Hercules and Antaeus

This drawing and the following lot are from a series illustrating the story of Hercules and Antaeus. An album from the Bordes Collection including 38 studies of the same subject was bought by P. and D. Colnaghi in 1936 from Paul Prouté and then dismembered and sold between 1936-41. Two sheets from this album are now in the Lehman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, pp. 163-5, nos. 133-4). Four others, signed and numbered and removed from the Beauchamp album, were sold Christie's, London, 15 June 1965, lots 149-152. Byam Shaw recognized a black chalk sketch of Hercules and Antaeus under a pen and wash drawing of a bullock, also in the Lehmann collection, directly connected with the animal subjects painted by Domenico in the Tiepolo villa at Zianigo. He suggests that this also connects the series of Hercules and Antaeus with the frescoes at the family villa and that they should be dated relatively late in Domenico's career. The ledge below the figures, perhaps the base of a small bronze or figure or even a dado rail, is also found in many of the preliminary drawings for the animal subjects. This suggests that the drawings were made with the decoration of the villa in mind.