This extremely fine depiction of the Rest on the Flight to Egypt is a characteristic work by the great exponent of the Late Baroque grand manner in Venice, Sebastiano Ricci. Ricci’s painterly brilliance, which owes much to his Venetian forerunners, was appreciated by collectors and connoisseurs across Europe. Uniting Veronese’s colorito with Bolognese classicism, he created fresh and luminous paintings with a new elegance and delicacy in the palette. Demand for his work was strengthened by his travels both within and beyond Italy.

In 1710-11, when this work was painted, Ricci was in Venice, having recently returned from a period in Florence spent decorating the Pitti Palace (1706-08). The theme was one to which he returned regularly, and we can compare other treatments of it from different points in his career; look, for instance, at an early version which is much more classical and Carracesque, and which demonstrates the lasting impact of Ricci’s 1768 move from Venice to Bologna.

Slightly later is the 1712-16 version of the theme in which the palette becomes even brighter and the handling of the medium more painterly and gestural, in the manner of Titian’s mature work. This version was painted in England under the patronage of the Earl of Burlington and may also reflect English taste at the time.

In the summer of 1716 Ricci returned to Venice, visiting Paris en route at the invitation of the Académie de France, where he met Antoine Watteau. Following his arrival in his native city, Ricci lived grandly, as befitted the status of an internationally acclaimed painter, and continued to receive prestigious commissions.

This painting was first published as a work by Ricci by Francis Russell in a 1978 Burlington Magazine article, where it had been long attributed to Guercino in an old Irish collection. Given the painting’s discoloured varnish at that time, the old attribution seems less far-fetched than it does today, after a cleaning that has revealed Ricci’s original, vibrant palette. This work could well be associated with a painting that appeared at auction in Cork in 1820 from the collection of James Roche, the recently bankrupted Irish businessman and collector. Roche hailed from old Catholic aristocracy and thus the subject matter would undoubtedly have appealed. Having been educated in France, he lived between Paris and Bordeaux for a number of years, including in the run-up to the Revolution of 1789. It seems likely that Roche could have acquired the painting from an aristocratic French collection during that turbulent time and brought it back to his home in Ireland.