Rothschild foundation acquires lost Guercino masterpiece

The portrait of Moses surfaced in Paris in 2022 and will form part of a loan exhibition at Waddesdon Manor in March

Guercino’s Moses (around 1618-19) has been bought by Jacob Rothschild’s charitable foundation for around €2m. The painting is expected to be on permanent display at Waddesdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire, which is managed by the Rothschild Foundation on behalf of the National Trust.

Few institutions in the UK are able to buy Old Master paintings at this sort of a price, but the foundation is backed by the wealth of the banking family. The charity’s income in the latest financial year was £41m.

Moses was a “sleeper”, offered at a Paris-based Chayette & Cheval auction in November 2022 as by a 17th-century Bolognese follower of Guido Reni, with an estimate of just €5,000-€6,000. Several dealers spotted its significance, believing it might be a Guercino, and it sold for €590,000. The buyer was the London/Paris dealer Moretti Fine Art.

The painting was later restored and examined by specialists. The Guercino attribution is now supported by Letizia Treves (formerly National Gallery, London) and Keith Christiansen (formerly Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). They believe it was painted by the artist in Cento, near Bologna, in around 1618-19.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) got the name Guercino (“Little Squinter”) because of an eye condition. Legend goes that as an infant he was woken up suddenly by an extremely loud noise, an episode that left him with his right eye permanently fixed at an angle in its socket.

In the painting, the bearded Moses looks upwards, raising his hands to communicate with God. Although in most depictions by other artists the prophet is shown with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, in Guercino’s composition we just see the animated upper part of his body.

Moar: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/01/30/rothschild-foundation-acquires-lost-guercino