Rothschild Foundation acquires Guercino's Moses, the painter's rediscovered masterpiece

The Moses by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri; Cento, 1591 - Bologna, 1666), the protagonist of a singular story a little over a year ago, has been purchased by the Rothschild Foundation : the work, in fact, was presented in a sale of the Chayette & Cheval auction house on November 25, 2022, with a generic attribution to the 17th-century Bolognese school and an estimate of just 5-6.000 euros, in an auction where, moreover, everything from jewelry to vases, ancient paintings to 20th-century prints were being sold, and so there was a risk that the painting would go unnoticed. In the end, it turned out to be a sleeper, as they say in technical jargon, that is, a work of quality that was not immediately recognized: there was in fact a great battle and in the end it went for as much as 590,000 euros, a price a hundred times higher than the initial estimate. The work was later attributed to Guercino, as it was thought to be close to the Head of an Old Man in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a work from 1619-1620.

So now we know who acquired the work, which will be displayed for the first time to the public at Waddesdon Manor in England for an exhibition dedicated specifically to Guercino(Guercino at Waddesdon : King David and the Wise Women, scheduled from March 20 to October 27): the Moses will be in the company of four other works by the artist from Cento. However, it was Tuscan broker Fabrizio Moretti who had been awarded the Moses last year, who says he never doubted the attribution. “You can see from 100 meters that it is one of Guercino’s earliest paintings,” he had said as early as last year. His gallery, Moretti Fine Art, restored the painting, bringing out its qualities. Exhibited in September at the gallery’s Paris headquarters, the painting was then put on the market again by Moretti and sold for the sum of 2 million euros.

The Waddesdon Manor exhibition presents the work as “one of the most important additions to Guercino’s oeuvre,” a painting that “helps us to understand his early maturity, a period considered by many to be his greatest for the dynamism, vigor and spontaneity of his painting.”

Rothschild Foundation acquires Guercino's Moses, the painter's rediscovered masterpiece

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