Offered by Antichità di Alina
Portrait of a Young Girl with a Basket of Flowers and Coral Necklace, with the Bay of Naples in the Background
Attributed to Joseph Hickel (Bohemia, 1736 – Vienna, 1807)
Oil on canvas, 65 x 51 cm (dimensions without frame)
Naples, circa 1790–1798
Hand-painted wooden frame with marble effect, XX century.
This refined portrait is attributed to the Austrian painter Joseph Hickel, created during the artist’s Neapolitan period in the 1790s, when he worked under commission from the royal Bourbon family. Hickel, official portraitist at the Viennese court and in service to the Habsburgs, was invited to Naples around 1790 thanks to strong dynastic ties between the two royal houses: Maria Carolina of Habsburg-Lorraine, Queen of Naples, was the sister of Marie Antoinette and daughter of Empress Maria Theresa. Hickel remained in Naples until 1798, producing a large body of official portraits for the royal family and its circle. Many of these works are now preserved at the Royal Palace of Caserta, evidence of the importance and volume of his output during this period. In a politically turbulent time—culminating in the Bourbon family’s flight during the Neapolitan Republic of 1799—Hickel built an artistic bridge between Naples and Vienna.
The young sitter wears a silk dress in a reddish-brown tone and a coral necklace, and holds a finely woven basket filled with flowers. Behind her stretches a view of the Bay of Naples, with soft hills and a calm sea under a pink-tinged sky. The scene is not an imagined landscape but a deliberate reference to a specific and politically charged location.
The painterly quality—seen in the rendering of textures, transparency, and skin tones—and the iconographic structure correspond closely to known portraits of children executed by Hickel for the Bourbon court. These works balanced formality and familial affection, portraying children as both private individuals and bearers of dynastic identity. The coral necklace, traditionally used in southern Italy as a protective amulet, and the flowers, symbols of fleeting youth, root the work in Neapolitan cultural symbolism.
Original canvas, with several old reinforcements visible on the reverse.
Condition: very good.
