.104 Exhibited: London, National Portrait Gallery, Handel, a celebration of his life and times 1685-1759, 1985-86, no.196, reproduced p.198 This powerful portrait of the antiquarian and courtier Sir Charles Frederick was completed in 1748 by the Roman painter Andrea Casali. Frederick, as comptroller of the royal laboratory, one of the ‘great officers’ of the Board of Ordinance at Woolwich, had just been responsible for the famed pyrotechnic display celebrating the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle: the so-called ‘Royal Fireworks’ for which George Frederick Handel composed music. Casali’s portrait pays tribute to Frederick’s role as comptroller of the royal laboratory, showing him with a firing diagram and mortar, it also points to Frederick’s interests as an antiquarian with the inclusion of antique relief. Casali had first met Frederick in Rome in 1738, where he had painted his portrait, Frederick subsequently encouraged Casali to travel to London. This probably accounts for the unusual format; rather than a modern man of science, Casali casts Frederick as an alchemist bent on some mystic discovery, as such, it is one of the most unusual portraits of the period. Andrea Casali was a pupil of Sebastiano Conca and then of Francesco Trevisani, who recommended him to the Spanish court in 1736. He enjoyed some success in Rome as a painter of frescoes and altarpieces, notably a large cycle of Scenes from the Life of St Dominic at the cloister of S. Sisto Vecchio, for which he was made a Knight of the Golden Spur in 1729. Casali began painting Grand Tourist portraits in Rome around 1738. His first portrait of Sir Charles Frederick is dated that year Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), it casts Frederick as a focused scholar, showing him seated at an elaborately carved console table, hard at work. In common with other Grand Tour portraiture of the period, Casali includes a famous Roman landmark in the background, in this case the façade of the Pantheon. Horace Walpole noted that it was thanks to the encouragement of ‘Mr Frederick and his Friends at Rome’ that Casali travelled to London in 1741. Charles Frederick was a fascinating Augustan polymath. Born at Fort St George, Madras, where his father, Sir Thomas Frederick, was governor, he successively matriculated at New College, Oxford (1725), was called to the Middle Temple (1728), became a Fellow of the Royal Society (1731) and Director of the Society of Antiquaries (1735). His interests were wide ranging. Frederick was an amateur architect, he designed the monument to Lucy, Lady Lyttleton, in Hagley Church and the monument to Thomas Miller, bishop of Waterford, in Highclere church, Hampshire. He was a numismatist and collector of antiquities, as well as an amateur scientist. It was in the last capacity that he was appointed comptroller of the royal laboratory at Woolwich and clerk of the deliveries in 1746, this was the most junior of the ‘great officers’ who made up the membership of the royal Board of Ordnance. This appointment came through the good offices of the master-general of the Ordnance, a fellow antiquarian, John, 2nd Duke of Montagu. As comptroller, Frederick was responsible for the fireworks celebration of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, for which Handel composed his celebrated music. As Horace Walpole wrote to his cousin, Henry Seymour Conway: ‘Charles Frederick has turned all his virtu into fireworks, and, by his influence with the Ordnance has prepared such a spectacle for the proclamation of Peace as is to surpass all its predecessors of bouncing memory. It is to open with a concert of fifteen hundred hands, and conclude with so many thousand crackers all set to music, that all the men killed in the war are to be wakened with a crash, as if it was the day of judgement, and fall a-dancing, like the troops in the Rehearsal. I wish you could see him making squibs of his papillotes, and bronzed over with a patina of gunpowder, and talking himself still hoarser on the superiority that his fireworks will have over the Roman naumachia.’ Performed in Green Park, the fireworks were mounted on a temporary structure designed by the architect Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni decorated by Adrea Soldi and Casali. Casali’s second portrait of Frederick was completed following the success of the firework display. In this remarkable image, we discover Frederick at work, dressed in almost monastic garb, pouring over an impossibly large tome propped on an antique altar. The altar is identifiable as a Roman relief depicting Victory writing on a shield, the original is at Villa Medici in Rome, but was engraved by Pietro Santi Bartoli...

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