The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired A Drinking and Musical Party (around 1619-20), a raucous genre painting by the renowned Caravaggisti, Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582-1622). The painting goes on view today (23 April) in the Getty Center’s East Pavilion.
Manfredi was so uniquely successful among the followers of Caravaggio at conjuring the master’s style that, until Manfredi’s rediscovery by scholars in the 20th century, A Drinking and Musical Party was attributed to Caravaggio. The painting’s dramatically lit tavern scene features four elegantly dressed young men seated around a table eating and drinking, and one of them plays a lute; in the background, two servants cheekily help themselves to wine and food, while a third refills the glass of one of the seated men. The composition is rich with details, from the knife and scraps of food on the table to one sitter’s sword very close at hand and the fine textures of the men’s clothes.
“Although Manfredi was not properly a pupil of Caravaggio, his strikingly realistic depictions of genre scenes crucially contributed to the European success of the Caravaggesque movement,” Davide Gasparotto, the senior curator of paintings at the Getty, said in a statement. “Since its reappearance in 1976, A Drinking and Musical Party has been considered one of Manfredi’s greatest paintings.”
The painting was featured prominently in the exhibition Beyond Caravaggio (2016-17) at the National Gallery in London. Though the Getty’s acquisition announcement states that the painting comes “from a private collector”, two years ago it was part of a group of Old Masters offered at Christie’s in New York from the holdings of the Chilean collectors Alvaro Saieh and Ana Guzmán, collectively known as the Alana Collection. Ahead of the June 2022 auction, Christie’s had given Manfredi’s painting an estimate of $4m to $6m, but the work does not appear to have sold.
According to the Getty’s digital collection, it has acquired two works from the Alana Collection: Agnolo Bronzino’s Virgin and Child with Saint Elizabeth and Saint John the Baptist (around 1540-45) and the polychromed marble pair The Annunciation (around 1333-34) by Giovanni di Balduccio.
The Manfredi is a significant addition to the Getty’s collection of Caravaggisti paintings, which already includes Valentin de Boulogne’s Christ and the Adulteress (around 1618-22), Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s The Supper at Emmaus (around 1615-25) and Gerrit van Honthorst’s Christ Crowned with Thorns (around 1620). This is the museum’s second major painting acquisition this month: it recently became the first museum in the US to acquire a painting by Sophie Frémiet, a pupil of Jacques-Louis David.
