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| The Letter |
Artist:Pietro Longhi (Pietro Falca) (Italian, Venice 1701–1785 Venice)
Date:1746
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:24 x 19 1/2 in. (61 x 49.5 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Frederick C. Hewitt Fund, 1912
An older man with a coin in his hand negotiates with a procuress for the favors of a pretty young woman, who reads with evident pleasure the letter he has written her. The great Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni praised Longhi's dedication to truth, by which he meant the way the artist chronicled the foibles of contemporary society. This picture with three others in the Museum's collection seems to have formed part of a series painted in 1746 for the Gambardi family in Florence. The frames are original to the pictures.
Catalogue Entry
Pietro Longhi was renowned in Venice for his small paintings representing scenes of everyday life. These were often salacious and depicted love stories, even though no particular narrative was presented and it is unlikely that these works would have had any moral commentary. The paintings often appeared in series and, again, these habitually did not follow a specific theme. Such paintings were avidly collected by patrician families, and the theatrical comic writer Carlo Goldoni praised Longhi’s work.
This scene is set in a poor room where seamstresses are meant to be at work—one, in fact, is fast asleep on the left. A pretty girl, dressed in pink and white, is intent in reading a love letter, presumably written by the older gentleman who enters the room from the right. He is offering a coin to the old woman, probably a procuress, who is acting as a business-like intermediary between man and girl. A young girl is innocently playing with her doll as this transaction takes place around her. For a discussion of the theme, see Bagemihl 1988.
This painting, together with three others at the MMA (14.32.2, 17.190.12, 36.16), is said to have been a part of a larger set of canvases by Longhi. It has been proposed (Volpi 1917) that the artist painted twenty pictures for the Gambardi family in Florence, and that the last member of the family left half of the set to the marchese Freschi in Padua and the other half to the conte Miari de’ Cumani in Padua. Out of the ten Freschi canvases, two are supposed to be in the National Gallery, London (An Interior with Three Women and a Seated Man and The Exhibition of a Rhinoceros in Venice), and two others in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (The Little Concert and The Tooth Puller). These two pairs, however, are different in format from each other. The four MMA paintings, instead, were sold by conte Giacomo Miari de’ Cumani in 1912–13. He was said to have owned ten paintings by Longhi, four of which are at the MMA, and six of which were in the collection of Elia Volpi in Florence and later in that of Lionello Perera in New York, before being dispersed at two sales: four were sold at Sotheby’s, London, on June 24, 1964 (nos. 31–34) and two were sold at Sotheby’s, London, on April 19, 1967 (nos. 18–19). Documentation in the MMA archives, however, suggests that conte Miari owned fourteen canvases by Longhi, and not ten. He commissioned copies of the paintings he sold, but these works are still untraced. Four of the Miari canvases were sold to Carlo Balboni who, together with Antonio Carrer, sold them to the MMA. Of these four, two (14.32.1 and 14.32.2) were exhibited at the Museum, while two were sold to J. Pierpont Morgan (17.190.12) and Henry Walters (36.16), before eventually returning to the Museum separately. Of the six remaining paintings that were sold in 1964 and 1967, three are the Artist Sketching an Elegant Company (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), The Quack Doctor (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and The Card Players (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Three more (A Gentleman and his Wife Taking Chocolate, A Musical Party, A Girl Dancing at a Picnic) are currently untraced. The set probably dates around 1746, the date inscribed next to Longhi’s signature on the back of The Visit (14.32.2). All four paintings have matching eighteenth-century Venetian frames, supporting their origin from the same set of canvases.
This painting was engraved by Cattini, and another version of it was in the collection of Sir Brinsley Ford in London.
Xavier F. Salomon 2011
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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