Lot Essay
The drawing was part of an album given by Tiepolo to the Somasco convent in Venice in 1762, before he left for Spain. The album has been dated by George Knox to the preceding eight years and described as 'the most magnificent sustained testimony to Giambattista's graphic inventiveness', G. Knox, Tiepolo, A Bicentenary Exhibition, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1970, under no. 89. The album was dismembered after the Cheney sale in 1885. It contained 75 drawings of variations on the theme of the Holy Family: several sheets are in the Robert Lehman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, VI, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, nos. 93-4, illustrated.