Portrait of Vincenzo Camuccini (1771-1844) and his wife Maddalena Devoti (d. 1820)

This charming double portrait depicts the Roman neoclassical painter Vincenzo Camuccini (1771-1844) with his young wife, Maddalena Devoti. The painting probably dates from soon after August 1816, when the couple married, and may have been made to commemorate the occasion. It is possible that the view through the window before which they pose represents Frascati, where the couple honeymooned.

Although the portrait has long been attributed to Camuccini himself, a more likely attribution is to his friend, the painter Matilde Malenchini, an artist from Livorno who trained with Camuccini’s lifelong friend, Pietro Benvenuti. Principally a genre painter and portraitist, she married the musician Vincenzo Malenchini in 1796, but soon left the marriage. In 1811 she travelled to Rome on a four-year study trip financed by a stipend from Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, Napoleon’s younger sister and patron of Benvenuti. With the aid of General François de Miollis, French Governor of the Papal States, Malenchini was able to establish a studio in the convent of Trinità dei Monti. In 1815 she was named Professor at the Accademia di San Luca. Unable to obtain an annulment from her marriage, she lived a bohemian life with her unreliable lover Louis de Potter, a Belgian writer. In 1855, aged 76, Malenchini was accused of pushing one of her maids out a window and was sentenced to 3 ½ years in detention. One of her final paintings depicts the interior of her prison in Florence.

There is a fine portrait of Malenchini when she was 35 years old painted in 1815-16 by Camuccini, and it may be that she painted the present portrait shortly thereafter as a gift to him in return. The portrait of Camuccini and his bride displays a sweet naïveté more reflective of Malenchini’s painting style than Camuccini’s own. The painting was likely in the collection of the famous British-born American painter, Thomas Sully. As suggested in an unpublished article by Christian Omodeo (30 October 2012), Sully could have acquired it in London in 1837 from Camuccini’s daughter, Teresa (b. 1817), the first of Camuccini’s two children with Maddalena Devoti before her untimely death in 1820. Sully’s acquaintance with Teresa Camuccini is documented, and he is known to have painted a portrait of her (engraved in 1830).