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Portrait of a lawyer, oil on canvas, 83,2x66,7cm, Private collection
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This painter came from the City of Cento and acquired Europe-wide fame in the 1620s, briefly residing in Rome during the reign of Pope Gregory XV, becoming his protege. In decades to come, Guercino`s fame only increased as corroborated by his book of commissions (Libro del conti).
The Portrait of a Lawyer has a famous collecting history. After appearing on the American art market in 1987, it ended up in the collection of Edmund P.Pillsbury, Director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth Texas. Sir Denis Mahon traced the work`s provenance back to the collection of Empress Josephine`s son Eugene de Beauharnais. This revelation was made, thanks to an entry by F.Muxel in a catalogue printed in Munich, providing information about the Leuchtenberg collection. This subsequent travels of the work took it to Saint Petersburg and before the October revolution to Paris (O.Mahon, in Giovanni Francesco Barbieri 1991, pp. 194-195). Information dating back to 1810 tells us that at that time the painting belonged to the Marchese Francesco Sampieri, who sold the collection of 130 works to Eugene de Beauharnais, Vice-Regent of Italy (before the sale, Guercino`s Portrait of a Lawyer hung on the wall of Francesco Giovanni Sampieri`s apartment).
It is possible that the man depicted in the portrait is lawyer Francesco Righetti (1595-1673), a doctor of legal sciences, who was well-known in Guercino`s native city of Cento, which was also home to the artist`s studio until 1642 (Salerno 1988, pp. 212-213). The portrait was painted between 1626 and 1628. The lawyer depicted in the painting was an energetic, active personality, a member of the Community Commitee (Consiglio della Comunita) and author of publications with a legal content, as emphasised by the legal tomes on the bookshelves (Helmholz 1992 pp.185-188). A wonderful example of a still life with the interaction of light and shade, as it was described in the 18th century by Giuseppe Maria Crespi.
