Painting, oil on canvas, measuring 60 x 50 cm without frame and 88 x 74 cm with a refined and elegant frame, depicting a vase of flowers by the painter Gaspare Lopez (Naples 1650 – Florence 1740).
This elegant Flower Vase, consisting of a lush and assorted bouquet – with carnations, tulips, roses, snowballs, bellflowers – that flows luxuriantly from a ceramic vase resting on a stone balustrade, is a typical testimony of Gaspare Lopez. An authorship that can be clearly deduced by comparison with several of his paintings, generally of varied inventiveness but always set "in the open air", and in which similar pot-bellied vases are inserted, with some flowers and racemes falling on the support surface.
One can cite one of his paintings from the Museum of San Martino in Naples; two verticals published by L. Salerno (La natura morta italiana, Bocchi ed., Rome 1984, nn. 66-4 and 66.5); one recently sold at the Dorotheum in Vienna (auction 24.04.07, n. 90); the beautiful vertical painting sold many years ago at Christie's in London (auction 16.97.71, n. 130), with a similar vase of flowers and an overturned fruit basket, as well as the similar version, but horizontal, published in Naturalia (edited by G. and U. Bocchi, Allemandi ed., Turin 1992, pp. 324-25, plate 116).
Also in this delicate canvas, Lopez is able to happily express his most peculiar qualities, of immediacy and pictorial freshness, based on a bright chromatism, well supported by a constructive luminism, which makes his agile and dynamic compositions airy. Lopez, also known by the nickname "Gasparo dei Fiori", in 1717 is registered with the corporation of Neapolitan painters, as reported by De Dominici who says he was a pupil of A. Belvedere but also of the Frenchman J.B. Dubuisson, who introduced to Naples the taste of Monnoyer and his elegant presentations of refined decorativism and scenographic setting. Two ascendants that Gaspare spontaneously combined, based on his fervent inventive fantasy, establishing himself as a worthy, albeit uncommitted, follower of Belvedere, the last great representative of the great seventeenth-century chapter of Neapolitan "still life".
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