Spaightwood Galleries

The 18th century is a new area of interest for us. We have had three drawings by Mouricault ever since I fell in love with them while on a research trip to Paris; our more recent acquisitions of works by Crespi, Parrocel, and I:D:N (possibly Jean François de Neufforge, Comblain-au-Point, 1714-1791 Paris, a sculptor, architect, and printmaker), are perhaps simply responses to interesting pieces that caught our eye either because one or both of us was interested in a particular image (like Justice or Mary Magdalene, acquired during our show of Images of Women in Old Master Prints and Drawings of the winter of 2002) or because someone made us an offer we couldn't refuse, in this case a portfolio of drawings mostly by I:D:N, but also containing several late 16th or 17th century drawings. Of the artists on this page, Crespi is certainly the most prominent. Following the publication of a study and catalogue raisonne of his works (Mira Pajes Merriman, Giuseppe Maria Crespi (lo Spagnolo) [Rizzoli, 1980]) he was featured in a show at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth that occasioned a fascinating accompanying monograph by John T. Spike, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy (1986). Other retrospectives followed in short order, including Andrea Emiliani and A. B. Rave, Giuseppe Maria Crespi 1665-1727 (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1990; this show also travelled to Stuttgart, Germany); Elvio Mich, ed, Giuseppe Maria Crespi ed altri Maestri Bolognesi nelle Collezioni di Castel Thun. Il Ciclo di Ercole dalla Quadreria di Francesco Ghisilieri (Trento: Castello del Buonconsiglio, 1998); see also Michael Liebmann, Giuseppe Maria Crespi. Mit einem Text von Luigi Crespi (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1976).