Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Artist Livio Mehus (Italian, born Flanders, ca. 1630 - 1691)

Formerly attributed to Pier Francesco Mola (Italian, 1612 - 1666)

Dateca. 1675

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 36 3/16 x 30 1/2 inches (91.92 x 77.47 cm)

Credit LineGift of friends in memory of Jesse Clyde Nichols

Object number52-1

Signedat right, on left side of donkey: "M"

On View

Not on view

Collections

European Art

Terms

DescriptionA seated woman (the Virgin) sits holding a baby boy (Christ Child) on her lap. She is seated on a rock near the center foreground of the landscape composition. To the left, an old woman (Salome) kneels in profile and offers a piece of fruit to the Child with her left hand. Behind Salome is a young servant girl holding a small bowl of milk and a terracotta pitcher. In the extreme right middleground, a bearded man (Joseph) attends to a donkey, flanked by a pair of columns that span the height of the compositions. Various rustic stone buildings can be seen in the left background, as well as several exotic trees.Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Junior Art Museum, Des Moines, Iowa, December 3, 1958-January 21, 1959, no cat.

Hutchinson Public Library, Hutchinson, Kansas, November 1962-February 1963, no cat.

Religion in Painting, Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, December 7, 1963-January 30, 1964, no. 1.

Gallery Label

This painting depicts a period of repose taken by the Holy Family during its flight into Egypt to escape King Herod. Here, Mary and the infant Christ are tended by two women who may be Mary's midwife and Salome, who doubted the identity of Christ until she touched him. In the background to the right are washerwomen, an allusion to Mary's industrious nature, and Joseph, who tends the donkey. Mehus worked chiefly in Florence where he was appointed Superintendent of Painting to the Medici, the ruling dynasty and important art patrons. The painting's rich shadows, warm colors and moody landscape recall the work of Venetian artists Giorgione and Titian in the previous century and are typical of the 17th-century, neo-Venetian style popular in Rome and elsewhere.

Provenance

With David M. Koetser Gallery, Zürich, by 1951;

Purchased from Koetser by Central Picture Galleries, New York, as by Pier Francesca Mola, 1951-1952;

Purchased from Central Picture Galleries by anonymous friends of Jesse Clyde Nichols, 1952;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1952.

Published References

“Art Gift in Memory of J.C. Nichols,” The Kansas City Star (March 30, 1952): C5, (repro.), as by Pier Francesco Mola.

Gallery News (The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts) vol. 19, no. 4 (April 1952): unpaginated, (repro.).

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 262, as by Pier Francesco Mola.

Religion in Painting, exh. cat. (Little Rock, Arkansas: The Arkansas Arts Center, 1963), unpaginated, (repro.), as by Pier Francesco Mola.

Ralph T. Coe, “The Baroque and Rococco in France and Italy,” Apollo 96 (1972): 538, as by Pier Francesco Mola.

Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri, Census of pre-nineteenth-century Italian paintings in North American public collections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 238, 275, 589, as Roman school.

Ross E. Taggart and George l. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 260, as by Pier Francesco Mola.

Letter from Richard Cocke to Ellen R. Goheen, October 10, 1874, NAMA curatorial files.

Letter from M. Chiarini to Edgar Peters Bowron, March 22, 1979, NAMA curatorial files, as by Livio Mehus.

Edgar Peter Bowron, “Mehus, not Mola,” Bulletin (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) vol. 5, no. 6 (January 1981):16-19, (repro.), as by Livio Mehus.

Edgar Peters Bowron, Review of Repertorio della Pittura Romana della fine del Seicento e del Settecento, by Giancarlo Sestieri, The Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1098 (September 1994): 627.

Elliot W. Rowlands, The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Italian Paintings, 1300-1800 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1996), 323-328, (repro), as by Livio Mehus.

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