Lot Essay
The present drawing formed part of an album of 107 caricatures from the Arthur Kay collection inscribed with the title Tomo terzo di Caricatura. The album, dispersed at Christie's in 1943, was bought by Kay in 1926 from John Grant, a bookseller from Edinburgh who had purchased it from Langton House, G. Knox, Tiepolo a Bicentenary Exhibition, exhib. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1970, no. 87. Professor Knox advanced the hypothesis that this album could be one of the eight succinctly mentioned in an Algarotti inventory of 1840: 'otto grandi libri di cento e più pagine l'uno', two of which were described in a sale catalogue of 1854 as 'due grossi libri' with 'una copiosa collezione di disegni umoristici del Tiepolo', M. Levey, Two Footnotes to a Tiepolo Monograph, The Burlington Magazine, 1962, CIV, p. 119. M. Kozloff, Caricatures of Giambattista Tiepolo, Marsyas, X, 1960-61, p. 16, also discusses the caricatures from the Kay Collection.