An inconspicuous truck pulled up in front of a restoration studio on 24th street. Christopher Bishop had been waiting on this delivery - a painting he’d purchased for $200,000 from a small Florida-based auction house. It was the height of the pandemic, and he hadn’t seen the work before. Though it had been labeled as a 19th century painting of unspecified origin, Bishop had an inkling it was something more.
“I had a gut instinct that it was a really important painting,” he told me over the phone, “from the quality, and from the way the story is told with such depth and understanding.”
Bishop didn’t go in completely blind. Before making the purchase, he conducted extensive research. Whatever mystery artist had created the piece — with its expertly crafted narrative structure and mastery of layered allegory — had studied the ancient statues of Endymion. Bishop noted the male figure with his head thrown back, the tension captured through the soft light. “I knew it really had to be a major Venetian painter of the early 18th century,” he said, “and the more I looked, the more I understood that this had to be a lost painting by Sebastiano Ricci.”
As he examined the piece on the New York City street, a metal quiver at the base of the painting caught his eye, glinting in the sunlight through hundreds of years of dirt and disrepair. In that moment, he knew he’d been right.
Before Bishop’s uncanny instinct made him a premier gallery owner and art dealer, it was honed by his family and teachers. “I had really good art teachers when I was small, '' he said of the French-American school he attended in California. “There was emphasis on culture and language and history. It wasn’t an afterthought or an addendum to your regular education. History and the arts were at the center of their worldview.”
However, it wasn’t until studying in Germany during his junior year of college that he realized his calling. “I took courses in art history from a great professor in Germany, and we did in-person seminars at museums in West Berlin.” The firsthand connection with the collections captivated Bishop. He later applied to graduate school at Yale University, where he studied 17th and 18th century French and Italian art, and began to work with prominent dealers. “I decided that that was the career path I wanted — to be involved in the trade.”
In 2006, just a few years out of graduate school, Bishop had his first break. “I was sent to look at a painting by a British dealer in Virginia,” he said, “and the painting went for all kinds of money. But, in the same auction, there was a drawing that nobody was paying attention to. I bought it quite cheaply.” The piece, shoved into a back room, was labeled Honthorst from Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656), but was found to be the previously unknown The Idolatry of Solomon — one of less than 75 drawings by the artist. It sold at Sotheby’s for $90,000, and now hangs in the Louvre Museum.
Since then, Bishop has emerged as one of the best pairs of young eyes in the field, recovering history by noticing the works that other dealers neglect. In 2013, he identified Study for the Head of Saint Dominic by Federico Barocci, an important unpublished drawing hiding in a private English collection. Most importantly, after seven years of searching, Bishop reunited Aurora, an important 17th century painting by eminent Italian Baroque painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, with its highly finished preparatory drawing for the first time in 350 years, a discovery upon which he founded Christopher Bishop Fine Art, his gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
“It sounds like half of your job is detective work,” I joked.
“That’s certainly part of it,” he replied. “You have to see beyond the old restoration, beyond the dirt, and have a vision of what the painting originally looked like. That, in combination with experience and a kind of nerve. Don’t be distracted by bad cataloging, or by the fact that it may be a small auction house.”
“It’s like a puzzle,” he continued, “and if you begin to put the pieces together, if they all begin to fit, then it tells you you’re onto something good.”
Bishop feels a tether to those in the industry who have come before, and those who are yet to come. “There are lots of dealers whose catalogs I’ve used before I knew them in person. They’re really a record of that discovery. It’s one of the reasons I do catalogs — I want somebody 30 years from now to pick it up and learn something that will teach them about some painting or drawing they might come across in the future.”
“It’s like a puzzle,” he continued, “and if you begin to put the pieces together, if they all begin to fit, then it tells you you’re onto something good.”
Today, Diana and Endymion (ca. 1720) hangs at High Line Nine Galleries in Chelsea, not far from the restoration studio where it first caught Bishop’s eye. This is not by accident — Bishop deliberately displayed the masterpiece in a white-box context, in a neighborhood run by primarily contemporary dealers. The painting is flanked by artifacts from the time period, but also items representing modern luxury. "This work was commissioned for its beauty and permanence and quality” Bishop said, “and that’s still with us today. In this way we can demystify the Old Masters. One doesn’t have to be intimidated. It speaks to us in the same way it would a patron in 1720.”
Just as luxury speaks across generations, so does storytelling. The piece depicts the goddess of the moon and hunting, finding the lifeless body of her mortal lover, Endymion. “Diana is almost falling in love with this beautiful sculpture that she’s seeing, the same sculptures Ricci would’ve seen. It’s a story about the permanence of beauty and love, the immortality of stories and the power of art.”
“The painting disappeared for two hundred years,” Bishop said. “I rediscovered it, I cleaned it, and it came back as beautifully and vibrantly today as the day it was painted.”
As people traverse the space and stop in front of the piece, attention rapt by its glinting gold, Ricci — and Bishop, for that matter — are vindicated, cementing their places in history.
Christopher Bishop Fine Art has been extended at High Line Nine through December 13th.