Giovanni Battista Tiepolo* (1696-1770)

The Madonna and Child with the Infant Baptist (recto);

Details

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo* (1696-1770)
The Madonna and Child with the Infant Baptist (recto);
Architectural motifs (verso)
black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown-gray wash, fragmentary watermark coat-of-arms
9 x 7 in. (241 x 180 mm.)

Provenance

Given by the artist to the Library of Somasco Convent, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice.
Count Leopoldo Cicognara.
Antonio Canova.
Monsignor Giovanni Battista Sartori-Canova.
Francesco Pesaro.
Edward Cheney, Badger Hall, Shropshire, by 1842, to his nephew,
Alfred Capel-Cure, Blake Hall, Essex; Sotheby's, 29 April 1885, part of lot 1024 (to Parsons).
With E. Parsons.
With P. & D. Colnaghi.
With Richard Owen.
Private Collection, Paris.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, 8 July 1964, lot 85.
T.P. Grange.
Mr & Mrs Jacob Kaplan, New York.
With P. & D. Colnaghi.

Exhibited

American Federation of Arts, 17th & 18th Century European Drawings, n.d., p. 14, no. 38, illustrated.
Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, Tiepolo a Bicentenary Exhibition, 1770-1970, 1970, no. 89, illustrated.

Lot Essay

The drawing was part of an album given by Tiepolo to the Somasco convent in Venice in 1762, before he left for Spain. George Knox dated the album to the preceding eight years and described it as 'the most magnificent sustained testimony to Giambattista's graphic inventiveness', G. Knox, Tiepolo, A Bicentary Exhibition, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1970, under no. 89.
The album was dismembered after the Cheney sale in 1885. It contained 75 drawings of variations on the theme of the Holy Family: several sheets are in the Robert Lehman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, nos. 93-4, illustrated), another drawing was recently donated by Mrs. Rudolf J. Heinemann to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, J. Bean and F. Stampfle, Drawings from New York Collections III, The Eighteenth Century in Italy, exhib. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971, no. 134, illustrated. A drawing with the same provenance was sold at Christie's London, 1 July 1997, lot 83.