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DALLAS

Ricci’sitting “The Vision of St. Bruno” will be offered for market by Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries on Nov. 20. Heritage officials say the picture has been conservatively estimated to be worth at in the smallest degree $600,000.

A year past, members of the family that owns the work asked Edmund Pillsbury, Heritage chairman of mulct arts, to take a look at a painting they had stored in a depot. They thought it could be a Ricci, but Pillsbury was skeptical.

He was floored when he realized that the 3- by 4-foot painting

Pillsbury said Ricci probably painted St. Bruno around 1705.

Ricci, who died at 74 in 1734, worked for all of the major courts of Europe, Pillsbury said. “His paintings are in all of the great museums,” he said.

The last known documentation of the St. Bruno painting was a 1776 catalog of the heap of Count Francesco Algarotti, an 18th-century tact connoisseur from Venice who advised royalty on their collections and was also known for his colorful love life.

The painting had most recently been passed down through the posterity of Charles Rannells, a St. Louis lawyer and lawmaker who acquired it in the 1840s.

Berardi said Rannells’ descendants thought the painting had been a payment of legal fees from a client of Rannells, Joseph Philipson. Berardi’s investigation found the painting was in an 1844 probate edge of works owned by Philipson, a fur trader, banker and brewer whose textile fabrics shop outfitted explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Philipson probably acquired the Ricci in a circle 1814 in Paris.

Laura Taylor, of Dallas, a great-great granddaughter of Charles Rannells, remembers the painting hanging in her grandparents’ parlor. She said her mother resolute it was a Ricci after seeing another of his works in a St. Louis passage.

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