About This Artwork

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, attributed to
Italian, 1665-1747

Woman Looking For Fleas, c. 1710/20

Oil on canvas
18 1/4 x 15 1/16 in. (46.4 x 38.2 cm)
Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1947.63

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

Cremona, Italy, 1937 (not verified)

San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Exhibition of Italian Baroque Painting, 17th and 18th Centuries, 1941, cat. 28

Publication History

Thomas Carr Howe, "Variety in the Work of Giuseppe Maria Crespi," The Pacific Art Review 1 (Summer 1941), p. 3, fig. 2 (ill. with wrong painting).

The Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1961), p. 110.

Mira Pajes Merriman, “The Paintings of Giuseppe Maria Crespi,” (Columbia Ph.D, 1986), Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, 1969, pp. 98, 296–97, no. 222.

Pierre Rosenberg, "La femme à la puce de G. M. Crespi, un don des amis du Louvre," La revue du Louvre et des musées de France 1 (1971), p. 15, fig. 3.

Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 59.

Mira Pajes Merriman, Giuseppe Maria Crespi (Milan, 1980), pp. 139, 306-7, no. 249 (ill.).

John T. Spike, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the emergence of Genre Painting in Italy, exhib. cat. (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1986), pp. 151, 154.

Ownership History

Reportedly in private collection, Naples, before 1939 [letter from Arnold Seligmann, dated April 10, 1939, in curatorial file]. Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co., New York, 1939; sold to Charles H. Worcester, Chicago, 1939; given to the Art Institute, 1947.