A reclining figure, seen from below

Drawn with swirly penwork and freely applied wash, this drawing of a dramatically foreshortened figure shown di sotto in sù, comes from an album of drawings titled Sole figure per soffitti. The album consisted of some 177 figure studies, dated by George Knox to circa 1758-60. These show steeply foreshortened figures and, while some can be loosely connected to paintings, the majority seems to have been drawn for its own sake. The album and nine others were sold in 1885 and are collectively known as the 'Cheney Albums'. Two of these, now dissembled, are in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. D.1824.1-89-1885 and S.1825.1-237-1885). Three others, of which the Sole figure per soffitti was one, were bought by Parsons in 1914, who broke them up and sold the sheets individually. Groups of drawings from the Sole figure per soffitti album can now be found in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (see J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection. Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, nos. 83-6). The Cheney albums and their provenance are discussed in detail by G. Knox in his Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1975, pp. 3-9.