Alexander Day (artist)

The Aldobrandini Madonna by Raphael, acquired by Alexander Day in Rome in 1800 or 1801, sold by him to George Canning, 1st Baron Garvagh in 1818

Alexander Day (ca. 1751 – 12 January 1841) was a miniature painter and art dealer. Born in Britain, he worked chiefly in Rome.

Biography

Alexander Day was born ca. 1751. He trained with the portrait-painter, Ozias Humphry.

In 1774 Day travelled to Rome, where he would remain for some forty years, associating with other British and continental artists, such as James Nevay, Thomas Jones, Angelica Kauffman and Vincenzo Pacetti, and selling Old Master paintings and his own miniatures to British visitors, such as Frederick Augustus Hervey, Richard Worsley and Philip Yorke. He bought many paintings from the dealer, Pietro Cammuccini, and sold them on to British collectors.

In 1800 Day returned to Britain, where he exhibited many works by old masters, which were sold into the collections of John Julius Angerstein and others. He returned to Italy in 1802, and in that year sent more paintings and contemporary sculpture to London for sale.

In 1815 Day returned to Britain permanently. He shared a house with the gem-engraver, Nathaniel Marchant. When Marchant died in 1816, Day married Marchant's housekeeper, to whom Marchant had left £9,000.

Among the paintings sold by Day were Titian's Rape of Ganymede and Venus and Adonis, Raphael's St. Catharine and the Madonna, Infant Christ, and St. John (the Aldobrandini Madonna),^[1] Leonardo da Vinci's Christ disputing with the Doctors, Domenichino's S. Jerome and the Angel, Annibale Carracci's Christ appearing to Simon Peter after his Resurrection, and Gaspard Poussin's Landscape with Abraham and Isaac, which are now in the National Gallery. His portrait miniatures of ladies are particulariy graceful.

Day purchased from the Borghese collection Annibale Carracci's Temptation of St Anthony, and, in 1792 Andrea Mantegna's Adoration of the Shepherds, which William Buchanan sold to Richard Payne Knight at Downton Castle.

Day died in Chelsea, London on 12 January 1841.

An anonymous pencil portrait of Alexander Day may be seen at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Annibale Carracci, Domine, quo vadis?, acquired by Day in Rome in 1800

References

1. Exhibited, with other Italian paintings in Day's possession and the cast of one of the Monte Cavallo horsemen, carried out under Day's supervision, in the Mews gallery at Carlton House, 1815 (described in The New Monthly Magazine 1 November 1815, p339f.

Further reading

• I. Bignamini, C. Hornsby, Digging And Dealing In Eighteenth-Century Rome (2010), p. 258-259

This article incorporates text from the article "DAY, Alexander" in Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers by Michael Bryan, edited by Robert Edmund Graves and Sir Walter Armstrong, an 1886–1889 publication now in the public domain.