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  • "No. 61 Il Portoguise"
    Type: inscription
    Location: verso of former mount (lost)
    Materials: pen and ink (?)
  • James Bowdoin III( Collector, Boston) - 1811.
  • Bowdoin College Museum of Art( Museum, Brunswick, Maine) 1811- . Bequest
  • Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College
    • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 5/17/1985 - 7/7/1985)
    • Clark Art Institute. ( 9/14/1985 - 10/27/1985)
    • University of Kansas. ( 1/19/1986 - 3/2/1986)
    • Art Gallery of Ontario. ( 5/17/1986 - 6/29/1986)
  • Nature Inhabited
    • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 4/20/1995 - 6/4/1995)
Type: catalogue
Author: Henry Johnson
Document Title: Catalogue of the Bowdoin College Art Collections
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Reference: no. 44
Remarks: (as "Il Portoguise")
Section Title: Pt. I, The Bowdoin Drawinga
Date: 1885

Type: catalogue
Author: Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Document Title: Bowdoin Museum of Fine Arts, Walker Art Building
Edition: 4th
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Reference: no. 44
Remarks: (as "Il Portoguise"
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Section Title: Descriptive Catalogue of the . . .
Date: 1930

Author: M. Benisovich
Document Title: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 45
Location: pp. 113-116
Reference: repr. fig. 1
Remarks: (as Quillard)
Section Title: "Quillard aux États-Unis -- Une Découverte"
Date: 1955

Author: M. Eidelberg
Document Title: Master Drawings, vol. 19, no. 1
Location: p. 37
Remarks: (as Vieira)
Section Title: "Quillard as Draughtsman"
Date: 1981

Type: exhibition catalogue
Author: David P. Becker
Document Title: Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Location: pp. 172-173
Reference: 80 (illus.)
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Date: 1985

Type: exhibition catalogue
Author: Julia W. Vicinus
Document Title: Nature Inhabited
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Location: p. 12
Reference: no. 6
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Date: 1995
			
		

With BCMA 1811.37, this drawing was attributed in 1955 by Michel Benisovich to the French artist Pierre Antoine Quillard. Both sheets were then given to Francisco Vieira the Younger by Martin Eidelberg in 1981. The two Bowdoin sheets, though bearing similar old inscriptions to "Il Portoguise," are almost certainly by different artists. They both do, however, probably originate in Rome during the early eighteenth century in the large circle of followers and imitators of Carlo Maratti.

The subject of this sheet seems unusual in itself and has not been explained. The purported existence of a painting by Quillard of three figures in a garden with a snake, reported by Benisovich, has been discounted by Eidelberg.1 The pastoral garden scene has undoubtedly led to the sheet's placement within eighteenth-century French art such as that epitomized by Watteau, but such subjects do turn up in Italy, especially in the work of such later artists as Hubert Robert and even Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The old Italian inscription lends some support to an Italian origin for these two drawings.

1. Eidelberg 1981, p. 37, n. 11.

Commentary credited to David P. Becker (or not otherwise captioned) appeared in his catalogue Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College (Brunswick: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1985).