Portrait of Antonio Ghedini and his Family
by BALDRIGHI, Giuseppe, Oil on canvas, 170 x 123 cm
Antonio Ghedini from Parma was an official cloth merchant to the Bourbon court. As befits the family of a leading cloth merchant, the Ghedini family are suitably modishly attired: his wife wears a brocaded silk open robe with foliate stripes, salmon-pink furbelows and matching stomacher.
Formerly the portrait had been ascribed to the French court painter Louis Michel van Loo. The confusion is perhaps understandable, for Baldrighi’s style was formed in Paris, where the Duke’s minister Guillaume du Tillot had sent him for training.