Apollo and the Muses

Frederick Calvert, the 6th Lord Baltimore, was the proprietor of the colony of Maryland, and he never went there. His country house was Woodcote Park, near Epsom in Surrey, and in the mid-1750s the architect Francis Brerewood remodelled parts of it for him. In the drawing room Brerewood set this canvas into the ceiling, inside a stucco frame. According to the museum, it had not been painted for that room. Jacopo Amigoni had worked in England in the 1730s and had left long before, and by the time his Apollo and the Muses went up overhead he had died in Madrid, in 1752. The museum lists the canvas as extended. Apollo appears among the Muses, with swans and a waterfall below them. In 1927 the Boston collector Eben Howard Gay gave the picture to the museum together with the carved panelling of the same room.