Young Man with a Helmet

Artist Giuseppe Maria Crespi (Italian, 1665 - 1747)

Date1725-1730

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 25 1/4 x 19 15/16 inches (64.14 x 50.62 cm)
Framed: 32 15/16 x 27 3/4 inches (83.64 x 70.49 cm)

Credit LineGift of Mr. and Mrs. Fred Cameron Vincent in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Irwin Kirkwood

Object number44-45

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

European Art

Terms

DescriptionA young man is depicted in half-length format against a brown background tinged with red at left. He wears a silver-gray helmet adorned with plumes (one black and the other tawny), a gray steel gorget, and a dark olive tunic with gray sleeves. Although his shoulders are almost parallel to the picture plane, his head turns slightly to his right, while his eyes, partially obscured in shadow, look directly out at the viewer. At the center foreground, his hands clasp the hilt of a sword.Exhibition History

Exhibition History

An Exhibition of Paintings by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Durlacher Brothers, New York, January 6-February 6, 1937, no. 4.

Men in Arms, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, February 2-March 4, 1943, no. 21.

Three Baroque Masters: Strozzi, Crespi, Piazzetta, Baltimore Museum of Art, April 28- June 4, 1944; St. Louis Art Museum, June 17-July 15, 1944, no. 31.

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, 1665- 1747, Pinacoteca Nazionale e Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna, Italy, September 7-November 11, 1990, no. 86.

Gallery Label

Military subjects, with their aura of romantic freedom and potential violence, were always in demand from Baroque period artists. Here, however, the sitter looks amused, so he may only be dressed as a soldier for the sake of the portrait. Such candor, as well as the dark shadows cast by the helmet around the eyes, recalls Rembrandt, the great 17th-century Dutch artist whom Crespi greatly admired. In Bologna, where the classicizing Baroque of Guido Reni's Saint Francis and Guercino's Saint Luke reigned supreme well into the 18th century, Crespi's more intimate or personal work was more likely to be expressed in drawings than in paintings such as this.

Provenance

Berta Gerster-Gardini (d. 1951), Dresden, Cincinnati and New York, by October 9, 1941 [1];

Purchased from Gerster-Gardini by Durlacher Brothers, New York, stock no. 125, October 9, 1941-September 29, 1944 [2];

Purchased from Durlacher by Fred C. (d. 1945) and Susan Gay (d. 1955) Vincent, Mission Hills, KS, September 29, 1944;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1944.

NOTES:

[1] Gerster-Gardini moved to the U.S. in 1922. See Philip Hart, Fritz Reiner: a Biography (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994): 23-28. As the painting was lent by an unknown lender in 1937 to Durlacher Brothers, which purchased the painting from Gerster-Gardini three years later, it is possible that Gerster-Gardini owned it by 1937.

[2] Getty Research Library, Los Angeles, Durlacher Brothers Records, Box 14, Ledger 1937-1966, copy in Nelson-Atkins curatorial files.

Published References

An Exhibition of Paintings by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, exh. cat. (New York: Durlacher Brothers, 1937), unpaginated.

Catalogue of an Exhibition of Men in Arms, February 2 through March 4, 1943, exh. cat. (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1943), unpaginated, (repro.).

Aline B. Loucheim, “Trio con Brio: Baroque Comes to Baltimore,” Art News 43, no. 6 (May 1-14, 1944): 10, 24.

Gallery News (The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts) (December 1944): 4.

Three Baroque Masters: Strozzi, Crespi, Piazzetta, exh. cat. (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1944), 41, (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 Giovanni Battista [sic] Crespi.

Mira Pajes Merriman, “The Paintings of Giuseppe Maria Crespi” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1968), 284, (repro.).

Ralph T. Coe, “The Baroque and Rococo in France and Italy,” Apollo 96, no.130 (December 1972): 541 [repr. in Denys Sutton, ed., William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City (London: Apollo Magazine, 1972), 73].

Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 59, 506, 589.

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.

Letter from Dr. Fritz Heinemann to Miss Goheen, January 28, 1975, NAMA curatorial file.

Renato Roli, Pittura Bolognese, 1650-1800, dal Cignani ai Gandolfi (Bologna: Alfa, 1977), 170, 250, (repro.).

Mira Pajes Merriman, Giuseppe Maria Crespi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 295, (repro.).

Hugh Brickstocke, “Bologna, Frankfurt and Moscow: Giuseppe Maria Crespi,” Burlington Magazine 132 (1990): 897-98.

Andrea Emiliani and August B. Rave, eds., Giuseppe Maria Crespi, 1665-1747, exh. cat. (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1990), LXXV, 85,172, 173, 422, 423, (repro.).

Letter from John T. Spike to Eliot W. Rowlands, January 11, 1993, NAMA curatorial files.

Michael Churchman and Scott Erbes, High Ideals and Aspirations: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1933-1993 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 64.

Kristie C. Wolferman, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Culture Comes to Kansas City (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 69.

Elliot W. Rowlands, The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Italian Paintings 1300-1800 (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1996), 349-55, (repro.).

Old Master Paintings (New York: Christie’s, October 4, 2007), 190.

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