The Holy Family resting on the Flight into Egypt, with two Angels kneeling

This drawing was probably part of an album of at least seventy drawings depicting the Holy Family given by Tiepolo or his son Lorenzo to the Somasco Convent in Venice in 1762, before the artist left for Madrid. The album passed through a number of Venetian collections, including that of the sculptor Antonio Canova. By 1842 it had been sold to British collector Edward Cheney and was included in his sale in 1885. The album likely stayed largely intact until it was dispersed at the Savile Gallery in London. George Knox described the sheets from the album as 'the most magnificent sustained testimony to Giambattista's graphic inventiveness' (G. Knox, Tiepolo, A Bicentenary Exhibition, exh. cat., Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, 1970, see no. 89).

Sheets from the album are held in important private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (J. Byam Shaw & G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, nos. 93-4), and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York (J. Bean & F. Stampfle, Drawings from New York Collections III, The Eighteenth Century in Italy, exh. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971, no. 134). Another sheet depicting the Holy Family was sold at Christie’s, New York, on 29 January 2015, lot 36.

For part of the 20th century, the drawing was in the collection of Lieutenant Richard S. Davis, an art collector and officer in the now famous unit known as 'The Monuments Men' during the post-war period, who was later appointed curator and then director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.