Additional Images

Provenance:

Acquired from a former dealer Paris, France (uncertain);
Estate Collection, Toronto

Note:

Many years ago, Maia-Mari Sutnik, Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), where she began developing the photography collection in 1979, proposed a lengthy discourse about this unattributed painting for the Private Collector in Toronto from whose Estate this work was consigned.

Ms. Sutnik opined that this scene depicts classical antiquity elements; Corinthian order columns and remains of a portico with vegetation on the architrave, probably the Temple of Neptune. A statue of a draped female stands by the base of farthest column. Foregrounded with two male figures, one stands with a cane and the other sits on the ground with a dog reaching up from an embankment. Beyond the ruins of two rounded Roman arches with three side columns is an imposing conical tomb finial and rubble at the site. On the right, a standing half-clad ghostly male figure emerges from nearby water’s edge. The background depicts a range of hills and a pallid sky.

Ms. Sutnik did not arrive at a positive attribution, but rather sketched out a terrain on which further research is essential. She concluded it was closest in the category of works generated by the Italian artist Giovanni Paolo Panini.

We are grateful for Maia-Mari Sutnik's extensive and most interesting research to offer with the lot.