Marquis de Colbert, by 1905;
By descent through marriage to the Ducs de Bisaccia (see below);
Anonymous sale, Paris, Millon et Associés, 14 December 2007, lot 8;
Acquired by the present collector in 2008.

Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, From the Private Collections of Texas, 22 November 2009 – 21 March 2010, no. 20.

R.R. Brettell, C.D. Dickerson III, From the Private Collections of Texas, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth 2009-10, pp. 152-55, no. 20, reproduced.

The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is on a little copper panel supported by an old cradle. The restoration is fairly recent. Each corner has been retouched, and there is a narrow line of retouching along the extreme base edge, also at the left edge, with some at the centre of the right edge, and several brief vertical scratches or marks retouched in the foliage to the left of the top edge with one near the top in the central trees. The sky is beautifully intact, apart from a little patch of retouching in the top right corner, with an even flow of unworn glazed light. The horizon and distant landscape is exceptionally finely preserved as well, as is the water with the reflections of the bushes and the foreground including the figures. There is one small slanting scrape retouched in the foliage at the lower right centre near the outer edge of the bushes above the water, with another little retouching near the upper right edge of the trees. The beautifully unworn quality of the paint is richly intact almost throughout, with any little old losses or scuffs almost entirely at the edges. The fine detail and glazed depth of colour is unusually well preserved. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This serene landscape, in which a shepherd boy rests on a rock near a river bank while the sun descends beneath the distant hills, has only recently (in 2007) come to light and thus been reassigned to the oeuvre of Claude Lorrain, the pre-eminent landscape painter in Rome in the first half of the 17th century. Its copper support, the exceptionally fine detail, and its similarity to several other works listed in the artist's Liber Veritatis, reinforce the widely-held belief that it was painted in the m🌊id-♌1630s.

The painting has much in common, in terms of composition, subject-matter and topographical detail, with a small canvas recorded by Roethlisberger in the F.F. Madan collection, London, and dated by him to circa 1636, a similar date to that proposed for the present work (see fig. 1).¹ In the Madan canvas a young shepherd boy is seated on a tree stump in the right foreground, playing a pipe while his herd of goats graze at the water's edge. On the far river bank is a dominant tree with a gap to its left allowing a view deeper into the wood. In the distance, before the gently rolling hills, is the same circular ruin. In short, the construction of each composition is astonishingly similar and it seems most likely that they were painted within a short time of each other. Roethlisberger allies the Madan painting with a landscape in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and a Judgement of Paris (Duke of Buccleuch);²  had the present work been known to him in 1961, however, he would surely have established even firmer links between it and the Madan work. Another link may be made with Claude's best-known etching, The Cowherd of 1636, which is built along almost identical compositional lines.³  The only major differences between the works are the introduction of a house between the trees on the far bank and a more complete view of the tree to the right.

The attribution to Claude has been confirmed by Prof. Marcel Roethlisberger following inspection of the original (private communication to the owner 2 November 2007).

A note on the Provenance:
Two old labels on the reverse denote that the painting was in both the Colbert and Bisaccia collections. It may have descended to the Dukes of Bisaccia by one of two means: either through the 1853 marriage of Marie de Colbert-Chabanais (1833-1917; daughter of Auguste Napoléon Joseph de Colbert-Chabanais, comte de Colbert) to Auguste Stanislas Marie Mathieu🍬 de La Rochefoucauld (1822–1887) 3rd duc de Doudeauville, whose brother, Sosthène Marie Charles Gabriel, 4th Duc de Doudeauville, inherited the title of Duc de Bisaccia; or, as is more likely, through the marriage of this latter's son, Comte Edouard François Marie (1874-1968 and the next Duc de Bisaccia incumbent), to Marie Camille de Colbert (1883-1869), daughter of Pierre Emile Arnould Edouard de Colbert, 3rd baron de Colbert, marquis de Chabanais.

1.  M. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain. The Paintings, London 1961, vol. I, p. 479, no. 215.
2.  Ibid., vol. I, pp. 108-10, no. 8, reproduced fig. 40; pp. 461-3, no. 201, reproduced vol. II, fig. 22.
3.  Brettell et al., see Literature, reproduced p. 154.