Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Venice 1696-1770 Madrid)

Saint John the Baptist

Details

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Venice 1696-1770 Madrid)
Saint John the Baptist
red chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash, watermark three crescents
13 3/8 x 9 3/8 in. (340 x 238 mm.)

Provenance

Prince Alexis Orloff; Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 29-30 April, 1920, lot 141 (FF4,800 to Knoedler).
William H. Crocker (1861-1937), Burlingame, California; thence by descent to his son
Charles Crocker (1904-61), San Francisco; thence by descent to the present owners.

Literature

G. Knox, 'The Orloff Album of Tiepolo Drawings', The Burlington Magazine, 1961, CIII, no. 699, p. 275, no. 49.

Exhibited

San Francisco, The San Francisco Museum of Art, The Opening Exhibition, January-March 1935, and intermittently afterwards.
Oakland, California, Mills College Art Gallery, and Portland, Museum of Art, Exhibition, Old Master Drawings, 1937-38, no. 76.
Chicago, The Art Institute, Loan exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints by the two Tiepolos, Giambattista and Giandomenico, 1938, no. 50 (as St. John in the wilderness).

Lot Essay

Knox in his 1961 article dates the drawing to the 1740s (Knox, op. cit., p. 275). The composition is similar though in reverse to Tiepolo's altarpiece of the same subject in the church of S. Massimo in Padua and dated to the early 1740s by Morassi (A. Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G.B. Tiepolo, New York, 1962, p. 38, fig. 45). Another painting, formerly in the collection of the Earl of Warwick, of the same subject but with the figure in a slightly different pose was sold at Sotheby's, London, 3 July 1997, lot 93 (Morassi, op. cit., p. 67, fig. 185). However, the drawing is more likely an independent work or Tiepolo's exploration of a compositional idea rather than a study for a specific painting or fresco.

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