Northern Follower of Jusepe de Ribera

John Crichton-Stuart (1933-1993), 6th Marquess of Bute;

By whose estate sold ("Sold by Order of the Executors of the 6th Marquess of Bute") London, Christie's, 9 December 1994, lot 344;

Where acquired.

N. Spinosa, Ribera: L'opera completa, Naples 2003, p. 345, under cat. no. B2 (only Hearing, as a copy after Ribera's lost original);

N. Spinosa, Ribera: L'opera completa (second edition), Naples 2006, p. 382, under cat. no. B2 (only Hearing, as a copy after Ribera);

N. Spinosa, Ribera: La obra completa, Madrid 2008, p. 498, under cat. no. C4 (only Hearing, as a copy after Ribera);

T.P. Olson, Ribera's Repetitions: Paper and Canvas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Naples, University Park 2024, pp. 49-50, reproduced fig. 21 (as a copy after a lost original).

This pair of paintings personifying Hearing and Smell derive from the celebrated series of the Five Senses painted by Jusepe de Ribera in Rome circa 1615-1616. Ribera’s originals, commissioned by the Spanish diplomat and collector Pietro Cussida, were among the earliest and most influential manifestations of Caravaggesque naturalism in Rome, translating allegorical subjects into uncompromisingly realistic half-length figures drawn from everyday life. The present works correspond closely to Ribera’s Hearing (Koelliker collection, Rome) and Smell (Abelló collection, Madrid), and preserve the earthy palette, dramatic chiaroscuro, and tactile realism that made the series so admired by contemporaries.

At the same time, these paintings display qualities that suggest the hand of a seventeenth-century Northern artist working in Rome. The figures’ slightly cooler tonality, smoother transitions of light, and heightened attention to surface detail impart a distinctly Northern inflection to Ribera’s robust idiom. This raises the intriguing possibility that the paintings were executed by a Northern artist with first-hand access to the originals—perhaps even copied directly from them. Indeed, Cussida was an important patron of several Northern artists working in Rome, including Dirck van Baburen and David de Haen, who was recorded as a guest at Cussida’s palace on the Via del Corso in 1621.

Documented by Giulio Mancini as early as 1620 as part of Cussida’s collection, Ribera’s Five Senses rapidly achieved canonical status, inspiring copies, variants, and adaptations well into the seventeenth century. The present Hearing and Smell stand as eloquent testimonies to that process of transmission: faithful to Ribera’s revolutionary conception of allegory as lived experience, yet subtly refracted through a Northern sensibility, they vividly evoke the cosmopolitan artistic milieu of early Baroque Rome.