Lot Essay
Nicholas Turner kindly confirmed the attribution on the basis of a photograph in a communication dated 30 October 2004, suggesting that the drawing was made in the second half of the 1640s. Mr. Turner further comments that 'the emphatic handling of the pen, with the unrestrainedly exuberant passage of hatching to indicate the area of shadow in the foreground finds a parallel in many of Guercino's figure studies in pen from this period, for example in the beautiful God the Father with an angel and a so-called genre study of A Man and a Woman seated at a table in the Fondation Custodia, Paris (J. Byam Shaw, The Italian Drawings of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, 1983, nos. 349 and 341)'.