300-year-old Italian painting up for auction

DALLAS - A lost painting by Italian master Sebastiano Ricci has turned up in Texas after a 300-year journey that has seen it change hands from a European nobleman playboy to a Missouri fur trader and finally to generations of an American family.
Discovered in a Dallas warehouse after the family asked an art expert to take a look at it, Ricci's "The Vision of St. Bruno" will be offered by Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries on Nov. 20. Heritage officials say the painting has been conservatively estimated to fetch at least $600,000.
When Heritage chairman of fine arts Edmund Pillsbury went to the warehouse about a year ago, he was skeptical that it was a Ricci because famous names are often thrown about when he is sent to look at a painting.
So he was floored when he looked at the 3-by-4 foot (1-by-1.2 meter) painting depicting a robed St. Bruno glancing up to a colorful grouping of angels in the heavens. The painting did indeed appear to be from the famous Venetian painter.
"I was not prepared for something that was as good and beautiful as this," said Pillsbury, former director of Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum.
A trip to the Kimbell to consult a few reference books confirmed his belief. He also realized this painting - which had been hanging in the homes of several generations of one family for about 160 years - had been considered lost.
"Fresh old masters just don't come up every day," Pillsbury said.
With some old-fashioned detective work and help from the family, art experts at Heritage began tracking the painting's journey from Italy to Texas.
Pillsbury said Ricci probably painted St. Bruno around 1705. His nephew, Marco Ricci, a noted painter himself, painted the background landscape.
Sebastiano Ricci, who died at 74 in 1734, was popular throughout Europe in his lifetime and worked for all of the major courts of Europe, Pillsbury said.
"His paintings are in all of the great museums," Pillsbury said.
The last known documentation of the St. Bruno painting was a 1776 catalog listing of the collection of Count Francesco Algarotti, an 18th century art connoisseur from Venice who advised royalty on their collections and was also known for his colorful love life.
Marianne Berardi, senior fine arts expert with Heritage, said Algarotti wrote several treatises on everything from art to opera and even wrote best-seller explaining Sir Isaac Newton's theories to women. She said he's also noted for helping Augustus III, King of Poland and elector of Saxony, shape the Royal Collection of Dresden.
"He was definitely a playboy, but a well-educated playboy," Berardi said.
Heritage experts learned from descendants of lawyer Charles Rannells of St. Louis that the two-term state senator had acquired the St. Bruno in the 1840s and then passed down through his descendants, gracing homes in Maplewood, Missouri; Webster Grove, Missouri; Dexter, Missouri; Stillwater, Oklahoma; and Dallas.
Berardi said that the Rannells descendants had thought that the painting came into their family as a payment in lieu of legal fees from a client of Rannells', Joseph Philipson.
Berardi's research found that the painting was in an 1844probate list of 400 works owned by Philipson - a fur trader, banker and brewer whose dry goods store outfitted explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
More research turned up evidence that Philipson probably acquired the Ricci around 1814 as part of a purchase of about 400 Old Masters in Paris.
Those works were part of a collection of Old Masters that the Polish immigrant who settled in St. Louis had hoped would one day be bought by an American city to form a museum. That dream was never realized, and Heritage experts say St. Bruno is the only one of those works that's been tracked since his estate was distributed.
There were other Rannells-Philipson connections. Rannells' wife, Mary Warder Rannells, and her mother, Ann Aston Warder, both art enthusiasts, knew Philipson. Mary Rannells helped him with his St. Louis gallery. Philipson and Warder exchanged letters about his attempts to find a city to buy his collection.
Laura Taylor of Dallas, the great-great granddaughter of Charles Rannells, remembers the painting hanging in her grandparents' parlor above the piano and then in her parents' living room above the couch.
She said her family knew the painting had been acquired from a client of Charles Rannells, but the name of the artist hadn't been passed down through the years.
Taylor said her mother really took an interest in the painting, deciding it had to be a Ricci after spotting another work by the artist in a St. Louis art gallery in the 1950s. Over the years, evidence mounted, including one art expert who saw a photograph of the painting saying it probably was a Ricci.
"She knew it was an important painting," Taylor said. "She's spent her whole lifetime trying to find out for sure."
Taylor said her family has enjoyed watching some of the mystery of the painting unravel.
"The story's been fascinating. It kind of brings these people to life," she said. - AP