With Jean Luc Baroni, London.;
From whom acquired by the present collector, November 1984.

This hitherto unpublished copper is a characteristic work by Gaetano Gandolfi, and contains all of the hallmark characteristics for which the artist is celebrated: a dynamic, loose handling of paint, bold coloring, and a fluid, dramatic composition. Though no known preparatory drawing or large scale finished composition for the work is known, the painterly technique suggests that it is a preparatory modello for a larger unknown Agony of Christ. Gandolfi produced these freely painted, but highly finished, preliminary pictures, often of a reasonably large size, from early on (see for example the Vision of Saint Jerome in a private collection, London that he painted at the very beginning of his career as a study for an altarpiece of 1757 still in situ in the Oratorio del Suffragio, Bazzano).¹  The basic figural arrangement employed here was repeated by Gandolfi on other occasions, for example in a Lamentation of Christ Forliì, Beata Vergine Addolorata), in which the standing angel holds an identical golden cup. 

1.  See D. Biagi Maino, Gaetano Gandolfi, Turin 1995, p. 343, cat. no. 1, reproduced fig. 1.
2. Ibid, cat. no. 228, reproduced in color, plate LXXXI.