Portrait of a gentleman

The portrait was part of a group of similar drawings, with some of them originally mounted in an album of horizontal format, that was dispersed in the 1920s by the London art dealer Frederick Richard Meatyard. Several collectors acquired the charming sheets and among them was Dan Fellows Platt, who at that time was accumulating a large collection of Italian drawings that later he would donate to the Princeton University Art Museum. This sheet bears Platt’s stamp and the date of its purchase from Meatyard in 1925. The drawing was among those deaccessioned by the museum in 1944 by Frank Jewett Mather, who needed to raise money to buy solander boxes and to mat the thousands of drawings gifted to the institution by Platt’s widow the previous year (L. M. Giles, ‘Collecting Italian Drawings at Princeton’, in L. M. Giles, L. Markey, and C. Van Cleave, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, New Haven and London, 2014, p. 30).

A recent study has questioned the traditional attribution of the sheets to Amigoni and demonstrated how the drawings were made after portraits painted by different artists active in England in the 18th Century, including Amigoni (Lo Giudice, op. cit., pp. 180-193).