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Lot Essay
This modello, so characteristic of Murillo in its apparently effortless fluency, is for the figure of the archangel in the Archangel Raphael with Francisco Domonte in Prayer of about 1680 formerly inset in a retable on the organ of the Convento de la Merced Calzada at Seville and now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow (D. Angulo Iñiguez, Murillo, Madrid, 1981, II, no. 368; E. Valdivieso, Murillo, Catálogo razonado de Pinturas, Madrid, 2010, no. 358). What may be a ricordo, showing the archangel in a bright yellow robe, is published by Valdivieso (op. cit., no. 357). Domonte, who had studied in the Casa Grande de la Merced in 1633, served as Vicar-General in Peru and was appointed titular Bishop of Arjona in 1680, dying shortly thereafter. The finished picture, appropriated during the French occupation and transferred to the Alcázar at Seville, was subsequently acquired by the duc de Leuchtenberg and then passed to the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, from which it was sent to Moscow.
General Meade was the third son of John Meade, who inherited his father’s baronetcy at the age of thirty eight days and was successively elevated as Viscount Clanwilliam in 1766 and Earl of Clanwilliam in 1776. He joined the army in 1794, retiring as a colonel in 1815, and was Member of Parliament for County Down. He was appointed Consul in Madrid in 1816 and remained in his house in the city on his retirement in 1832. Meade accumulated what became one of the three most substantial collections in Madrid. He owned some 220 pictures by Spanish artists and evidently had a particular interest in Murillo, acquiring no fewer than 46 pictures given to him. He shared this interest with Sir William Eden, who met him in Madrid and in his diary for 16 July 1830 recorded: ‘General Meade took me to see some beautiful Murillos in the academy’. Meade evidently allowed very limited access to his collection, which was dispersed in three ways: 54 pictures were sold in 1842 in a roundabout way to Angela Laporta, the mother of his illegitimate children; 70 pictures offered in 65 lots were sent from Madrid and sold at Christie’s on 26 June 1847; and finally, posthumously, the remainder of the collection was sold in 397 lots for his son at Christie’s, 6-8 March 1851 (for a full account see Kent, op. cit., pp. 133-157).
Sir William Eden, 4th and 6th Bt. assembled a smaller but nonetheless very distinguished collection of Spanish pictures, largely it seems at sales in London. With Richard Ford and William Stirling, later Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, 9th Bt., he was one of the pioneering collectors of Spanish pictures in Britain.
General Meade was the third son of John Meade, who inherited his father’s baronetcy at the age of thirty eight days and was successively elevated as Viscount Clanwilliam in 1766 and Earl of Clanwilliam in 1776. He joined the army in 1794, retiring as a colonel in 1815, and was Member of Parliament for County Down. He was appointed Consul in Madrid in 1816 and remained in his house in the city on his retirement in 1832. Meade accumulated what became one of the three most substantial collections in Madrid. He owned some 220 pictures by Spanish artists and evidently had a particular interest in Murillo, acquiring no fewer than 46 pictures given to him. He shared this interest with Sir William Eden, who met him in Madrid and in his diary for 16 July 1830 recorded: ‘General Meade took me to see some beautiful Murillos in the academy’. Meade evidently allowed very limited access to his collection, which was dispersed in three ways: 54 pictures were sold in 1842 in a roundabout way to Angela Laporta, the mother of his illegitimate children; 70 pictures offered in 65 lots were sent from Madrid and sold at Christie’s on 26 June 1847; and finally, posthumously, the remainder of the collection was sold in 397 lots for his son at Christie’s, 6-8 March 1851 (for a full account see Kent, op. cit., pp. 133-157).
Sir William Eden, 4th and 6th Bt. assembled a smaller but nonetheless very distinguished collection of Spanish pictures, largely it seems at sales in London. With Richard Ford and William Stirling, later Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, 9th Bt., he was one of the pioneering collectors of Spanish pictures in Britain.