(Cremona 1647–1710 Milan)
Still life Flowers with Lilies; Still life of Flowers and Strawberries
the first signed and dated lower left: MARG.TA /CAFFI VICENTINA/ F.1696 MILANO the second indistinctly signed lower left: VICEN…/MILANO
oil on canvas, each 110 x 190 cm, framed
a pair (2)

Provenance:
Private European Collection

Margherita Caffi’s paintings, such as the present composition, are remarkable for their freedom of composition and the loose, fluid technique that resembles 18th-century decorative painting rather than the work of her contemporaries. The dark backgrounds give strength to her preferred colour schemes of flowers of blue, red and white and mark these works as Baroque rather than Rococo. Her flowers are not always accurately depicted, or even identifiable; she was less interested in the scientific, or symbolic, content of still-lifes than in their potential for a decorative composition. The exuberant virtuosity of her technique makes her work an interesting link between the styles of earlier north Italian 17th-century painters such as Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Bernardo Strozzi and Domenico Fetti, who also used free, fluid brushwork and impasto (pittura di tocco), and Venetian 18th-century painters such as Francesco Guardi and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who perfected this style.