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 4. Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness
circa 1535
Moretto da Brescia
Italy, Brescia
1498–1554 

Oil on panel, 22 ½ x 19 ½ in. (57.15 x 49.53 cm), Gift of Philip Yordan, 51.4.

Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness

Provenance:
Oskar Bondy [d. 1944], Vienna;1 [Jacob M. Heimann, Beverly Hills];2 Philip Yordan, Beverly Hills (until 1951),3 gift 1951; to LACMA

Notes:

  1. According to information provided by the donor. Regarding the Bondy collection, see entry on Isenbrandt. This painting is also one of a group of paintings from the Bondy collection that have not been identified in the lengthy, but incomplete, inventory of restituted works or in the Kende sale. It does appear to have been in New York during the late 1940s and therefore may have been part of the collection returned to the family and sold privately, or carried by the family to Switzerland and later to America. The painting does not appear on the Austrian government’s list of works sought by the Bondy family. 
  2. Jacob M. Heimann, a Russian emigrant, was a private dealer, who worked out of his home in Beverly Hills during the 1940s and 1950s. His name appears in a number of transactions involving New York and paintings recently arrived from Europe. The reverse of a photograph of this painting in the study collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., is annotated "Mont 1947." The photograph came from the collection of E. P. Richardson, former director of the Detroit Institute of Art, suggesting that the dealer Frederick Mont, New York, may have represented Mrs. Bondy in the sale of the painting. Frederick Mont (a.k.a. Mondschein), like Blumka, Silberman, and Kende, the other dealers involved with the sale of the Bondy collection in New York, had been a dealer in Vienna before the war. Mont was director of Galerie Sanct Lucas, Vienna.
  3. Regarding Philip Yordan, see entry on Jan Mandyn.

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