Saint Jerome in the Wilderness
Perugino·c. 1490/1500
Historical Context
Perugino's Saint Jerome in the Wilderness belongs to the productive final decades of a career that had made him the most celebrated Italian painter of the 1490s. Jerome, the penitent scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, was among the most popular subjects in late fifteenth-century devotional art, allowing painters to combine landscape, still life, and figure elements in compositions suitable for private chapels. Perugino's handling of the subject reflects his characteristic soft modeling, sweet facial types, and luminous Umbrian landscape backgrounds—qualities that made him the most sought-after altarpiece painter of his generation and the teacher of Raphael. Follower versions demonstrate how thoroughly Perugino's graceful manner had been absorbed by his numerous pupils and workshop assistants.
Technical Analysis
Painted in tempera on poplar panel, the work adopts Perugino's smooth, idealized figure style and gentle atmospheric perspective. The landscape background with soft, rolling hills and delicate trees is typical of the Umbrian school.
Provenance
Sir Thomas Gage Saunders Sebright, 8th bt. [1802-1864], Beechwood Park, Hertfordshire, by 1856;[1] by descent to Sir Giles Edward Sebright, 13th bt. [1896-1954], Beechwood Park; (his sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 2 July 1937, no. 139, as Venetian School); purchased by (Volterra, Florence) for (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Florence); sold October 1937 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[2] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] Gustav Friedrich Waagen, in _Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain...Visited in 1854 and 1856..._, London, 1857: 327, describes in Beechwood "a landscape, with St. Jerome on the right, who, with a stone in his left hand, is doing penance before a small crucifix fastened high upon a tree..." that he lists as "Raphael (?)" but which he concludes "[reminds] me most of Timoteo Viti." The provenance sometimes given for the panel, as having been in the "collection of Count B. Pinamonte, Ferrara," comes from the 1937 bill of sale between Contini Bonacossi and the Kress Foundation (see note 2). According to Sir Ellis Waterhouse, this provenance is spurious (see note in Fern Rusk Shapley's hand, in NGA curatorial files). [2] The bill of sale from Contini Bonacossi to the Kress Foundation, for this and several other paintings, is dated 20 October 1937 (copy in NGA curatorial files). See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1849.
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