Giuseppe Maria Crespi
Sleeping Shepherdess (Fall)
1698
Oil on copper
15.9 cm x 22.9 cm (6 1/4 in. x 9 in.)
The Suida-Manning Collection

In scale and incident, these paintings on copper reveal Giuseppe Maria Crespi at his most intimate and charming. Traditionally their subjects were described as allegories of spring and fall. Without excluding such associations, they are better described as bucolic reveries, the one involving a feigned drama, the other a quiet grace. Their meaning, like much of Jean-Antoine Watteau's work, is deliberately imprecise and therefore broadly poetic. Crespi was a great individualist of the late Baroque and in turn one of the most striking realists in European painting. In one sense, his style is proto-Romantic, based upon a rejection of academic training and the predictable style it was engendering. In another, it represents a conscious return to the naturalistic light, sincere feeling, and personalized touch of early seventeenth-century Bolognese painters like Guercino. Crespi's interpretation of religious and mythological subjects is idiosyncratic, seemingly ingenuous, and reinforced by the delicate matter of his pearlescent light and scumbled surface. And unique are his choice, psychological exploration, and dignifying of genre subjects. Crespi's realism reflects the taste of both a fading nobility and an emergent bourgeoisie for emblems of a simpler, unaffected existence. But these works are so unexpected and acute in observation that they predict significant aspects of nineteenth-century painting.