SOFA GUERCINO

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Front cover:

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino (1591-1666)

The Virgin and Child with a Pot of Lillies No.15

Charity No.3

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino (1591-1666)

FELICITÀ D’INVENZIONE: DRAWINGS BY GUERCINO

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Here there is a young man from Cento who paints with remarkable felicity of invention (‘felicità d’invenzione’). He is a great draughtsman and a most felicitous colourist; he is a phenomenon of nature, a true miracle who astounds everyone who sees his works.’1

Thus was the young artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino (1591-1666), described by the aged Bolognese painter Ludovico Carracci, in a letter written in October 1617, when Guercino was twenty-six years old. A native of Cento, a small town in the province of Ferrara, some thirty kilometres north of Bologna, Guercino was largely self-taught and, apart from a period of less than three years in Rome in the early 1620s, spent almost all of his career in the region of Emilia-Romagna, working first in Cento and later in Bologna. He enjoyed a highly successful career as a painter, receiving important ecclesiastical and private commissions from patrons all over Italy and elsewhere in Europe, and was even able to turn down offers of employment at the English and French courts.

Guercino was also one of the finest draughtsmen of the Seicento in Italy, with an extensive corpus of drawings that he zealously guarded throughout his career. Indeed, relatively few of his drawings left his studio in his lifetime, and this remained true for almost a century after his death. Most of his drawings were made as preparatory studies for paintings, but others – landscapes, caricatures and genre scenes, in particular – seem to have been done for his own pleasure. Characteristic of all of his drawings, however, is a creative energy and spirit that have always made them attractive to collectors and connoisseurs. Indeed, as one scholar has recently noted, ‘It can be argued that there are few Italian artists whose drawings make for such rewarding study as Guercino.’2

I am delighted to be able to present this selection of drawings by Guercino, several of which are published here for the first time. I am, as ever, enormously grateful to my wife Laura for her patience, advice and constant support, as well as Sebastian and Benjamin for tagging along with their parents on a trip to Bologna and Cento. I would also like to thank the indefatigable Alesa Boyle, who, together with Megan Corcoran Locke and Antonia Rosso, worked on all aspects of preparing this catalogue and the accompanying exhibition. I am particularly indebted to David Stone, who was able to study each of the drawings in person and patiently answered countless questions by e-mail; his support and encouragement has been nothing short of stellar. Andrew Smith has photographed each of the drawings and, with Alesa, has also colour-proofed the catalogue images against the original artworks to ensure that they are as accurate as possible. I am also grateful to the following people for their help in the preparation of this catalogue and the drawings included in it: Gary Aylmer, Deborah Bates, Sarah Bowler, Jane Carter, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Alastair Frazer, Enrico Ghetti, Joseph Goldyne, Millie Greenlees, George Hecksher, John Marciari, Eilidh McClafferty, Zak Meek, Sebastien Paraskevas, Emma Ricci, Bernd Schoeppler, Davide Trevisani and Nicholas Turner.

Stephen Ongpin

Dimensions are given in millimetres and inches, with height before width. Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

High-resolution digital images of the drawings are available on request.

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd.

82 Park Street

London W1K 6NH

Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (7710) 328-627

e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com

FELICITÀ D’INVENZIONE: DRAWINGS

BY GUERCINO

PRESENTED BY

STEPHEN ONGPIN

THE LIFE OF GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, CALLED IL GUERCINO

(1591-1666)

Born in Cento, a small town situated halfway between the cities of Bologna and Ferrara, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino (‘the squinter’) because he was cross-eyed, was one of the leading Italian painters of the 17th century. He was essentially self-taught, despite some initial training with the Centese painter Benedetto Gennari the Elder and other minor local artists. Guercino’s early work was strongly influenced by the paintings of Ludovico Carracci; in particular an altarpiece of The Holy Family with Saint Francis painted by Ludovico in 1591 for the Capuchin church in Cento. The young Guercino also travelled to Bologna to study the works of Ludovico and his cousins Annibale and Agostino Carracci, although he was never a part of the Carracci academy. The artist is also known to have visited Ferrara at least twice before 1620, and his youthful paintings likewise reveal his study of artists from that city, notably Ippolito Scarsella, known as Scarsellino, whose influence may be credited with imparting a Venetian flavour to some of Guercino’s earliest works.

Around 1612 Guercino met the Bolognese churchman Padre Antonio Mirandola, who became his first important patron and supporter and, eventually, his de facto agent. Through him he earned a commission for an altarpiece of All Saints in Glory, painted in 1613 for a church in Cento and now lost, apart from two small fragments. In the same year he painted his earliest known fresco, depicting the Four Cardinal Virtues, for the façade of the Palazzo della Comunità in Cento, which was much praised at the time but also does not survive. Another important early commission was for three altarpieces for the church of San Sebastiano in the nearby town of Renazzo di Cento, painted between 1615 and 1616. Over the next few years Guercino received a number of commissions for mural decorations in private homes in and around Cento, notably the Casa Pannini, where, with the help of assistants, he painted an extensive series of 140 small-scale frescoes in several rooms of the house between 1615

Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630), Portrait of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino, 1623

and 1617. In 1616 Guercino also established his own life drawing school in Cento, where he taught some two dozen students, and in 1619 a drawing manual illustrated with prints after his anatomical and figure drawings was published and widely distributed.

In 1617 Guercino was summoned to Bologna by Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, the archbishop of the city, for whom he painted several important works. It was probably of these paintings that, later the same year, Ludovico Carracci wrote of Guercino in a letter sent from Bologna to the priest and scholar Don Ferrante Carlo: ‘Here there is a young man from Cento who paints with remarkable felicity of invention. He is a great draughtsman and a most felicitous colourist; he is a phenomenon of nature, a true miracle who astounds everyone who sees his works.’1 A brief trip to Venice in 1618 was significant in Guercino’s development, particularly evident in the colouring of his altarpieces of the next few years, while in 1620 he also spent some time in Mantua, where he was able to study several paintings by Rubens, as well as Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, in the Gonzaga collection.

Apart from the fresco decoration of the Palazzo Tanari and the Oratorio di San Rocco in Bologna, Guercino painted a number of important altarpieces during this initial Bolognese period. The most significant of these was a large painting of Saint William of Aquitaine Receiving the Monastic Habit, commissioned from the artist through the auspices of Padre Mirandola and completed in 1620 for the church of San Gregorio; the painting is now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. As well as from altarpieces for churches, Guercino also produced paintings of secular and religious subjects for private clients, a practice he maintained throughout his career. Among such early patrons were Bartolomeo Fabri in Cento, the Marchese Enzo Bentivoglio in Ferrara, and Cardinal Jacopo Serra, the Papal Legate in Ferrara between 1615 and his death in 1623, who commissioned at least five major easel paintings from Guercino. Other important commissions were received from Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, and Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

When Alessandro Ludovisi was elected Pope Gregory XV in 1621, Guercino was among several Bolognese artists who received a summons to Rome to work for the new pontiff and his nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. It was during his relatively brief period in Rome, between 1621 and 1623, that Guercino painted some of his most celebrated works, notably the monumental ceiling fresco of Aurora on the vault of the main hall of the Casino Ludovisi, completed in 1621, and the large altarpiece of The Burial and Reception into Heaven of Saint Petronilla, commissioned in the same year by the Pope for the Basilica of St. Peter’s. He also painted a formal portrait of Gregory XV, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Other public commissions included work in the Palazzo Lancelotti and a ceiling fresco of Rinaldo and Armida for the Palazzo Patrizi (now Costaguti), as well as a ceiling canvas for the Roman church of San Crisogono in Trastevere, commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The papacy of Gregory XV was short-lived, however, and on the death of the Pope in 1623 Guercino decided to return to his native town of Cento, perhaps feeling that, without the patronage of the Ludovisi and their circle, he would find it difficult to continue to earn important commissions in Rome. Nevertheless, his brief period in the Eternal City was of great importance to his artistic development, introducing a more restrained, classical style, inspired by the Roman paintings of Guido Reni and Domenichino, into his work. Over the next decade or so Guercino’s style evinced a gradual move away from the powerful naturalism and dramatic lighting effects of his earlier works towards a manner of painting characterized by a more refined line and a restrained, harmonious sense of colour.

Almost immediately upon his return to Cento, Guercino was commissioned to paint a very large Assumption of the Virgin for Count Alessandro Tanari of Bologna, now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. This was soon followed by an altarpiece of The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Magdalen and Saints for the church of the Madonna della Ghiara at Reggio Emilia, commissioned in 1624 and completed the following year. The artist was to remain based in Cento for nearly twenty years, and although he rarely, if ever, travelled beyond the province of Emilia-Romagna, he received significant commissions from patrons throughout Italy and beyond, including Duke Francesco I d’Este in Modena, Marie de’ Medici, Queen of France, and King Charles I of England, as well as several Popes and members of the Papal court in Rome. He also turned down offers of employment as a court painter from Charles I of England in 1625 and Louis XIII of France in 1639.

Among the other important projects on which Guercino was engaged in the 1620s was the fresco decoration of the cupola of the Duomo in Piacenza, which was begun by the Lombard painter Pier Francesco Mazzuchelli, known as Morazzone, but had been left unfinished at his death. In 1626 Guercino painted six of the eight compartments of the cupola, each containing a figure of a prophet with an attendant angel or putto, and also frescoed the arched lunettes and a narrow frieze below them, and the entire project was completed in 1627. Although from all accounts Guercino was a somewhat reticent character, content to live and work in the remote country town of Cento and to have little contact with other artists apart from his pupils and assistants, it is interesting to note that in 1629 the Spanish court painter Diego Velásquez, who was on his way south to Rome, stopped in Cento for a few hours specifically to meet him.

The 1630s and 1640s found Guercino in great demand, receiving important commissions from private, noble and ecclesiastical patrons in Bologna, Cento, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio Emilia, as well as further afield; in Fabriano, Florence, Forlì, Lucca, Pesaro, Piacenza, Siena, Rome, Venice and Vicenza. Although most of these paintings were of religious or mythological subjects, he also painted a pair of full-length portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Modena, completed in 1632. The previous year Guercino had painted a ceiling fresco of Hercules and Antaeus for the Palazzo Sampieri (now Talon) in Bologna, which was to be his final work executed in the medium of fresco. In 1632 he painted a pair of canvases for the side walls of the Giroldo chapel in the cathedral of Reggio Emilia, for which he had painted a major altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin with Saints Peter and Jerome a few years earlier. One of the largest secular works he produced in the 1630s was a David and Abigail painted for Cardinal Antonio Barberini around 1636; later presented by Barberini to Cardinal Jules Mazarin in Paris, the canvas was destroyed during the Second World War. During this period Guercino also earned a number of significant commissions from clients in France, largely through the influence of Cardinal Bernardino Spada of Bologna, who had served as Papal Nuncio at the French court between 1624 and 1627. Among such French patrons was Louis Phélypeaux de La Vrillière, Secretary of State to Louis XIII, who commissioned four paintings for a gallery in his hôtel in Paris.

In September 1642, shortly after the death of his longtime artistic rival Guido Reni, and at the suggestion of his Bolognese patron Count Filippo Aldrovandi, Guercino left his beloved Cento, which was being threatened by the fighting of the Wars of Castro, and moved his studio and workshop to Bologna. He quickly inherited Reni’s position as the leading painter in the city, and earned commissions for religious pictures of the sort that Reni had specialized in. As David Stone has noted, ‘In Cento, and then for a quarter of a century in Bologna…Guercino set the standard in Emilia-Romagna – indeed, for much of Italy – for the carefully finished, emotionally charged, and ultra-pious altarpiece and the elegantly draped, majestic history painting.’2 Guercino ran a busy and productive workshop in Bologna, with several assistants that included his younger brother, the still-life painter Paolo Antonio Barbieri, Bartolomeo Gennari and his brother Ercole, who had married Guercino’s sister Lucia, and their two sons Benedetto and Cesare Gennari.

Guercino’s fame was at its height throughout the 1640s and 1650s, during which he continued to send paintings to clients throughout Italy and France, where the chief minister to the French King and noted collector Cardinal Mazarin was among his admirers and patrons, eventually coming to own thirteen paintings by the artist. One of Guercino’s significant works of this period was a very large Circumcision painted in 1646 for the Augustinian church and convent of the Gesù e Maria in Bologna. The deaths of the artist’s lifelong friend and mentor Padre Antonio Mirandola in 1648, and of his brother Paolo Antonio the following year, however, appear to have encouraged a tendency in Guercino to work in relative solitude, and in the last fifteen years of his career he seems to have allowed almost no one, apart from family members and assistants, to enter his studio, and only rarely left the city.

Among the few privileged visitors to gain access to Guercino’s studio was Queen Christina of Sweden, who paid a visit to the artist in Bologna in November 1655, while on her journey south to Rome. (It was at this time, or soon afterward, that she probably acquired the several dozen sheets by Guercino that were in her well-known collection of drawings.) Perhaps the most significant patron of the artist’s late career was the Sicilian nobleman Don Antonio Ruffo of Messina, with whom he had an extensive

correspondence. Ruffo commissioned a number of important paintings from Guercino over a period of almost two decades, most notably in 1661, when he asked the artist to paint a pendant to Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, which was in Ruffo’s collection. The last few years of his life found Guercino in poor health, and more reliant on his assistants – notably his nephews Benedetto and Cesare Gennari – than before. Among his most important late works was an altarpiece of Saint Thomas Aquinas Writing the Hymn in Honour of the Holy Sacrament for the Bolognese church of San Domenico, completed in 1663, and another of Saint Teresa Receiving the Habit, commissioned in 1665 by Ruffo for the church of San Gregorio in Messina but destroyed in an earthquake in 1908. Guercino died in December 1666, at the age of seventy-five and still at the height of his fame, and was buried in the Bolognese church of San Salvatore.

Among the most useful sources in studying Guercino’s career is his so-called Libro dei Conti; an account book of commissions and payments received by the artist, begun in January 1629 and maintained, initially by his brother Paolo Antonio Barbieri, until the end of the Guercino’s life in 1666. The Libro provides a thorough documentary record of Guercino’s painted output for much of his long and prolific career, which lasted for just over fifty years, including the name of the purchasor, the subject of the work, and the price paid for it. (It should be noted, however, that not every work painted by the artist after 1629 is included in the Libro, since it does not list paintings made for his own pleasure or those given away as gifts, or as part of an exchange.) Interestingly, Guercino maintained a fairly rigid system of charging by the figure for his commissioned paintings, with each full-length figure priced at around one hundred ducats, a half-length figure at fifty or sixty ducats, and a head at twenty-five or thirty ducats. At the height of his career, Guercino was earning the significant amount of between a thousand and four thousand scudi per year. He was able to buy a large house on the present-day Via Sant’Alo in Bologna, which contained his studio and workshop, and also acquired the house next door for his extended family, which included his brother Paolo Antonio, his sisters and their husbands, and their children.

One early biography of Guercino appeared during his lifetime, written by the physician and art lover Francesco Scannelli as part of his book Il microcosmo della pittura, which appeared in 1657, while another contemporary account of the artist, by the Roman painter Giovanni Battista Passeri, was written before 1673 but not actually published until a hundred years later. The most comprehensive account of Guercino’s life and works, however, appeared as part of the Felsina pittrice, a two-volume history of Bolognese painting published in 1678 by another contemporary biographer, Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia. Malvasia came to know Guercino well, particularly after the painter had settled in Bologna, although it seems he was not admitted into the artist’s studio and was often frustrated in his attempts to learn more about his character and personality. In the years following Guercino’s death, however, Malvasia gained privileged access to the letters, documents and records kept in the painter’s home and studio in Bologna. As such, his account of Guercino’s career in the Felsina pittrice, which is largely based on this mass of archival material, is especially useful in including a long and fairly comprehensive list of paintings produced by the artist, arranged more or less chronologically. As Malvasia wrote of Guercino, ‘He painted one hundred and six altarpieces [and] one hundred and forty-four paintings for various Princes, including Popes Gregory [XV], Urban [VIII], Innocent [X], Alexander [VII], [the] Emperor and Empress, the Kings of France, of Spain, of England, and the Queen of France, the Dukes and Duchesses of Savoy, of Tuscany, of Modena, [and] of Mantua, Princes, Cardinals, Ambassadors at Court, etc.’3 Between 350 and 450 paintings by the artist are known today.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino (1591-1666), Self-Portrait, c.1635. London, Schoeppler Collection.

THE DRAWINGS OF GUERCINO

Guercino was among the most prolific and gifted draughtsmen of the 17th century in Italy, and his drawings were described by his friend and biographer Malvasia as ‘so witty, full of spirit, fanciful and dashing’1. He seems to have been highly regarded for his drawings from almost the very start of his career, and as early as 1615 his patron and promoter Don Antonio Mirandola chose to exhibit the young Guercino’s painting of Saint Matthew in Bologna alongside several drawings by the artist.

Guercino produced numerous figural and compositional studies for each of his paintings, together with autonomous drawings of landscapes, academic nudes, genre scenes and caricatures, as well as designs for engravings and a small number of highly finished independent drawings. He worked in a wide range of media, notably in pen and ink and wash, as well as charcoal and both red and black chalk. Although Guercino occasionally used coloured or toned papers, most of his drawings were on white or whitish paper.

A large portion of Guercino’s drawn oeuvre consists of studies for works in oil or fresco. When embarking on a painting commission, the artist would invariably produce numerous drawings as a means of working out compositional ideas and developing the poses of individual figures. (Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he rarely produced drawings with several different compositional sketches on the same sheet.) Yet very often such preparatory studies for paintings differed quite considerably from the final works, as the artist continued to experiment and develop his ideas while working on the canvas. As the Guercino scholar David Stone has noted, ‘More than his predecessors and contemporaries in Bologna and Rome, the Cento master utilized his preparatory drawings for intellectual and artistic discovery. Ideas seem to have come to him most readily as he worked. In one sketch after another, we witness an endless search for gestures, narrative groupings, costumes, and facial expressions. He was never content. The most finished and seemingly perfect drawings are often the least related to the compositions of the paintings they purportedly prepare. Guercino habitually made at least one or two sketches in a design sequence in reverse to the compositions studied in all the other drawings. The more ideas he drew and discarded, it seems, the closer he came to the scheme he would ultimately paint.’2 Furthermore, as another scholar has recently observed, ‘Rather than a linear process from commission to finished painting, drawing was for Guercino the means for thinking about a subject, testing out ideas, and finding inspiration. Any one of his preparatory drawings can be a tour de force; taken as a group, his studies of a given subject offer a sequence of drawings whose richness and rewards for close examination are matched by few other artists.’3

Guercino also produced studies, usually in chalk, of heads, hands, limbs and draperies for individual figures within a given composition. Only very rarely did these individual studies for a painting result in a final drawn modello of the definitive composition, however. As Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta have commented, ‘Perhaps because of his desire to keep his options open, even to the very last moment, Guercino was reluctant to commit the composition to paper in this way, preferring instead to work exclusively from his series of miscellaneous studies of single figures and groups of figures, enlarging them in his head and combining them together into a painted whole, the final composition effectively coming together first on the full-size canvas rather than beforehand on a piece of paper.’4

An interesting characteristic of Guercino’s artistic practice during the latter half of his career is that, when producing studies for a painting, he could be much more dynamic and innovative in working out compositional ideas on paper than was sometimes evident in the eventual result. From the 1630s onwards, there is often a far greater fluency and freedom of expression in the various preparatory drawings by Guercino for commissioned paintings than is seen in the final works, which are generally more restrained in composition. Fewer preparatory drawings are known for Guercino’s paintings of the 1650s and early 1660s, by comparison with the output of earlier decades, and it is likely that he drew somewhat less in the last decade and a half of his career.

Most of Guercino’s drawings are executed in pen and ink, often enlivened with added brown wash; a medium that allowed him to quickly and decisively set his compositional and figural thoughts on paper. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, he hardly ever began a pen study with an initial underdrawing in black chalk, confident in his ability to utilize the pen alone to accurately express his ideas. Also unlike many of his fellow artists, Guercino only infrequently drew on both sides of a sheet of paper. Many of his spirited and calligraphic pen studies were drawn on very thin paper, and the corrosive effect of the iron-gall ink that he often used, combined with the sheer vigour of his penmanship, sometimes damaged the surface of the sheet, particularly in the areas of the darkest shadows. In the drawings made in the last few years of his life, Guercino seems to have favoured chalk over pen and ink, perhaps the result of weakness and ill health affecting the steadiness of his hands.

The use of red chalk was another fundamental aspect of Guercino’s repertoire as a draughtsman. After his return to Bologna from Rome in 1623 he began to use red chalk regularly, most often to study the pose of a particular figure, or details of folds of drapery, once the initial compositional studies in pen and ink had been completed. As his career progressed, however, his use of red chalk became more frequent, especially from the later 1640s onwards. Black chalk – with the exception of early academic nude studies – is also found mainly in drawings from the later part of the artist’s career, in the 1640s and 1650s, although it was never used as often as red chalk. While Guercino remained very busy with commissions until his death in 1666, he seems, as noted above, to have drawn much less in his later years, and comparatively few drawings, most of which are in red chalk, survive from his last fifteen years of his career. Indeed, what is said to be the very last drawing he made was a red chalk study of Saint John the Baptist drinking water from a spring, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle5.

Guercino appears to have kept his working drawings close to hand in his studio, and would often reuse drawings made for one painting when developing compositional ideas for later projects; ‘As the years passed, Guercino built up an ever-expanding body of drawings that might be reused as the starting points for new paintings of old subjects...but, even in the 1660s, Guercino would still make multiple compositional sketches when given a new commission.’6 (Occasionally, he also seems to have made compositional drawings for paintings to be executed by one of his assistants.) As part of his process of working out a composition, and to see how it might look in reverse, the artist often made counterproofs of his chalk studies; by placing a damp sheet of paper on the surface of a drawing and then taking it away, he was able to create a reversed, albeit fainter image of the subject. A large number of such counterproofs, kept together and bound into an album, were among the contents of his studio at the time of his death, and are today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Most of these offsets, however, have been retouched by later hands.

The paintings and drawings of Guercino were often copied, and many were reproduced in the form of prints, both during his lifetime – particularly by his close friend from Cento, the engraver Giovanni Battista Pasqualini (1595-1631) – and for many years afterwards. As Stéphane Loire has noted, ‘The work of few Italian Seicento painters was as extensively engraved in their own lifetime as that of Guercino…He did not much practice printmaking himself, but he did ensure that a large number of his paintings were reproduced as prints, as Annibale Carracci and Domenichino had done. The prints after Guercino’s compositions – paintings as well as original drawings – were frequently executed under his personal supervision...Most of these were by artists close to him: Malvasia lists more than 50 in the long catalogue of engravings after Bolognese artists he inserted in the Felsina Pittrice ’7 Several of Guercino’s drawings are drawn in a precise technique of hatching and stippling and appear to have been executed specifically to be reproduced as prints. As has been pointed out, however, ‘Through virtuoso penwork and a multiplicity of lines, many of Guercino’s designs for prints exemplify the artist’s particular awareness of texture…Unfortunately, such details were often lost on the engraver.’8 Despite his interest in the print medium as a means of disseminating his paintings and drawings to a wider audience, Guercino seems not to have been interested in working as a printmaker himself, and only produced two small etchings in his lifetime.

Guercino’s influence as a draughtsman is particularly notable in the work of such later artists as Pietro Giacomo Palmieri, John Hamilton Mortimer and Benjamin West, as well as Livio Mehus, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Francesco Bartolozzi, all of whom made copies of drawings by the master. Guercino’s drawings have likewise long been admired by collectors and connoisseurs; as the 18th century French amateur and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote of the artist, ‘This painter has a very seductive pen, and when combined with a few touches of wash, it gives his drawings a beauty that cannot be found in the drawings of any other master.’9

Nicholas Turner has noted of the artist that, ‘for most of his life he maintained an extraordinarily prolific output in the medium [of drawing], faltering only toward the end, probably as a result of failing health. The freshness and vitality of his drawings remain undiminished to this day. The directness of their touch, their feeling for dramatic effects of light and space, and the energy of the figures make them among the most accessible of all Old Master drawings.’10 As another scholar has aptly noted, ‘Drawing, in sum, remained the basic operative element of Guercino’s artistic output. It is little surprise that an artist so perpetually engaged in the exploration of the world through drawing has left behind a body of work that continues to delight and fascinate us today.’11

THE LATER HISTORY AND COLLECTING OF GUERCINO’S DRAWINGS

Guercino appears to have assiduously kept his drawings in his workshop throughout his long career, and to have only parted with a few of them in his lifetime. Indeed, his reluctance to give away or sell his drawings is evident in a letter written in February 1650 to one of his most important patrons, Don Antonio Ruffo, wherein the artist turned down Ruffo’s request to send drawings to him for his collection. Cesare Malvasia recorded that Guercino’s home contained an ‘infinità di disegni’, and on his death in 1666 all of the numerous surviving sheets in his studio passed to his nephews and immediate heirs, the painters Benedetto Gennari the Younger (1633-1715) and Cesare Gennari (1637-1688). As Denis Mahon writes, ‘It is sufficiently obvious that what was inherited after Guercino’s death was the immense mass of graphic work of a bottega which had flourished for decades.’1 The two brothers, who had been Guercino’s chief assistants in the last few years of his career, also inherited the master’s workshop in Bologna, which became known as the ‘Casa Gennari’. The huge corpus of Guercino drawings remaining in the studio – described by Malvasia as ‘Ten albums of drawings, partly in pen, partly in red and black chalk, with a variety of exquisitely drawn landscapes2 – was treasured by the nephews and remained largely intact throughout their lives. The collection of drawings was kept either at the Casa Gennari in Bologna, or the family villa [or ‘Casino’] at Bel Poggio, just outside the city gates.

By the time that Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice was published in 1678, it seems clear that, while a few of Guercino’s drawings may have been acquired from the artist’s descendants by private collectors, including Malvasia himself, the vast majority remained in the Casa Gennari in Bologna. While some of the drawings were displayed in frames (though probably not behind glass) in both of the Gennari homes in Bologna and Bel Poggio, most were either pasted into a series of large albums or kept as loose sheets in folios. (It is interesting to note that the Flemish-born Italian painter Livio Mehus (c.16301691) appears to have had access to some of the drawings in the Casa Gennari, as he made drawn copies of several of them, particularly the caricatures.) While it is not known precisely how many drawings by Guercino were left in his studio at his death, an inventory of the Casa Gennari made over fifty years later, in October 1719, a few years after Benedetto Gennari’s death, lists 1,689 drawings by the master kept in eight albums, a further 660 or so loose sheets, and 136 framed drawings, including several landscapes and studies of male nudes, as well as an album containing 177 counterproofs of drawings by Guercino and two albums of drawings by the Gennari themselves. (The inventory also lists a large number of drawings by other artists, including Agostino, Annibale and Ludovico Carracci, Correggio, Pietro Faccini, Lelio Orsi, Parmigianino and Guido Reni, among others.) Although Benedetto and Cesare Gennari had kept almost all of the collection together in Bologna, fourteen of Guercino’s landscape drawings were taken to France by Benedetto, who was working at the court of Louis XIV in Paris in the early 1670s, to be engraved by the French printmaker Jean Pesne (1623-1700).

The Casa Gennari collection was in turn inherited by Cesare’s sons, Gianfrancesco (1671-1727) and Filippo Antonio Gennari (1677-1751), and thence by the former’s son, Carlo Gennari (1716-1790). It was Carlo Gennari, Guercino’s great-great-nephew, who began to offer the drawings for sale around the middle of the 18th century. A few drawings had left the Gennari collection some sixty years earlier, however, since during the period that he was active in England, working at the courts of Charles II and James II between 1674 and 1689, Benedetto Gennari had sold several of his uncle’s landscape drawings – including the same group of fourteen that had earlier been etched by Jean Pesne – to one of his patrons, William Cavendish (1640-1707), later the 1st Duke of Devonshire. Benedetto also seems to have sold other drawings to the portrait painter and collector Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), his fellow painter at the English court, whose renowned collection of nearly ten thousand drawings included several drawings by Guercino and was dispersed at auction in 1688 and 1694.

A rare example of an Italian collector who owned drawings by Guercino during the artist’s lifetime is Alfonso III d’Este (1591-1644), briefly Duke of Modena and Reggio until his abdication in 1629, whose collector’s mark is found on a number of works by the artist, including a group of four highly finished pen and ink drawings of the Evangelists that were in all likelihood commissioned from Guercino.

Cardinal Antonio Barberini (1607-1671), a nephew of Pope Urban VIII, assiduously collected paintings by Guercino but is also known to have acquired a number of drawings by the artist. A posthumous inventory of the Cardinal’s collection, in the Barberini family archives, lists several figure studies in pen and ink and red chalk by Guercino, as well as ‘Due Disegni di Paesini con figure fatti con Acquerello e Penna’3. Also among the earliest collectors of Guercino’s drawings was Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici (1617-1675) of Florence, a passionate collector whose acquisitions form the nucleus of the Uffizi’s outstanding collection of Italian drawings, and the Oratorian priest Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635-1714) in Rome, whose collection of drawings filled some thirty albums. Another was Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689), who had visited the artist in Bologna while on her way to Rome in 1655, after her own abdication. Over a hundred drawings by Guercino and his circle, acquired either from the artist himself or from his heirs, were included her superb collection of drawings, which was eventually purchased by the Teyler Museum in Haarlem in 1790.

The collecting of drawings by Guercino began to flourish in the 18th century, particularly when drawings started to be sold from the Casa Gennari. In 1714 the eminent French banker Pierre Crozat (1665-1740) purchased a large group of more than 350 drawings by Guercino from the heirs of Cesare Malvasia (1616-1693), who is likely to have acquired them directly from the artist or from the Casa Gennari. Crozat’s collection was dispersed at auction in Paris in 1741, and many of his Guercino drawings were purchased by the eminent connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774), who had catalogued the Crozat collection. Among other 18th century collectors who acquired sheets by Guercino were the Florentine biographer Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri (1676-1742), the Frenchmen Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville (1680-1765), who owned twenty-three drawings by or attributed to the artist, Charles-François, Marquis de Calvière (1693-1777), and Charles Paul Jean-Baptiste de Bourgevin Vialart, Comte de Saint-Morys (1743-1795), as well as the Saxon prince Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen (1738-1822), whose collection of around 150 drawings by Guercino and his school is today in the Albertina in Vienna. The English portrait painter, author, connoisseur and collector Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1667-1745) also owned a number of drawings by Guercino.

Guercino’s drawings were, in fact, especially prized by 18th century English collectors. As Mariette aptly noted, ‘the English are passionate about Guercino’s drawings’4, and it was in England that many of the Guercino drawings sold from the Casa Gennari in the 18th century ended up. Among the major purchasors of drawings from the Casa Gennari in Bologna was the young British antiquarian John Bouverie (c.1722-1750), who acquired – probably through such intermediaries as the Bolognese art dealer Francesco Forni – a very large and important group of several hundred drawings by the artist that was later described by one contemporary writer and collector as ‘perhaps the finest collection of Guercino’s drawings in England…contained in about twelve volumes.’5 Acquired in Italy in the 1740s, the Bouverie collection of Guercino drawings was the first significant group of works by the artist to come to England. Bouverie’s Guercino drawings descended to the Earls of Gainsborough, and an initial group of 116 drawings, divided into forty-eight lots, was sold at auction in 1859, with much of the remainder dispersed in several sales in London in the early 1920s.

Another major tranche of drawings by Guercino was acquired from the Gennari heirs, some fifteen years after Bouverie’s purchases, by Richard Dalton (c.1715-1791), the Librarian to King George III of England. Between about 1758 and 1764, Dalton purchased more than eight hundred drawings by Guercino and his studio from the Casa Gennari for the English Royal Collection. These all remain today at Windsor Castle, and form the single largest extant group of drawings by the artist. (Dalton also seems to have acquired several drawings and some paintings by Guercino from the Casa Gennari for his own collection, which was sold at auction in 1791, shortly after his death.) A number of drawings by Guercino appear to have been acquired from the Casa Gennari in the late 1750s by the English art dealer William Kent (active c.1742-c.1762) and were dispersed at auction in London in 1762. Another significant group of drawings from the Casa Gennari were two albums of drapery and figure studies by Guercino that were acquired by the Bolognese painter Francesco Giusti (1752-1828); these were sold by Giusti’s heirs in 1899 to the German diplomat and collector Baron Franz von Koenig-Fachsenfeld (1864-1918) and are kept today in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

The particular 18th century English appreciation for the drawings of Guercino, noted by Mariette and typified by the collections of Bouverie and King George III, is also seen in the drawings assembled by later collectors such as Nathaniel Hone, Thomas Hudson, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Pond, the Rev. Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode, Richard Payne Knight, Henry Reveley and Thomas Lawrence. The collecting of Guercino drawings in England lessened somewhat during the 19th century, when Italian Baroque art in general was largely ignored in favour of the earlier works of the Renaissance. The 1859 auction of the first tranche of 116 drawings by Guercino from the Bouverie collection, however, saw sheets acquired at the sale by the scholar and curator Sir John Charles Robinson (1824-1913), a leading figure in the Victorian art world, much of whose collection was later acquired by the Scottish collector John Malcolm, 14th laird of Poltalloch (1805-1893).

The collecting of Guercino drawings was revived in the early 20th century among collectors such as Sir Robert Witt (1872-1952) and Archibald G. B. Russell (1879-1955), both of whom acquired several sheets from a 1922 auction in London of drawings from the collections of Bouverie and the Earls of Gainsborough and originating from the Casa Gennari. (The following year Russell also published the first account of Guercino as a draughtsman, in which he noted of the artist that ‘In the lightness of touch, in the transparency of effect, as well as in the luminous use of the untouched spaces of white paper, which are characteristic of the best of these sketches, he is the forerunner of Tiepolo, who, it may be observed, is known to have held the drawings of Guercino in the highest esteem and to have formed a collection of them.’6) Throughout the 1920s the American collector Dan Fellows Platt (1873-1938) acquired some two hundred drawings by Guercino and his school from the London dealers E. Parsons and Sons, many of which had been purchased at the Bouverie-Gainsborough sale in 1922. Most, but not all, of the Platt drawings were later bequeathed by him to the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey.

Another 20th century collector with a particular interest in Guercino was the Dutchman Frits Lugt (1884-1970), who from 1919 onwards assembled a small but choice group of drawings by the artist, most of which were acquired when scholarly appreciation of the artist and his oeuvre was still relatively limited. The most significant collector of Guercino’s work in the past century, however, was the British art historian Sir Denis Mahon (1910-2011), who, beginning in the 1930s, amassed a highly significant group of paintings and drawings by the artist from Cento. Mahon championed Italian Baroque painting at a time when it was largely ignored by scholars and collectors, and was particularly dedicated to the work of Guercino, whose oeuvre he studied systematically, and with great insight, throughout his lifetime. In 1937 Mahon published two articles on the earliest works of the young Guercino in The Burlington Magazine, and over the next sixty years he produced an extensive series of articles, books, exhibition and collection catalogues devoted to the artist which remain indispensable to this day. Perhaps most significant of these are the pair of seminal catalogues that accompanied the groundbreaking monographic exhibitions of paintings and drawings by Guercino organized by Mahon in Bologna in 1968. Indeed, Mahon may be credited with almost single-handedly restoring Guercino’s reputation after many years of critical and commercial neglect, and to have done more than anyone else to have brought the work of this remarkable painter and draughtsman to light.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Kneeling Male Nude

Oiled or modified charcoal or black chalk, possibly dipped in a gum solution, on blue-grey paper, backed. Inscribed (by Dubini) with the sheet size 555/375 in pencil at the lower right. Further inscribed questo disegno del Guercino / fu Di Bastiano Ricci / [?] volta(?)di Jacopo Parolini / Pittore ferrarese donatogli in Bologna dall’ A[?] per memoria in brown ink on the verso, partly backed. 559 x 379 mm. (22 x 14 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sebastiano Ricci, Bologna, Piacenza, Venice and elsewhere (according to a contemporary inscription on the verso); Giacomo Parolini, Bologna and Ferrara (according to a contemporary inscription on the verso)1; Francesco Dubini, Milan2; Private collection, Milan in 1991; Prisco Bagni, Bologna; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Sir Denis Mahon, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri il Guercino 1591-1666: Disegni, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1991 [pub. 1992], p.313, no.206.

EXHIBITED: Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico, Il Guercino: disegni, 1991, no.206.

This large sheet may be added to a small but distinctive group of drawings by Guercino dating from his early years in Cento and Bologna, before he left for Rome. In 1616 the young Guercino is known to have set up an Accademia del Nudo, or drawing academy, in two rooms in the house of one of his patrons, Bartolomeo Fabri, in the artist’s native town of Cento. His biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia noted that, by the following year, Guercino had nearly two dozen pupils, some of whom came from quite far away. During this period of his early career – between 1616 and 1620, and before his trip to Rome in 1621 – Guercino produced several drawings of male nude academies in black chalk or oiled charcoal that were almost certainly related to his teaching activities. These works, usually on a large scale, reflect something of the drawings of male nude academies produced by the previous generation of artists in Emilia-Romagna, notably the life drawings of the Carracci and, in particular, Pietro Faccini, who had himself left the Carracci academy in the 1590s to establish a drawing academy of his own in Bologna3

As one scholar has noted, ‘Guercino’s many drawings of seated, kneeling, or reclining nude or draped youths done in black chalk or charcoal on coarse, tinted papers, [were] made in the studio in the years prior to the painter’s Roman sojourn. These unusually large-scale studies were drawn by the master as exemplae for students, teaching them how to draw forms in contrasting light and shadow from a living model…Guercino’s pre-Roman life drawings generally represent nude figures and often show the same model in various attitudes, accompanied by simple props such as staffs, draperies, and blocks to sit upon.’4 It has been suggested that Guercino’s charcoal ‘nudi d’accademia’ of this type were drawn on a largescale so that they could more easily be seen by all of the pupils working in a large studio. Referring to the technique of these early drawings by the artist, John Marciari has opined that ‘the chalk or charcoal dipped in gum solution perhaps appealed to Guercino because the intense, bold effect it created corresponded to the forthright study that underlay the drawings’ conception, something different from the furious sketching of his pen drawings or the refinement of a more delicate chalk study.’5 After about 1620, however, drawings of this type largely disappear from Guercino’s oeuvre, as he found himself too busy with commissions to continue his work at the Accademia del Nudo6

Drawn on faded blue-grey paper, the present sheet may likely be dated to around 1618, the year in which Guercino spent some time in Venice, where he would have become familiar with the use of blue paper by local artists. As Marzia Faietti has pointed out, ‘While it is difficult to provide precise dates for the nude studies of the pre-Roman period since for the most part they were not intended as preliminary to a finished work of art, they often reveal the artist experimenting with poses to be used later in a painting, or they were extrapolated from preparatory studies for paintings.’7 It may be noted that the pose of the

male nude in this drawing is very similar, albeit with the position of the arms reversed, to that on one side of a comparable large-scale drawing of c.1617-1618 by Guercino; a double-sided study of David with the Head of Goliath (fig.1) in the Uffizi, drawn in soft black chalk on blue paper8. Both sides of the Uffizi drawing are in turn preparatory studies for an independent, portable fresco painting of the same subject (fig.2), executed around 1618 and now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri9. The present sheet was probably done at around the same time as the Nelson-Atkins fresco – a work which exhibits a pronounced Venetian quality – and may well have been a first idea for the pose of David in the composition. Whether or not this large sheet was drawn specifically as a study for the David with the Head of Goliath, however, cannot easily be determined. As the Guercino scholar David Stone has noted, ‘When it has been possible to relate one of Guercino’s nude studies to a figure depicted in a compositional sketch or a painting, scholars have queried whether the study was made (and the model posed) specifically for the task or whether, as seems to be more likely, it is not simply a case of a ready-made image from a life session being pressed into service at a later date when needed.’10

The pose of the male nude in this large drawing shares some affinities with the muscular ignudi-like figures in niches earlier painted by Guercino in monochrome fresco in the Casa Provenzale in Cento in 1614 and still in situ11. These were inspired by the Carracci family’s decoration of the Palazzo Fava in Bologna, executed some thirty years beforehand, which Guercino must have studied closely.

Among stylistically comparable charcoal drawings of male nudes by Guercino is a sheet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York12 and a drawing of A Male Nude Lying on the Ground, of considerable scale but still somewhat smaller than the present sheet, in an American private collection13, as well as a large study of a seated young man in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles14. As Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta have noted of such drawings, ‘Guercino’s studies from the living nude model are masterly in their suggestion of light, their confident handling, and their economic simplification of form.’15

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Madonna of Loreto in a Niche Pen and brown ink. Another depiction of the same subject in pen and brown ink on the verso. 212 x 165 mm. (8 3/8 x 6 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Benjamin Peronnet, Paris; Private collection, London.

This double-sided sheet depicts a famous sculpture known as the Madonna of Loreto. As one scholar has noted, ‘The wooden statue of the Madonna and Child, which stood for centuries in the Santa Casa in the Sanctuary of Loreto in the Marches, was one of the most important devotional images of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.’1 This venerated wooden sculpture of the Virgin and Child, with the head of the Virgin wearing a papal triple tiara, was covered in a richly embroidered cloak overlayed with jewels and placed on the main altar of the Marian shrine of the Basilica of the Santa Casa in Loreto, in the Marches2. The work was destroyed by fire in 1921 and was replaced by a copy.

Both sides of the present sheet are preparatory studies for an engraving, in reverse, depicting the Madonna of Loreto in a niche with putti above (fig.1), by the Centese printmaker Giovanni Battista Pasqualini (1595-1631)3. From around 1618 until his death in 1631 Pasqualini was closely associated with Guercino, producing numerous engravings after his compositions which led to the young painter’s work becoming known well beyond their native Cento. Pasqualini even accompanied Guercino when he travelled to Rome in 1621, and by the end of his brief career had engraved nearly sixty prints after both paintings and drawings by him. At best, however, Pasqualini remained a printmaker of only modest talent, and Guercino must have struggled to ensure that his compositions were reproduced as accurately as possible. As Nicholas Turner has pointed out, ‘With ‘provincial’ engravers, such as

recto (actual size)

[Gianfrancesco] Mucci and Pasqualini, the supervision required would have been considerable, even though the artist must have realized from the outset that the quality of their engravings was never going to be high, despite his attempts to control their work.’4 An indication of how closely the artist supervised Pasqualini’s process is seen in a handful of proof impressions of engravings by the latter which display corrections in pen and ink by Guercino that were later incorporated into the final state of the prints.

Although the related engraving is dated 1628, the present sheet may be a few years earlier in date. As the Guercino scholar David Stone has noted, ‘Pasqualini’s print must derive from a drawing (now lost) by Guercino, one that is not necessarily as late as 1628. Pasqualini often used Guercino drawings and paintings of earlier years as sources for his engravings.’5 The print bears an extensive dedication to the archpriest6 and canons of the church of San Biagio in Cento from a certain Bartolomeo Lori, a native of Loreto living in Cento, who presumably commissioned the engraving from Pasqualini. As an act of faith and penitence, Lori is said to have carried the statue of the Madonna of Loreto on his shoulders from Loreto to Cento as a gift to the Augustinian nuns of the church of Santa Maria Maddalena there. A copy of the Madonna of Loreto is, in fact, still in situ in the church today.

Guercino had depicted the Madonna of Loreto in an early, signed canvas of Saints Bernardino of Siena and Francis of Assisi Praying before the Madonna of Loreto, painted in 1618 for the church of San Pietro in Cento and now in the Pinacoteca Civica there7, but in that altarpiece the statue is seen from the side and deep in shadow. Much closer to the present sheet is the frontal depiction of the Madonna of Loreto in two related pen and wash drawings of Souls in Purgatory Supplicating the Madonna of Loreto by Guercino, one in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa8 (fig.2) and the other in the Albertina in Vienna9. Both drawings are, however, unconnected to any surviving painting by the artist.

A stylistically and thematically related drawing of The Nativity in a Fictive Frame Supported by Two Angels (fig.3) appeared at auction in 2005 and is now in the Grimaldi Fava collection in Cento10. That drawing is likewise based on an earlier sculpture; a 15th century stucco relief of The Nativity by a follower of Donatello which had been venerated in Cento since the early 16th century, and which remains in the church of Santi Sebastiano e Rocco there. As the scholar Fausto Gozzi has written of the Cento drawing, in terms that are apposite to the present sheet, ‘This drawing…is an extraordinary example of Guercino’s draughtsmanship. Here the master displays all his power to depict a subject succinctly, with economy of expression. The pen seems to dance over the paper with a constant movement, leaping and then pausing momentarily, but almost never breaking off the restless line...’11 Like the present sheet, the Cento drawing was later engraved, by the local printmaker Matteo Mingarini, in a print dated 163412 Among stylistically comparable drawings of the second half of the 1620s by Guercino is The Madonna of the Rosary of c.1627-1628 in the Uffizi in Florence13, which is a design for a wooden statue, by an unknown sculptor, intended for a church in Cento.

verso (actual size)

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Recto: Charity

Verso: Landscape with Trees by a Farm and Figures by a Pond

Pen and brown ink and brown wash. The verso in pen and brown ink, lightly squared in red chalk. Faintly inscribed CHARITAS in brown ink on the scroll held by one of the children. Further inscribed Guerchin in brown ink at the lower right. The verso faintly numbered 12 in pencil in the lower centre margin. 150 x 200 mm. (5 5/8 x 7 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: John Skippe, The Upper Hall, Ledbury; William Bateson, London and Merton House, Grantchester, nr. Cambridge (Lugt 2604a); His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 23-24 April 1929, lot 48 (‘Charity. Pen and ink and brown wash. 6 in. by 7 7/8 in. (15 cm. by 20.1 cm.) A landscape with a cottage and trees on back. Collection: J. Skippe’, bt. Meatyard for £1); Frederick Richard Meatyard, London; Probably E. Parsons and Sons, London; Dan Fellows Platt, Englewood, New Jersey, with both his collector’s mark (Lugt 2066b) and estate stamp (Lugt 750a) on the verso; By descent to his widow, Ethel Bliss Platt, Englewood, New Jersey; Mr. and Mrs. Gordon B. Washburn, Buffalo, New York; Michael Curran, Houston; His anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), New York, Christie’s, 11 January 1994, lot 202 (sold for $51,750); Thomas Williams, London and W. M. Brady & Co., New York, in 1995; Private collection, Massachusetts.

LITERATURE: Piero Boccardo, Genova e Guercino; Dipinti e Disegni delle Civiche Collezioni, exhibition catalogue, Genoa, 1992, illustrated p.42, under no.6; Nicholas Turner, The Paintings of Guercino: A Revised and Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rome, 2017, p.415, under no.141.

EXHIBITED: New York, W. M. Brady & Co. Inc., and London, Thomas Williams (Fine Art) Ltd. at Daniel Katz Ltd., Old Master Drawings, Autumn 1995, no.19; Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, 2000.

The recto of this double-sided drawing is a preparatory study for Guercino’s painting of Christian Charity (fig.1) of c.1625-1626, in the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio1, of which a reproductive engraving by Giovanni Battista Pasqualini – dated 1626 and dedicated to Ludovico Malvezzi, canon of the church of San Pietro in Bologna2 – was published soon after it was painted. A related drawing, which is much closer to the arrangement of the figures in the final painting (fig.2), is in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa3. A similar subject, although more expansive in composition, is found in a pen and wash drawing of Charity, with an Old Man, likewise datable to the first half of the 1620s, formerly in the Malcolm collection and now in the British Museum4

recto

The verso of this drawing of Charity is notable as one of only a handful of landscape sketches by Guercino that can be approximately dated, by virtue of the compositional study of c.1625 on the recto. Because they are not related to his finished paintings, Guercino’s landscape drawings are difficult to accurately date, although most are assumed to date from the 1620s and 1630s, before he left rural Cento for Bologna. Almost the only known securely datable landscape in his oeuvre is a drawing now in the Uffizi, which, according to an inscription on the sheet, was given by the artist in 1626 to the governor of Cento. The use of diagonal squaring lines in red chalk in the centre of this early landscape composition is also unusual among Guercino’s drawings, as is the fact that the artist has drawn on both sides of a sheet of paper; indeed, very few landscape studies are found on the reverse of a figure drawing by the artist.

As Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta have written, ‘Guercino made numerous landscape drawings, yet the motivation behind this prolific output and its ultimate purpose remain obscure. Guercino rarely painted pure landscapes (though there are a few notable examples both in fresco and on canvas among his early works…), and usually the backgrounds of his history subjects are devoid of landscape details. It is therefore impossible to assign to any of these drawings a preparatory function. They were apparently made as ends in themselves, probably for the artist’s own personal satisfaction and for the amusement of his friends… The landscapes differ markedly from the artist’s working studies for history paintings in their meticulous execution, concern for detail, and highly finished appearance. Guercino nonetheless succeeded in achieving spectacular effects of light and space.’5

According to the provenance given in the catalogue of the auction of William Bateson’s collection of drawings in 1929, the present sheet was once part of the collection of Italian drawings assembled in the last quarter of the 18th century by the English artist John Skippe (1742-1812). The drawing may have been acquired from one of Skippe’s descendants by the eminent biologist William Bateson FRS (1861-1926), who came to own a small but choice group of drawings by Guercino. The posthumous sale of Bateson’s collection, held in London in April 1929, included twenty-seven drawings by the artist, including this double-sided sheet. Soon afterwards the present sheet entered the extensive collection of more than two hundred drawings by Guercino assembled by the American collector Dan Fellows Platt (1873-1938). Most, but not all, of Platt’s outstanding collection of Italian drawings – which included large groups of studies by Luca Cambiaso, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo and Salvator Rosa, as well as Guercino – were later presented to the Princeton University Art Museum. Since this drawing does not appear in Mildred Lynes’s 1940 manuscript catalogue of the Guercino drawings in the Platt collection, it must have left his possession shortly after his death.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Man with a Moustache and a Cap, Looking to the Right (The Almond Seller)

Pen and brown ink. Laid down on an 18th century English (Richardson) mount, inscribed Guercino. in brown ink at the bottom. 121 x 124 mm. (4 3/4 x 4 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Jonathan Richardson, Senior, London (Lugt 2184 and on his mount); Probably his sale, London, Covent Garden, Christopher Cock, 22 January to 8 February 1747; Margot Gordon, New York and Marcello Aldega, Rome, in 1988; Nina Griscom, New York.

LITERATURE: Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, p.161, under no.555.

EXHIBITED: New York, Margot Gordon and Rome, Marcello Aldega, Old Italian Drawings XVI to XVIII Century, 1988, no.19.

The 17th century Roman painter and biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri, who does not appear to have ever met Guercino and whose account of the artist is based on secondhand sources, nevertheless noted that he had seen ‘a number of drawings by his hand, of dances, festivals, and weddings, all decorously conducted in his Rocca di Cento, imitating the ideas, the demeanour and the appearance of these rustics, and of these foretane of the country, which were, in truth, curious and well-captured.’1 The present sheet belongs with a group of genre studies, almost certainly drawn from life, which Guercino produced throughout his career. The result of the artist’s acute observation of the people he saw around him in his native town of Cento, these studies – of shopkeepers, peasants, labourers and others – may have been influenced by the example of the Carracci, who were among the first to recognize that peasants, village folk and similar mundane characters were interesting artistic subjects in their own right. Such genre subjects had been introduced into Italy by German and Netherlandish prints of the 16th century, which were particularly influential on Bolognese artists.

Often sympathetic yet sometimes verging on caricature, Guercino’s genre drawings were not generally intended as studies for paintings but were produced rather as visual exercises and for his own amusement. As David Stone has written, ‘For [Guercino], genre drawings were worth executing for their own sake and for their entertainment value. One cannot help but notice the sincere humanity and ‘down-home’ flavor of many of Guercino’s sketches....it is easy to understand why the artist left Rome in 1623 and returned to a ‘piccolo paese’ to continue his career. He seems genuinely to have enjoyed the provincial community where he grew up and learned to paint.’2 As another scholar has further noted, ‘Given that Guercino travelled little and spent so much of his career in provincial Cento, it is no surprise that his caricatures and genre scenes reflect local life rather than political subjects. A gentle, sensitive humor and humanity characterize his work in this field and indeed pervade his entire graphic output.’3

Probably datable to the second half of the 1620s, the present sheet depicts the head and shoulders of the same figure in a larger pen and ink study of A Street Seller and his Customer, drawn by an artist from Guercino’s immediate circle, that is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle4. The Windsor sheet shows more of the street vendor, and the full composition includes a barrel and a sack which is labelled mandole, or almonds.

The earliest known owner of this drawing was the English portrait painter, author and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1667-1745), whose collector’s mark is found at the lower right corner of the sheet. Richardson owned a remarkable collection of nearly five thousand drawings, mostly Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, assembled over a period of about fifty years.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Sibyl

Red chalk. Two small made up areas at the lower left corner and the left centre, near the figure’s proper right shoulder. Laid down on an 18th or 19th century mount. 185 x 211 mm. (7 1/4 x 8 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably by descent from the artist to his nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; Thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna, and probably sold in the second half of the 18th century; Anonymous sale, London, Rosebery’s, 4 June 2020, lot 109 (as Workshop of Guercino); Private collection.

The twelve Sibyls of classical antiquity were pagan seers who are said to have foretold the coming of Christ, and thus were regarded as the secular and female equivalent of the prophets of the Old Testament. Guercino treated the theme of Sibyls in a number of paintings dating from throughout his career – notably depicting eight of them in the fresco decoration of four of the lunettes below the cupola of the Duomo in Piacenza between 1626 and 1627 – but the subject became especially common in his painted output of the 1640s and 1650s. These secular works proved particularly popular among collectors in Italy and, later, in England. As an early 19th century Irish art critic wrote of Guercino’s paintings of such female subjects, ‘His women, so highly admired by artists and amateurs, are not of celestial mould. They have neither the devotional calm of monastic seclusion, nor the studied elegance of Cleopatras. Made up of human sympathies, their charm is a blended character of delicacy and ardour, unaffected airs, the sparkling freshness of youth, and speaking expression of animated sensibility.’1

Nicholas Turner has suggested that the present sheet may be related to a half-length painting of the Sibyl Hellespontica, today in the collection of the National Trust at Ickworth House in Suffolk2. (Sometimes also known as the Trojan Sibyl, the Hellespontine Sibyl was the priestess of the Oracle of Apollo at Dardania and is said to have predicted the crucifixion of Christ.) The painting is recorded as a work by Guercino when in the collection of Frederick Hervey, 1st Marquess of Bristol (1769-1859), and is noted as hanging in the library at Ickworth House in the 1830s. The composition is not known in any other version, and is not listed in Guercino’s Libro dei Conti. Until recently the painting was thought to be later in date and was attributed to Guercino’s nephew and pupil Benedetto Gennari the Younger. However, the high quality of the Ickworth canvas has led to a recent reassessment of it as, at least in part, an autograph work by the master, although its dating has remained something of a question mark3

Turner has compared the present sheet with two red chalk studies for the seated sibyls painted by Guercino in the Duomo in Piacenza in 1627, one in the Nasjonalgaleriet in Oslo4 and the other in the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest5. David Stone has, however, noted that the present sheet is more likely to be a work of the first half of the 1630s. A comparison, on stylistic grounds, may be made with such red chalk drawings by Guercino as A Peasant Woman with a Basket of Grapes in the Uffizi in Florence6, as well as two sheets at Windsor Castle; A Woman Showing a Nude Baby to Two Attendants7 and Saint Geneviève of Paris8. Likewise similar in technique and handling is a drawing of The Virgin and Child in red chalk which appeared on the art market in 1998 and 20019

A coarsely reworked counterproof of this drawing is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle10, part of an extensive collection of nearly 240 offsets of red chalk drawings by Guercino acquired from the Casa Gennari in Bologna, in the late 1750s or early 1760s, by Richard Dalton for King George III. Although the dimensions of the Windsor counterproof are slightly larger than the present sheet, the scale is identical, and it would appear that this drawing has been trimmed slightly at the left and right edges.

Another retouched counterproof at Windsor, of slightly larger dimensions, shows the same woman in an identical pose, but without the scroll and with much more sketchy outlines11, and may record a lost initial sketch by Guercino for the present composition.

The album of counterproofs of Guercino drawings acquired by Dalton from the Gennari heirs in the 18th century contained offsets of original drawings by the master that were part of the contents of the artist’s studio in Bologna. While some of these counterproofs were pulled during Guercino’s lifetime, it would seem that most of them were done some time after his death, in order to preserve records of the original drawings before they were sold from the Casa Gennari. As Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner have noted, ‘It is possible that the Windsor offsets were sold by Guercino’s heirs instead of the original red chalk drawings that they were either unwilling to sell to Richard Dalton or that he was unwilling to buy; he was apparently satisfied with the purchase of some of these ‘reproductions’ as supplements to the large group of autograph drawings he had already secured.’12 It is likely, therefore, that the provenance of the present sheet can be traced back to the Casa Gennari.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Man Looking to His Left

Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Numbered (by Malaussena) 137 in brown ink at the lower right. 200 x 192 mm. (7 7/8 x 7 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: François Alziary, Baron de Malaussena, Le Blanc (Indre) and Nice (Lugt 1887), with his associated number 1371; Possibly his sale (‘Collection de M. le baron de M.’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Delbergue-Cormont], 18-20 April 1866, possibly part of lot 209 (as Guercino: ‘Bustes d’hommes. Deux dessins à la plume’, sold for 16 francs) or part of lot 208 (as Guercino: ‘Deux figures d’apôtres, jeune homme à mi-corps; homme versant à boire à deux guerriers. Quatre croquis à la plume.’, sold for 20 francs); Paul Frantz Marcou, Paris (Lugt 1911b)2; By descent to his daughter Catherine, Mme. Henry Dumas; Thence by descent; Marcou sale (‘Seconde partie de la collection Paul Frantz Marcou 18601932’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lafon], 23 May 2007, lot 26 (as Bolognese School, 17th Century); JeanLuc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2008; Private collection, London; Anonymous sale (‘Property of a Private Collector’), New York, Christie’s, 24 January 2017, lot 37.

EXHIBITED: New York, Jean-Luc Baroni at Adam Williams Fine Art Ltd., An Exhibition of Master Paintings and Drawings, 2008, no.15.

This splendid sheet, which has been dated to the 1630s, appears to be a character study of a person whose appearance the artist found particularly interesting, and is more of a genre subject than a caricature. The subject was almost certainly someone from the artist’s native town of Cento. As Fausto Gozzi has noted of works such as this, ‘These drawings give us the portrait of a community whose favourite stage was the town square…Old Cento, before the buildings and monuments erected in the eighteenth century, still looked like an ancient village, inhabited by barely 5,000 people – almost a communal dwelling where everyone knew everyone else. The square was like a great room, where one could encounter the strangest people...In the square of Cento it is not difficult to imagine Guercino drawing amid the colourful crowd, a young man among the throng, observing these faces with amusement, yet profoundly moved as a man and as an artist before these people on the edges of society who, through his drawings, began to acquire their own face and identity.’3

The Guercino scholar Nicholas Turner has further written of such genre drawings that ‘they are characterized by a rapid touch, an economy of means, and a remarkable acuteness of observation, many of them clearly based on scenes taken directly from life. The foibles of the men, women, and children of all rank who were his unwitting subjects are captured with great immediacy, which has always given these drawings a special appeal. Although the nobles, gentlefolk, and clergy, largely from his native Cento, came under his powerful scrutiny, the most frequent subjects were the peasant folk, or contadini, for whom it seems the painter had a particular affection.’4

Among stylistically comparable drawings with the same predominant application of brush and wash, and with only a limited use of the pen, is a study of the head of a bearded man in a private collection5, as well as a caricature of a man with bulging eyeballs, at the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle6

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Seated Female Nude

Red chalk, with stumping. 268 x 198 mm. (10 1/2 x 7 3/4 in.)

Watermark: A cockerel standing on three mountains1.

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 28 June 1995, lot 113 (sold for 165,000 FF); Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, in 2003; Private collection, San Francisco.

LITERATURE: Nicholas Turner, The Paintings of Guercino: A Revised and Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rome, 2017, p.382, under no.118.1 (as location unknown).

‘Guercino…showed great accomplishment in the use of red chalk. This allowed for less tonal range than black chalk, as the darks have necessarily to be less dark than those achieved with the other medium. But this is compensated for by the warmth of the hue inherent in red chalk. Guercino exploited its painterly softness to convey a lifelike transience with a mastery achieved by few other artists…In his later years he resorted to red chalk rather more frequently with a loose, impressionistic touch, the rapidity of which on occasion served to replace pen and wash…Few other artists of his period used the graphic device of stumping as efficiently as did Guercino. This he employed in his more finished red chalk drawings to convey the subtle tonal transitions between the half-tones and the lights. The usual technique was simply to smudge the chalk, although occasionally chalk granules were mixed with water and applied with a brush. Stumping was particularly useful for rendering delicate nuances of light over flesh…’2

As Nicholas Turner has noted, ‘Guercino’s drawings of the female nude are among the rarest, most soughtafter of the master’s figure drawings.’3 The present sheet, which is in exceptional condition, would appear to be a study for a bathing nude, likely a Susanna, Venus or Bathsheba4. A closely comparable study of a female nude, in an almost identical pose, appears in a late red chalk compositional drawing of Susanna and the Elders (fig.1), part of the large album of drawings known as the Codice Resta in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan5. Although Turner published the present sheet as a study for the figure of Venus in Guercino’s painting of The Toilet of Venus of c.1622-1623, painted during the artist’s Roman period and today in the Goethe Academy in Renaissance, California6, this drawing is more likely to date from somewhat later in the artist’s career, around the second half of the 1630s. A stylistic comparison may be made with a red chalk drawing of Cleopatra, of the same period, in the British Museum7.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

King David with his Harp

Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Inscribed guercino in brown ink at the lower right. Further inscribed Le Guerchin in black chalk and Gio Francesco Barbieri / da Cento 1590 + 1666 in brown ink on the verso.

134 x 129 mm. (5 1/4 x 5 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Hans Haug, Strasbourg1

The Biblical figure of David occurs in Guercino’s painted oeuvre throughout his career, sometimes accompanied by a musical instrument, usually the harp (or lyre) which he played with great skill. This newly-discovered drawing can be closely related to two other pen and wash studies of the crowned David with his harp, one in the British Museum in London (fig.1)2 and the other formerly at Holkham Hall in Norfolk and now in the Goldman collection in Chicago (fig.2)3. However, no three-quarter length painting of this particular subject is recorded in Guercino’s account book, the Libro dei Conti, nor is one mentioned by Cesare Malvasia in his biography of the artist.

Nicholas Turner has recently suggested that both the British Museum and Goldman drawings, and by extension the present sheet, may be first ideas for Guercino’s painting of King David Rending his Garments of 1637 (fig.3), formerly in the collection of the Bob Jones University Museum in Greenville, South Carolina, and lately sold at auction in France4. The canvas is listed in the Libro dei Conti under the 14th of July 1637, when the artist was paid fifty ducats by a Monsignor Gorri, Vice Legate of Bologna, for ‘una mezza figura di un David Profeta fatto in atto di rompersi gli habiti propri.’5 A red chalk drawing by an artist in Guercino’s circle, now in the collection of the Albertina in Vienna6, depicts the same subject as the painting of King David Rending his Garments of 1637, albeit in reverse, and is likely to be a copy of a lost autograph drawing for the picture.

The existence of three other half-length drawings of King David by Guercino, each of which show the figure looking upwards but not in the act of tearing his vestments, has led Turner to suggest that Guercino may have originally planned the painted composition quite differently, with David leaning on his harp. As Turner hypothesizes, ‘It is likely that Monsignore Gorri was offered a more conventional

actual size

composition of King David, half-length, as attested by two original drawings [ie. the British Museum and Goldman drawings], both datable on stylistic grounds to the mid-1630s…which show him half-length, looking heavenwards.’7 Of the other two related drawings of this subject, the present sheet is closest in composition to the study in the British Museum, notably in the angle of David’s head and the position of his right arm and hand.

Two later pen and ink drawings by Guercino depicting King David accompanied by his harp – one in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California and the other in a private collection7 – as well as a black chalk study of the same subject formerly in the Mariette collection and now in the Louvre8, show the Biblical monarch as a somewhat older and more pensive figure. All three drawings, which may be dated to around 1650, lack the overt emotion evident in the present sheet and its related studies, as well as the 1637 canvas, and are likely to be related to a later painting of King David, albeit without his harp, commissioned from the artist in 1651 and today on loan from the Rothschild Collection to Waddeson Manor in Buckinghamshire.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento

1591-1666 Bologna

The Head and Torso of a Bearded Old Man

Pen and brown ink. A study of the same bearded man, in reverse, drawn in red chalk on the verso. Inscribed Guercino / B-26 Parsons 1920 and numbered 22 in pencil on the old backing sheet. 187 x 188 mm. (7 3/8 x 7 3/8 in.)

Watermark: A star above a cartouche with a fleur-de-lys and papal keys.

PROVENANCE: By descent from the artist to his nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; By descent to Cesare Gennari’s grandson, Carlo Gennari, Bologna; Probably Francesco Forni, Bologna; Acquired in the 1740s by John Bouverie, Betchworth, Surrey; By descent to his sister, Anne Bouverie, Betchworth, Surrey, until 1757; Her son, Christopher Hervey, London and Betchworth, Surrey, until 1786; His aunt, Elizabeth Bouverie, Barham Court, Teston, Kent, until 1798; Bequeathed to Sir Charles Middleton, later 1st Baron Barham, Barham Court, Kent; By descent to his grandson, Charles Noel, 3rd Baron Barham and later 1st Earl of Gainsborough of the second creation; Thence by descent in the collection of the Earls of Gainsborough, Exton Park, Oakham, Rutland; Possibly their sale (‘Drawings by Old Masters, The Property of The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Gainsborough, Of Exton Park, Oakham, Rutlandshire’), London, Christie’s, 27 July 1922, part of lots 84 or 85 (bt. Parsons); E. Parsons and Sons, London (according to the inscription on the old backing sheet); Acquired from them in c.1920 by Dan Fellows Platt, Englewood, New Jersey (his estate stamp [Lugt 750a] stamped on the verso and also on the old backing sheet); James Gilvarry, New York; His sale (‘The Property of Mr. James Gilvarry’), London, Christie’s, 6 July 1977, lot 86 (sold for £1,000); Prisco Bagni, Bologna; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Mildred Akin Lynes, The Drawings of Guercino in the Dan Fellows Platt Collection, Englewood, New Jersey, unpublished M.A. thesis, New York University, 1940, p.101, no.95 (‘St. Jerome. (Platt B 26). Pen and bistre. (h 18.9 x w 18.9 cm.) Half-length figure of old bearded man leaning forward, profile to right, arms behind him. Purchased 1920.’).

Datable on stylistic grounds to the late 1630s, this fine drawing is likely to be a study for a figure of Saint Jerome, or possibly another hermit saint such as Saint Paul of Thebes1. Unusually for Guercino, the sheet includes a sketch on the verso; a red chalk study of the same bearded man, but in reverse. Although this pen and ink study remains unconnected to any extant work by Guercino, the head is akin to that in a painting of Saint Jerome Kissing a Crucifix, a lost work of c.1637-1638 that was one of a pair of oval paintings commissioned by Giovanni Battista Ferri for his family chapel in the church of San Giovanni in Monte in Bologna; the composition of the lost canvas is known through a painted copy2. When the present sheet appeared at auction in London in 1977 it was suggested that it may be a study for a figure of the elderly father Cimon in a Roman Charity, a proposal also recently made by David Stone.

The vigorous pen technique of this sheet provides a striking example of the gustosa facilità which the artist’s biographer Cesare Malvasia praised as a characteristic feature of Guercino’s draughtsmanship. The drawing may be compared stylistically with a damaged study of an old bearded man in profile to the right, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle3, which is drawn on the reverse of a letter dated Cento 1638. Also somewhat similar is the head and torso of an elderly bearded saint in profile to the right found in a red chalk drawing at Chatsworth4

Spirited pen and ink drawings like this Head and Torso of a Bearded Old Man display Guercino’s innate talent as a draughtsman to the full. As the scholar and curator Carel van Tuyll has noted, ‘For all their functionality…Guercino’s drawings are also clear evidence of how much he enjoyed the medium for its own sake, and of his (justified) pride in his virtuosity: the calligraphic flourish of his pen lines and the vigour of

recto

his washes have always been admired…What makes Guercino’s drawings so appealing to modern eyes is in fact their spontaneity, the evidence they provide of an endlessly fertile imagination and a truly baroque creative urgency.’5

Drawings such as this have long been some of the most esteemed of the artist’s works among collectors and connoisseurs. As the early 19th century Irish art critic William Paulet Carey wrote of Guercino, ‘He contributed largely to the treasury of genius, and will ever rank as a bold original among the great masters. This originality is still more strongly marked in his drawings, which are numerous, and highly prized in all classic collections…Produced with strokes, and dashes, rapid and full of life and vigour; like sparks of flame struck forth by collision, they are more strongly impregnated with the fire of his unmitigated feelings…In Guercino’s drawings, the boldness of hand, the roughness of touch and surface, were subordinate results of real power; the necessary means of vigorous expression, character, and effect.’6

The present sheet was part of the extensive collection of more than two hundred drawings by Guercino assembled in the 1920s by the American archaeologist and collector Dan Fellows Platt (1873-1938). While much of Platt’s collection of Italian drawings was bequeathed to the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey, this drawing was acquired by the Irish-American bibliophile and collector James Gilvarry (1914-1984) of New York. It later entered the collection of the Italian scholar and art historian Prisco Bagni (1921-1995), a native of Cento who published several important studies on Guercino and his studio.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Roman Charity: Cimon and Pero

Red chalk, backed. Illegibly inscribed [da Cento?] in brown ink on the verso, partly cut off at the top edge of the sheet.

251 x 236 mm. (9 7/8 x 9 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably by descent from the artist to his nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; Thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna, and probably sold in the second half of the 18th century; Private collection; Fondantico, Bologna.

Previously unknown, this fine drawing is a preparatory study for a half-length painting of Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero) by Guercino, commissioned from the artist in 1639 by the Marchese Cornelio II Bentivoglio as a gift for Monsignor (later Cardinal) Jules Mazarin, who had served as papal nuncio in France. The painting is mentioned, as a ‘Carità Romana’ in Guercino’s account book, the Libro dei Conti, which records a payment of 66 scudi for the picture, received on 23 August 16391. Long thought to be lost, Guercino’s painting has recently been identified by Nicholas Turner with a canvas (fig.1) today in the Schoeppler collection in London2

The story of Cimon and Pero is taken from the Roman historian Valerius Maximus’s Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings), a compendium of stories of Ancient Rome, written around 30 BC. The aged Cimon is imprisoned and left to die of starvation, but is secretly nursed by his daughter Pero, who keeps him alive by doing so. This act of filial piety and selflessness impresses the old man’s jailers, and he is set free.

At least four other drawings of this subject by Guercino are known, all of which may be related to the 1639 Bentivoglio commission. A pen and ink drawing of Cimon and Pero (fig.2), from the Casa Gennari, Bouverie, Earls of Gainsborough and Oppé collections, is in a private collection in Germany3, while another pen drawing of the same subject (fig.3) was on the art market in 19944. A third pen and ink drawing, formerly in the collections of Padre Sebastiano Resta, Lord Somers and Richard Houlditch, was with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in 2014 [no.35] and reappeared on the art market in 20195. In all three of these drawings the arrangement of the figures is identical to that seen in the present sheet. A drawing of Roman Charity in red chalk, with the figures transposed so that Cimon is at the right and Pero at the left, was at one time in the H. S. Reitlinger collection and was sold at auction in 19536. What appears to be a copy of the present sheet was on the art market in 2012 and is now in a private collection7.

As David Stone has noted of this recent addition to the corpus of Guercino’s drawings, ‘Of the many preparatory sheets [for the 1639 painting] thus far identified, the present sheet is closest to the scheme realized...As in the latter, Cimon’s shackle and chains on the stone block feature prominently in the newly identified drawing, which has wonderfully realized shadows for the individual links of the chains. Guercino’s treatment of Cimon’s right hand is particularly sensitive, giving the viewer a sense of the man’s age and fragility. The daughter’s left hand, meanwhile, simultaneously conceals and reveals: with her fingers, with a degree of modesty, she holds her right breast to give suck to her prisoner-father; with her thumb she presses up against the contours of her left breast, reinforcing the voluptuousness of her body.’8 An interesting pentiment is noticeable in the present sheet, where Guercino first drew Pero’s head angled more to the left and looking down at Cimon, before deciding to tilt her head to the right to look away from her father as he nurses at her breast.

Stone has further pointed out of the present sheet that ‘Guercino’s drawing has a strong vertical redchalk line running prominently down the left side of the sheet, leaving a considerable margin. Perhaps early on, as he confronted a blank or nearly blank sheet, he wanted to set the proportions of his painting (typical of Guercino, he may not have yet fully settled on making a horizontal composition; he was constantly experimenting). But he seems to have regretted this line, and drew right over it (and also, in a sense, lessened its impact with hatching in the upper left.)’9 A reworked offset or counterproof of this drawing is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle10. Since the album of counterproofs of Guercino drawings in the Royal Collection, acquired from the Gennari heirs in the 18th century, contained offsets of original drawings by the master that were part of the contents of the artist’s studio, it is almost certain that the present sheet was once part of the very large corpus of drawings by Guercino in the Casa Gennari.

Guercino also treated the closely related subject of The Roman Daughter, in which a woman suckles her imprisoned mother, in two pen and ink drawings; one in the Royal Collection at Windsor11 and the other in a private collection in Switzerland12. An early 19th century etching after a lost Guercino drawing of the subject of Roman Charity, published in 1808 by the painter and printmaker Antonio Bresciani (1720-1817)13, shares some compositional similarities with the present sheet.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Landscape with Travellers Before a Rustic Building

Pen and brown ink.

195 x 192 mm. (7 3/4 x 7 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably by descent from the artist to his nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; Thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna, and probably sold in the second half of the 18th century; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 June 1979, lot 155; Prisco Bagni, Bologna; Thence by descent; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2017, lot 25; W. M. Brady and Co., New York; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, p.169, under no.584; Sir Denis Mahon, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri il Guercino 1591-1666: Disegni, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1991 [pub. 1992], p.286, no.183; Massimo Pulini, ‘Guercino di fronte al paesaggio’, in Massimo Pulini, ed., Guercino: racconti di paese. Il paesaggio e la scena popolare nei luoghi e nell’epoca di Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, exhibition catalogue, Cento, 2001, p.61, p.64, fig.12 (as Cesare Gennari).

EXHIBITED: Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico, Il Guercino: disegni, 1991, no.183; New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Old Master Drawings, Oil Sketches, and Sculpture 1520-1900, 2018, no.11.

Although painted landscapes are a feature of some of Guercino’s early works, such as the frescoes in the Casa Pannini in Cento, the artist produced relatively few landscapes, and in only a handful of his mature works is there a prominent landscape background. The practice of landscape drawing, however, occupied Guercino throughout his career, and such drawings account for a large and prominent part of his oeuvre. (Indeed, it has been noted that more landscape studies by Guercino are known than by almost any other Italian draughtsman of the period.) These drawings appear not to have been intended as studies for his paintings, and instead were done for their own sake; drawn for the artist’s own pleasure or, perhaps, occasionally given away as gifts. As Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner have pointed out, ‘Since they are not connected with his figure paintings, they presumably cannot have been made with any expectation of financial gain. For an artist who was attentive to such matters, besides being under pressure for time from his numerous commissions, this dedication to what might be considered a merely peripheral activity bespeaks Guercino’s devotion to what he himself must have considered of some importance.’1

Almost always executed in pen and ink, but only very rarely with wash, Guercino’s landscape drawings display little of the reworking and experimentation so typical of his figure studies. Carefully composed and incorporating such stock elements as solitary windblown trees, many of these drawings were probably not drawn on the spot, although they often contain motifs reminiscent of the landscape and river of the artist’s native town of Cento. Indeed, while some Guercino’s landscape drawings appear to depict actual views in and around Cento, most are imaginary views, combining different topographical and figural motifs in a fanciful manner to create a pleasing scene. As Mahon and Turner note, ‘As statements, many of [these landscape drawings] have a completeness not found in his more experimental and hastily drawn figure studies, and they contain something of the force and concentration of a painting rather than a drawing. In them the artist demonstrates the fecundity and power of his imagination by inventing a scene, shaping the space within it, giving the whole a unity by the suggestion of light and, finally, evoking a mood – all within the confines of a relatively small piece of paper.’2 In many of Guercino’s landscape drawings, there is an echo of the pastoral views of such 16th century Venetian artists as Giorgione, Titian and Domenico Campagnola, while the artist may have found other sources of inspiration in the work of such contemporaries as Agostino Tassi, Annibale and Agostino Carracci, Domenichino and Paul Bril, all of whom produced landscape studies.

The present sheet is a fine and characteristic example of Guercino’s landscape drawings. A sense of spatial recession is achieved through the use of the pen, with darker and thicker strokes of ink in such prominent foreground elements as the trees at the left becoming progressively lighter and more delicate as the eye moves through the landscape towards the far distance. As Sir Denis Mahon noted, when the present sheet was included in the important exhibition of Guercino drawings held in Bologna in 1991, on the four hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth, ‘This drawing [is a] typical example of how Guercino worked, quickly sketching out new landscape ideas.’3

‘There are always interesting details to be noted in Guercino’s landscapes’4, and here it may be observed that the prominent building, despite its rustic appearance, is decorated with a grand stemma, or coat of arms. The inclusion of figures in the foreground is typical of Guercino, and add a vital human element to the composition; as Turner has written, ‘Another characteristic of these drawings is the endless stream of little figures dotted about, enlivening the scene and at the same time providing a sense of scale: wayfarers, country folk engaged in different occupations, children playing together and the occasional yapping dog.’5 Comparable landscapes executed in the same rapidly-drawn pen technique include a Landscape with a Central Tree and a Church Spire in the Distance (fig.1) in the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin6 and a Landscape with a Church on a Hill in a private collection7. A school copy of the present sheet, more horizontal in orientation, is among the extensive collection of drawings by Guercino and his studio acquired from the Casa Gennari for the Royal Collection, and today at Windsor Castle8

This landscape is likely to have been part of the large group of drawings by Guercino that remained in his studio at the time of his death and were kept at the Casa Gennari in Bologna. According to the Bolognese biographer Cesare Malvasia, the Gennari collection included ‘Ten volumes of drawings, some in pen, some in red and black chalk, with a variety of exquisitely drawn landscapes’9. In a 1719 inventory of the Casa Gennari, several albums of drawings by Guercino are listed, one of which contained ninety-two landscapes (‘Dissegni à Penna ed’ Acquarella rapresentanti vedute di Paesi diversi’), while another was partly made up of ‘Paesi piccolo di Penna, Acquerella, e Lapis’, amounting to some sixtynine sheets10. Of the landscape drawings by Guercino in the inventory, five were valued very highly, at twenty-five lire each, while some thirty examples were framed and displayed on the walls of the Casa Gennari in Bologna and the family’s country villa at Bel Poggio, outside the city.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Virgin of the Rosary with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena

Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Inscribed Guercino and numbered 7 in pencil on the verso. 401 x 267 mm. (15 3/4 x 10 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably among the contents of the artist’s studio at the time of his death, and by descent to his nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; Thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna and probably sold in the second half of the 18th century; Charles Férault, Paris and Biarritz (Lugt 2793a)1; Private collection, France.

LITERATURE: Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, exhibition catalogue, London, 1991, p.138, under no.113 (as lost); Sir Denis Mahon, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri il Guercino 1591-1666: Disegni, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1991 [pub. 1992], p.158, under no.90 and p.176, under no.110 (as lost); Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.II, Vienna, 1994, p.743, under Inv.1377 (as lost); John Marciari, Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 2019-2020, p.78, under no.20 (as lost, and preparatory for the 1637 Turin painting).

Only recently rediscovered in a French private collection, this important drawing can be related to two major altarpiece commissions undertaken by Guercino in the late 1630s and early 1640s. The sheet is most closely related to the large altarpiece of The Virgin and Child Presenting Rosaries to Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena (fig.1), painted between 1640 and 1642 for the high altar of the church of San Marco Evangelista in the Marchigian town of Osimo and still in situ there2. The painting is thought to have been ordered from Guercino by the Bishop of Osimo, Agostino Simone Galamini (known as Cardinal Aracoeli after his titular church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome), shortly before his death in 1639, and the commission was thereafter assumed by the church authorities in honour of their recently deceased bishop. As is noted in a document of 20 June 1640, the patrons requested that they be shown a preparatory drawing for the composition, for the approval of the Congregation. Later the

same year, in October 1640, the painting is recorded as a work in progress by a visitor to Guercino’s studio. The altarpiece was probably completed sometime in 1642, when it was sent from Cento to Osimo, although the final payment of the total cost of 400 scudi was only received in April 1643.

Another pen and ink compositional drawing by Guercino for the Osimo altarpiece, formerly in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden (fig.2), is today in the Teyler Museum in Haarlem3, while a third, drawn in red chalk and highly finished (fig.3), is in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth4. Among preparatory studies for individual figures in the painting is a pen and ink study for the Virgin in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle5 and a pen drawing for two of the putti at the top right of the composition, which appeared at auction in London in 19746. Another study for the putti in the upper half of the altarpiece, drawn in red chalk, was formerly with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art [no.38] and was recently acquired by the National Trust for The Vyne in Basingstoke, Hampshire7. Finally, an untraced pen and ink drawing of the Virgin and Child, formerly in the collection of the Baron de Malaussena and sold at auction in Amsterdam in 19278, has been tentatively related to the Osimo canvas.

Some elements of the present sheet are also found in a slightly earlier altarpiece, with a different composition, of the same subject of The Virgin of the Rosary with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena (fig.4), painted for the Compagnia del Rosario in Turin and placed in the church of San Domenico there in 16379. As is sometimes the case with Guercino’s compositional drawings, some confusion exists in determining which of the artist’s studies of this subject are related to one or the other of the two painted versions of The Virgin of the Rosary with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena; the Turin painting of 1637 or the Osimo altarpiece of a few years later. Compositional studies for the Turin painting include a red chalk drawing in the British Museum10 and a pen and ink sheet in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York11. The pose of Saint Catherine in the present sheet, however, is quite close to that in the Morgan drawing, which has in the past been regarded as a preparatory study for the Osimo canvas12

A later copy of the present sheet by the 18th century Florentine engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (17271815), in the Albertina in Vienna13, is part of a group of around fifteen copies of Guercino drawings by Bartolozzi in that collection. In the late 1750s and early 1760s, Bartolozzi seems to have had access to the large corpus of Guercino drawings in the Casa Gennari and made drawn copies after several of them; this would suggest that the present sheet has a Casa Gennari provenance.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Soldier in Armour Facing Right, Holding a Shield and Looking to the Left

Black chalk. Some small made-up areas along the bottom edge and at the lower right corner. 270 x 197 mm. (10 5/8 x 7 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Italy; Anonymous sale, Rome, Bertolami Fine Art, 9 May 2019, lot 4 (as Circle of Guercino); Maurizio Nobile Fine Art, Bologna, Milan and Paris.

LITERATURE: Davide Trevisani, ‘Guercino: virtuosismo e furore del segno / Guercino: virtuosity and the frenzied mark’, in Stefano Bosi, ed., Segni d’artista: Masterpieces for a Collection, Genoa, 2022, pp.4-17.

It has been noted that ‘Guercino seems to have used black chalk only rarely, especially in the later part of his career, even though he achieved effects of great delicacy with the medium.’1 Although, as Nicholas Turner has pointed out, ‘Guercino did not often use the technique of black chalk for his figures’2, such drawings in black chalk that exist tend to be found more among the artist’s preparatory studies for paintings of the 1640s than in previous decades.

This splendid drawing has been related to Guercino’s large canvas of Hersilia Intervening Between Romulus and Tatius (or The Sabine Women Intervening to Bring Peace Between the Romans and the Sabines) (fig.1), painted in 1645 for the Parisian collector Louis Phélypeaux de La Vrillière and today

in the Louvre3. The drawing would appear to represent an early and unused idea for the pose of the striding warrior – usually identified as Titus Tatius, King of the Sabines – at the left of the composition, although in the final painting this figure is shown with a short beard. While the youthful appearance of the figure in the present sheet would seem to argue against it being a study for the bearded and apparently slightly older warrior in the painting, it would not be unusual for Guercino to experiment with different ideas for the facial appearance of this figure. Indeed, another preparatory drawing that can be definitively related to the Louvre canvas – a pen and ink sheet in a private American collection4 – depicts several profile studies of the head of the same warrior, some of which show him unbearded.

The warrior in this drawing, wearing armour and a helmet akin to that of the equivalent figure in the Louvre painting, and holding a similar oval shield, looks behind him, and seems to be in the act of placing his shield on the ground. It is conceivable, therefore, that when planning the composition Guercino had initially considered having the Sabine princess Hersilia approach Tatius from the left to beseech him to lay down his arms, and to show him beginning to lower his shield. In the end, however, Guercino chose to depict the more dramatic episode of the combat between the Sabine king Tatius and his Roman challenger Romulus about to commence, before the truce brought about by Hersilia’s mediation.

The present sheet can be likened to another drawing in black chalk that has also been related to the painting of Hersilia Intervening Between Romulus and Tatius of 1645; a head of a helmeted warrior, similarly youthful and unbearded (fig.2), in the collection of the Teyler Museum in Haarlem5. A pen and ink study of a soldier in a similar helmet, in the Princeton University Art Museum6, has also been tentatively related to the Louvre picture. Among a handful of other drawings that served as preparatory studies for the Hersilia Intervening Between Romulus and Tatius is a stylistically comparable study in black chalk for the figure of Hersilia, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle7

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Man Reading a Book, in Profile to the Left

Pen and brown ink.

195 x 136 mm. (7 5/8 x 5 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 31 January 2018, lot 153 (unsold); Carta Ltd., London, in 2021; Private collection, London.

Probably drawn from life, the present sheet is typical of Guercino’s character studies and his interest in physiognomy, and may be dated to the late 1630s or the 1640s. Guercino made numerous genre studies of this type, drawn from life, which often verge on portraiture. The emphasis here is on the man’s hair and face, wherein the artist has applied numerous small dots of ink to capture the subject’s unshaven appearance. Large areas of the sheet have been left blank to serve as highlights, which accentuates the artist’s confident draughtsmanship.

In superb condition, this drawing epitomizes Guercino’s use of a stipple and line technique that was first developed in drawings intended to be engraved by his associate, the printmaker Giovanni Battista Pasqualini. However, Guercino continued to work in this so-called ‘gravure’ style in genre drawings of the late 1630s and 1640s, such as the present sheet, that are unconnected with prints. Characteristic of these drawings is the stippling on the face of the figure and the treatment of his hair. As one scholar has noted, ‘the texture of hair seems to have fascinated Guercino, and few draftsmen represented it as adeptly. Whether head-born or face-worn, hair is used subtly to bring a sense of verisimilitude and realism to Guercino’s figures and compositions.’1

Although not necessarily made to be reproduced in print form, Guercino’s ‘gravure’ drawings, typified by this Man Reading a Book, in Profile to the Left, were sometimes used as models by printmakers long after the artist’s death. The present sheet may be likened, in stylistic terms, to such pen and ink drawings as a study of A Woman in Profile to the Left in the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin2, a Seated Woman in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford3, which was later etched by Giuseppe Zocchi in the 18th century, and a Saint John the Evangelist in Meditation in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco4, which was also reproduced as an engraving by the Bolognese printmaker Domenico Bonaveri sometime in the early 18th century. As David Stone has written of the Achenbach drawing, in terms equally appropriate to the present sheet, ‘Drawings of the later 1640s like Guercino’s St. John…have an arresting calmness and stability that seem almost neo-classical in feeling.’5

Other comparable pen drawings include a study of a young man in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice6 and two profile drawings of An Unshaven Pope and a Young Man Wearing a Large Soft Hat, both in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey7

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Virgin and Child with a Pot of Lillies

Red chalk, with framing lines in red chalk. 296 x 232 mm. (11 5/8 x 9 1/8 in.)

The medium of red chalk, which he exploited with great skill to achieve subtle gradations of texture and tone, was an essential part of Guercino’s draughtsmanship for most of his career. After his return to Bologna from Rome in 1623 the artist began to use the medium regularly, usually to further study the pose of a figure once the initial compositional studies in pen and ink had been completed. In his handling of red chalk, he was particularly influenced by the drawings of Annibale Carracci and, from an even earlier generation of Emilian artists, Correggio. (Indeed, he appears to have owned drawings by both of these artists.) As Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta have noted, ‘Guercino was…skilled in the use of red chalk, obtaining with it many outstanding effects. Red chalk limits the draughtsman to a narrower tonal range than black chalk or pen and wash, but it facilitates more subtle gradations within the range; it also provides an attractively warm hue, which Guercino exploited to the full to bring his figures to life in all their sensuousness.’1 As his career progressed, his use of red chalk became more frequent, especially from the 1650s onwards.

Datable to the late 1630s or the 1640s, this highly finished drawing in red chalk does not have the appearance of being a preparatory study for a painting. Instead, it is likely to have been intended as an autonomous work of art, as is further suggested by the drawn framing lines in red chalk. Such finished drawings in this attractive medium were certainly popular with later collectors. As the 19th century picture restorer Frederick Peter Seguier noted, in his Dictionary of the Works of Painters, published in 1870, ‘Guercino was a good draughtsman, and his sketches in red chalk are favourites with collectors.’2 In terms of subject, medium and style, this drawing can be likened to an equally finished red chalk study of The Virgin and Child with a Book and a Pot of Pinks (fig.1) of c.1635-1638, in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York3. A counterproof of the Morgan drawing is in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle4, which was in turn used as a model for an undated engraving by Francesco Curti5.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Head of a Bearded Soldier in a Plumed Helmet

Brush and brown wash, pen and brown ink. 267 x 215 mm. (10 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sir Charles Greville, London (Lugt 549), his collector’s mark stamped on the verso; By descent to his nephew, George Guy Greville, 4th Earl of Warwick, Warwick Castle, Warwick (Lugt 2600); Thence by descent at Warwick Castle; Probably the Warwick sale (‘Important Drawings Removed from Warwick Castle, and Sold by Order of The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Warwick, and of the Trustees of the late (6th) Earl of Warwick’), London, Sotheby’s, 17 June 1936, part of lot 26 (‘Guercino. A Warrior. Brush drawing in sepia, and six Others’, sold for £4.10); Private collection, France.

Drawn with the point of the brush and modelled almost entirely in wash, this fine study of an armoured warrior cannot be definitively associated with any of Guercino’s surviving paintings. Nevertheless, similar helmeted soldiers appear in a number of the artist’s works. More specifically, the figure in this drawing may have been intended to depict Mars, as the facial type, armour and plumed helmet are all motifs common to the depiction of the god in several paintings by Guercino. The appearance of the figure in this drawing is particularly close, for example, to two paintings of Mars alone, one of c.1628 at Tatton Park in Cheshire1 and the other, datable to 1630, at Apsley House in London2, as well as a Mars, Venus and Cupid of 1633 in the Galleria Estense in Modena3 and a Mars Seated with a Putto of 1649 in the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio4

Another possible identification of the subject would be the Circassian warrior Argantes, the fiercest of the pagan knights from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata, of whom Guercino produced a finished pen and wash drawing5 and a related painting of c.1645, known in two versions; one in the Uffizi in Florence and the other in a private collection6. As Nicholas Turner has noted, ‘Argantes is generally identified by the adundant plumes of his helmet, sometimes construed as a metaphor for his unrestrained ferocity.’7 It may be noted however, the face of the subject in this drawing bears little trace of the aggressive character attributed to Argantes.

Drawings executed almost entirely with the brush, with only a limited use of the pen, are quite rare in Guercino’s oeuvre. Among stylistically comparable examples is a Bust of a Bearded Man in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam8 and a brush drawing of A Warrior with a Plumed Helmet in Profile to the Right in a private British collection9. Two further drawings of this type are a study of a soldier with a sword in the Courtauld Gallery in London10, which is related to a figure in Guercino’s Hersilia Intervening Between Romulus and Tatius of 1645 in the Louvre, and a drawing of a Mucius Scaevola in the Princeton University Art Museum11, which is a study for a painting of Mucius Scaevola Before Lars Porsenna of c.1645-1648, now in the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini in Genoa. Drawings such as this may have been made to serve as stock figure types and models, to be kept in the studio and used as needed for staffage in paintings or engravings. A very similar frontal view of a man in a plumed helmet, but drawn in red chalk, was on the art market in 1999 and was formerly in a private collection in Chicago12

The present sheet is part of a small but choice group of Guercino drawings acquired by the soldier, politician and collector Sir Charles Greville (1762-1832), although it remains unclear how, when and from whom he acquired them. Greville’s collection passed by descent to his nephew, George Guy Greville, 4th Earl of Warwick (1818-1893) and was kept at Warwick Castle, on the River Avon in Warwickshire. A dozen Guercino drawings from the Warwick Castle collection are today in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Bearded Old Man

Oiled black chalk.

201 x 244 mm. (7 7/8 x 9 5/8 in.)

Watermark: Three mountains with a cross in a circle (Heawood 921; Rome 1646).

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 13-14 December 1984, lot 42; Private collection; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 21 January 2004, lot 190 (unsold); Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2005, lot 132; Private collection.

The use of a rich, oily black chalk or carboncino – although somewhat different from the similar charcoal media that the artist used for academic nudes at the beginning of his career – is mainly found in the last three decades of Guercino’s life, when it was most frequently utilized for head studies such as the present sheet, as well as for studies of putti.

Both Nicholas Turner and David Stone have dated this drawing to between 1640 and 1650. Guercino used oiled black chalk in a number of comparable figure drawings of this period, such as several sheets in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle: a Young Man with a Moustache and Tousled Hair1, a study of an Old Bearded Man on tinted paper2 and a Bearded Old Man with his Left Shoulder Bare3, as well as a Roman Commander4, which is a study for a painting of Cleopatra Kneeling before Augustus of 1640, and a study of a Sleeping Youth5, which has been related to two paintings of Endymion Asleep commissioned from Guercino in the 1640s. A stylistic comparison may also be made with a drawing of Saint Biagio Protecting the Town of Cento (fig.1), executed in oiled charcoal but in poor condition, in the collection of the Civica Pinacoteca il Guercino in Cento6.

Similar heads are also seen throughout Guercino’s paintings of the 1640s, such as a Saint Peter Weeping Before the Virgin of 1647 in the Louvre7.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Woman with a Vase of Flowers (Flora?)

Pen and brown ink. Inscribed (by Milford) Guercino and numbered No. / 495. in brown ink on the old backing sheet.

257 x 182 mm. (10 1/8 x 7 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sir Erasmus Philipps, 5th Bt., Picton Castle, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, in c.1730; By descent to Richard Philipps, 1st Baron Milford, Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire (Lugt 2687), with his label and number No.495 on the back of the old mount; By descent to Sir John Erasmus Gwynne Alexander Philipps, Bt., Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire, until 1943 or 1946; Probably acquired from him by Hans Calmann, London; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 March 1968, lot 42 (‘Il Guercino, A Young Lady arranging flowers in a vase, pen and brown ink, framed c. 250mm x 180mm. From the Milford Collection (L. 2687)’); Herman Shickman, London, in c.1972; Joseph Goldyne, San Francisco; Private collection, San Francisco.

LITERATURE: ‘Supplement: Guercino Drawings in North American Collections. A Selective Checklist’, in David M. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman. Works from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, Ottawa and Cleveland, 1991, p.225, no.214, illustrated p.234, pl.F.

Datable to the 1640s, this elegant drawing may be intended to represent Flora (or Primavera), the Roman goddess of spring. It does not, however, match the description or appearance of three of Guercino’s known paintings of the subject – executed in 1624, 1632 and 1642 – in which the figure of Flora is, in each case, accompanied by putti. A lost painting of Primavera, commissioned from the artist by Prince Niccolò Ludovisi and paid for on 3 June 16571, would appear, from its price, to have depicted a single full-length figure; however, the present sheet is unlikely to be related to that painting, since it would seem, on stylistic grounds, to be somewhat earlier in date than the late 1650s. Guercino also treated the related subject of Ceres in a lost half-length painting of 1640-1641, which is recorded in the Libro dei Conti for 16 October 16402.

A stylistic and thematic connection may be made with a pen and ink drawing by Guercino of a Seated Woman Wearing a Wreath of Foliage on her Head, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle3, which has been tentatively related to a lost Flora painting of 1632.

An 18th century etching by Francesco Romero, after a lost drawing by or attributed to Guercino, depicts an analogous subject of a woman with a vase of flowers4. Also similar in style and subject is another print, after a Guercino drawing of a woman holding a flower in her upraised left hand5, by James (Giacomo) Nevey, a Scottish painter and engraver resident in Rome, which was one of a series of etchings after drawings by Guercino published by Giambattista Piranesi as Raccolta di Alcuni Disegni del Barberi da Cento detto Il Guercino in 17646

The present sheet was part of the collection of drawings assembled by the 18th century British politician Sir Erasmus Philipps FRS, 5th Baronet (1699-1743), which remained in the possession of the Philipps family until the 1940s, when it was dispersed. The majority of the drawings – mostly Flemish, Dutch and Italian sheets of fine quality – are thought to have been part of a 17th century Italian collection and to have been acquired by Erasmus Philipps in Italy in the late 1730s or early 1740s.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Kneeling Saint Jerome with a Book

Pen and brown ink. Inscribed 57. Pr. Fo. Cons in brown ink at the lower right. Laid down. 376 x 265 mm. (14 3/4 x 10 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent from the artist to his nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; By descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna; Acquired in the 1740s by John Bouverie, Betchworth, Surrey; By descent to his sister, Anne Bouverie, Betchworth, Surrey, until 1757; Her son, Christopher Hervey, London and Betchworth, Surrey, until 1786; His aunt, Elizabeth Bouverie, Barham Court, Teston, Kent, until 1798; Bequeathed to Sir Charles Middleton, later 1st Baron Barham, Barham Court, Kent; By descent to his grandson, Charles Noel, 3rd Baron Barham and later 1st Earl of Gainsborough of the second creation; Thence by descent in the collection of the Earls of Gainsborough, Exton Park, Oakham, Rutland; Possibly their sale (‘Drawings by Old Masters, The Property of The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Gainsborough, Of Exton Park, Oakham, Rutlandshire’), London, Christie’s, 27 July 1922; Possibly E. Parsons and Sons, London; Private collection.

Guercino treated the subject of Saint Jerome in several paintings, mainly half-length in format, particularly in the late 1630s and the 1640s. As has been noted, ‘Always popular in the Catholic Church, the saint was one of the four Latin fathers and his main claim to fame was his Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate), partly written in the desert.’1 This impressive sheet, which is of a scale unusual among Guercino’s drawings, remains unconnected to any surviving painting by the artist.

As the Guercino scholar David Stone has written of this drawing, ‘This exquisitely preserved St. Jerome, one of the most beautiful representations of this subject in Guercino’s drawn oeuvre, may very well be preparatory for one of the many compositions of this iconography mentioned in the Libro dei conti. However, the sheet does not seem to connect to any of the extant paintings. The drawing is so suave, carefully controlled, and luminous in its overall effect – so complete in its composition – that it is worth considering that it was made as a kind of “meditation” on the subject rather than as a preparatory sketch. Such relatively complete and finished drawings could be given away as presents to friends; but they could also be saved (like so many of Guercino’s drawings) as resources for him and his studio for future projects. Guercino was one of the first artists in history to consider drawings as complete works of art in their own right. On the basis of style and handling, the present sheet would seem to date from around, roughly, 1640.’2

The inscription ‘57. Pr. Fo. Cons’ at the lower right of the present sheet identifies this drawing as coming from the collection of the Casa Gennari in Bologna. Similar inscriptions, which may be inventory numbers, appear on many drawings by Guercino with a Casa Gennari and Bouverie provenance, such as A Seated Nude Woman Embracing a Child in the Courtauld Gallery in London3 and a Vision of Saint Francis in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford4, to name just two examples. As Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta have posited, ‘It is likely that this annotation is a reference to the drawing’s original location in the series of albums of drawings by Guercino preserved by the artist’s heirs until the dispersal of the collection in the eighteenth century, the letters perhaps standing for ‘Primo Foglio’.’5

Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner have noted that ‘most of the drawings by Guercino in the Casa Gennari were preserved in a series of albums, five of them of imperial size and three royal. This was the nucleus of the family’s collection and one of its greatest treasures. The description of the bindings of these albums in the inventory gives some indication of their splendour. The first six were covered in red leather, trimmed with gilt and had silk cords attached to the spine to act as dividers, some in red, others in blue and green. Kept in this way, the drawings remained flat and free from dust and were not exposed to light. It was an

ideal method of preservation; and this explains why so many drawings by Guercino with a mid-eighteenthcentury provenance from the Casa Gennari still remain in such impeccable condition...Preserved en masse in this way, Guercino’s drawings must have seemed impressive indeed and would have been the envy of any collector.’6

A stylistically similar pen and ink drawing of Saint Jerome kneeling and adoring a crucifix in a landscape (fig.1) was likewise formerly in the Casa Gennari collection and was on the art market in London in the 1970s7. Another comparable study of Saint Jerome (fig.2) by Guercino, with the same provenance and datable to the 1640s, is in the Princeton University Art Museum8

The present sheet was part of a large and important group of drawings by Guercino acquired from the Casa Gennari in the 1740s by the young British antiquarian and collector John Bouverie (c.17221750), which was later described by the contemporary English collector Henry Reveley as ‘perhaps the finest collection of Guercino’s drawings in England.’9 As Turner and Plazzotta have stated, ‘drawings by Guercino with a Bouverie collection provenance share many features in common. They are in general in remarkably fine, even pristine condition, which implies, as Reveley was the first to observe, that they were very largely the drawings once preserved in the albums described by Malvasia as being in the master’s house…Although the drawings now at Windsor remain the single most impressive group of Guercino’s drawings in existence…[it contains fewer of] the more desirable pictorial composition studies in which the Bouverie collection was so rich.’10

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

An Old Man Greeting Two Young Boys (Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph?)

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, on paper trimmed with an arched top. A small made-up strip at the top of the sheet.

181 x 250 mm. (7 1/8 x 9 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Jean-Baptiste-Florentin-Gabriel de Meryan, Marquis de Lagoy, Paris, Saint-Rémy-deProvence and Aix-en-Provence (Lugt 1710); Possibly his sale, London, Christie’s, 27 May 1834; Ernest Pinkus Antiques, New York; Private collection.

The present sheet is part of a group of four pen and ink drawings that depict the subject of an old man embracing two boys, all of which are datable to the 1640s. Two of the drawings include more figures and the suggestion of an architectural setting; one is in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth (fig.1)1 and the other, which is attributed to an artist in the studio of Guercino, is at Windsor Castle2. A third drawing of this subject, now lost, was once in the collection of the French diplomat, draughtsman, engraver and collector Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon (1747-1825) and is known through a reproductive etching (fig.2) by Denon himself3. Denon’s print only shows the three central figures, with the pose of the older youth particularly close, albeit in reverse, to the two boys in the present sheet4

The subject here depicted is probably from the Old Testament. While it has been tentatively suggested that this drawing may represent the return of the prodigal son, the two boys appear to be too young to fit the Biblical parable. A more likely subject for our drawing, as well as those in Windsor and Chatsworth and the lost Denon sheet, would be Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph, as David Stone has recently suggested. An important episode from Hebrew scripture, the patriarchal blessing of Jacob, who was given the name Israel by God, is told in the Book of Genesis:

‘Some time later Joseph was told, “Your father is ill.” So he took his two sons Manasseh and Ephraim along with him…When Israel saw the sons of Joseph, he asked, “Who are these?” “They are the sons God has given me here,” Joseph said to his father. Then Israel said, “Bring them to me so I may bless them.” Now Israel’s eyes were failing because of old age, and he could hardly see. So Joseph brought his sons close to him, and his father kissed them and embraced them. Israel said to Joseph, “I never expected to see your face again, and now God has allowed me to see your children too.”…And Joseph took both of them, Ephraim on his right toward Israel’s left hand and Manasseh on his left toward Israel’s right hand, and brought them close to him. But Israel reached out his right hand and put it on Ephraim’s head, though he was the younger, and crossing his arms, he put his left hand on Manasseh’s head, even though Manasseh

was the firstborn…When Joseph saw his father placing his right hand on Ephraim’s head he was displeased; so he took hold of his father’s hand to move it from Ephraim’s head to Manasseh’s head. Joseph said to him, “No, my father, this one is the firstborn; put your right hand on his head.” But his father refused and said, “I know, my son, I know. He too will become a people, and he too will become great. Nevertheless, his younger brother will be greater than he, and his descendants will become a group of nations.” He blessed them that day and said, “In your name will Israel pronounce this blessing: ‘May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.’” So he put Ephraim ahead of Manasseh.’5

The present sheet would appear to depict Jacob, having blessed his younger grandson Ephraim, being confronted by the older brother Manasseh, in a manner that is also apparent in the lost Denon drawing. No related painting of this composition by Guercino is known, however. The artist had painted the subject of Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph early in his career, in a painting commissioned by Cardinal Jacopo Serra in 1620 and today in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin6, but this drawing and the three other related studies would appear to be considerably later in date.

Drawings such as this are characteristic of Guercino’s use of drawings to further study the relationships between figures in a painted composition. As Julian Brooks has noted, ‘Generally, Guercino would already have made studies of the relevant figure or group full length, but would draw them again up close, in halflength. Such drawings occur frequently in Guercino’s oeuvre but are unusual for other artists. Guercino often used “close-ups” to characterize the figures studied through details of facial type, hair, or dress. More importantly, however, they examine the facial expressions and gestures of the characters in relation to one another. These studies seem to be Guercino’s way of getting inside the emotional dynamics of a scene, analyzing its psychological disposition, and developing a real understanding of the narrative of the story… They are evidence of a fertile and inventive imagination looking to tell a story in the most convincing and satisfactory way possible.’7 A stylistic comparison may be made with a pen and ink drawing of A Bearded Man, with his Arms held open in a Gesture of Greeting, with a Casa Gennari and Bouverie provenance, in a private British collection8

The present sheet bears the collector’s mark of the Provençal nobleman Jean-Baptiste-FlorentinGabriel de Meryan, the Marquis de Lagoy (1764-1829), who assembled a fine collection of over three thousand drawings by nearly nine hundred artists. Roughly a third of the collection, which included several sheets by Guercino, was made up of Italian drawings, many acquired from such earlier collectors as Charles-François de Calvière, Marquis de Vézénobres, Charles-Philippe Campion, Abbé de Tersan and, in particular, the Dutchman Willem Anne Lestevenon, from whom Lagoy purchased some two thousand drawings. During his lifetime, Lagoy dispersed of small groups of drawings from his collection in private sales to dealers or fellow collectors, most significantly in 1820, when he sold 135 of his finest sheets, including several works by Raphael and Michelangelo, to the English art dealer Samuel Woodburn. The remainder of Lagoy’s collection of drawings was dispersed in two posthumous auctions held in Paris and London in April and May 1834.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Monk with a Staff

Red chalk, with a framing line in red chalk at the bottom. Numbered 56 in brown ink on the old backing sheet.

197 x 193 mm. (7 3/4 x 7 5/8 in.)

Watermark: Coat of arms with crossed swords or keys, and oak leaves.

PROVENANCE: Possibly Edouard de Cérenville, Lausanne; His son, René de Cérenville, Lausanne; Thence by descent until 2007; Anonymous sale, Zurich, Koller, 23 March 2007, lot 3402; Dr. Sylvia Legrain, Wabern, near Bern; Thence by descent.

The present sheet is a fine example of Guercino’s late style, when the artist was tending towards a lighter, more ‘feathery’ and impressionistic manner in his chalk drawings. This Monk with a Staff, which possibly represents Saint Anthony Abbot, is likely to be a study for a three-quarter length painting, to judge from the border line the artist has drawn at the bottom of the sheet.

A stylistic comparison may be made with a red chalk study of Saint Bruno (fig.1) in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London1, which is a study for a painting executed by Guercino in 1647 for the Certosa in Bologna. Also similar is a drawing in red chalk of an old man holding a staff, with a Casa Gennari and Bouverie provenance, that recently appeared at auction2

The Swiss collector René de Cérenville (1875-1968) was a journalist, writer and critic whose collection of Italian, Netherlandish, French and Swiss drawings was in part inherited from his father, the physician Edouard de Cérenville (1843-1915). The younger de Cérenville bequeathed part of his collection of drawings to the Musée Jenisch in Vevey. The present sheet, however, remained with his descendants until 2007, when it was acquired at auction by the renowned Swiss neurosurgeon Sylvia Legrain (1936-2022).

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Prophet Isaiah with a Scroll

Pen and brown ink, with framing lines in brown ink. The sheet backed with thin Japan paper. 210 x 247 mm. (8 1/4 x 9 3/4 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale (‘Exposition et Vente d’un Cabinet des Dessins du XVème au XVIIIème Siècle’), Paris, Galerie Férault, 1929, lot 30 (‘Saint tenant une banderolle. Dessin à la plume. Haut. 156 millimètres, largeur 220.’); Private collection; Anonymous sale (‘Ancienne collection de Monsieur et Madame C.’), Paris, Pierre Bergé & Associés, 17 December 2020, lot 19; Private collection, London.

Nicholas Turner has identified this drawing as a study for Guercino’s half-length canvas of The Prophet Isaiah Reading from a Scroll (fig.1), painted in 1648 and today in a private collection1. The painting is mentioned in the Libro dei Conti on 19 November 1648, when payment of thirty ducatoni was received from the Marchese Cospi for a ‘Testa del Profeta Isaia’ which was delivered to Rome2. As Turner has written of the present sheet and the related canvas of 1648, ‘Drawing and painting correspond closely in general conception, but as was typical of the artist he was keen to consider as many options as possible before arriving at a final design. In the drawing, the prophet inclines his head to the left as he looks downwards at the scroll, which he holds loosely in his hands at either end. In the painting, he looks downwards slightly to the right but instead of a scroll he holds a piece of paper firmly in both hands, inscribed: EGO DOMINUS PRIMUS ET NOVISSIMUS EGO / SUM/ ISAIAE CAPE 35 ’3

A closely related pen and ink drawing of Isaiah reading a scroll, but in three-quarter length format (fig.2), appeared at auction in New York in 20064. Turner has noted that ‘Though the ex-New York drawing is more finished than the present sheet, it must have been drawn earlier, since it surely represents a first idea for the painting. Nevertheless, the fluttering pen lines with a fine nib are identical to those in the present sheet, confirming that the two studies were made at about the same time. The many differences between the two illuminate Guercino’s process of self-revision as he worked on a given composition.’5 Another study associated with the 1648 canvas, drawn in red chalk on the reverse of part of a letter, appeared at auction in 1991 and 19946, and is closest to the figure of Isaiah in the final painting.

A similar pen and ink study of the head of an old man looking down, albeit in reverse to the present sheet, is in the Princeton University Art Museum7, while a compositionally related drawing of the same subject, attributed to an artist in the workshop of Guercino, is in the Albertina in Vienna8

GIOVANNI

FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Death of Saint Joseph

Black and red chalk, with stumping. Squared for transfer in red chalk, and with the borders of the sheet painted in gold ink. Inscribed Guercino in brown ink on the verso.

372 x 410 mm. (14 5/8 x 16 1/8 in.)

Watermark: An anchor in a circle.

PROVENANCE: Sir Thomas Lawrence, London (Lugt 2445), his drystamp at the lower left; Purchased after Lawrence’s death, together with the rest of his collection, by Samuel Woodburn, London, in 1834; Possibly his posthumous sale (‘The Valuable and Important Collection of Drawings, By the Old Masters, Formerly in the Collection of the Late Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., And more recently the Property of that Distinguished Connoisseur, Samuel Woodburn Esq., Deceased’), London, Christie’s, 4-8 June 1860, lot 480 (‘Guercino de Cento…The death of St. Joseph – black and red chalks’); William S. Brough JP, London and Leek, Staffordshire (Lugt 2652)1; His posthumous sale (‘The Property of the late W. S. Brough, Esq. J.P., of Leek’), London, Sotheby Wilkinson & Hodge, 19 May 1919, part of lot 31 (twelve drawings by various artists, including a ‘Death of St. Joseph, by Guercino’); Private collection, Switzerland; Anonymous sale, Zurich, Koller, 20 September 2008, lot 3411 (sold for 102,000 CHF); Nicolas Schwed, Paris; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: Paris, Nicolas Schwed, Dessins anciens et du XIXème siècle, 2022, no.9.

The present sheet is one of the largest compositional drawings by Guercino, and among the most finished. Only a handful of drawings by the artist executed in this combination of red and black chalks are known, most of which can be dated to the later part of his career. This impressive drawing, which has been dated by both Nicholas Turner and David Stone to around 1650, is unrelated to any surviving painting by Guercino, although Turner has noted that the weeping Virgin is similar in pose to the figure of Saint Peter in Guercino’s easel painting of Saint Peter Weeping Before the Virgin (fig.1) of 1647 in the Louvre2. As he has written, ‘The figures of Christ and the Virgin recall those of the two protagonists of

Guercino’s painting of The Tears of Saint Peter in the Louvre, painted in 1647. The seated Virgin in the painting plays much of the same role as Christ in the drawing while Saint Peter, who weeps copiously into his large white handkerchief, parallels the action of the Virgin.’3 Also highly unusual in Guercino’s drawn oeuvre is the squaring of the composition, which is only found in a few drawings by the artist.

The subject of the death of Saint Joseph is relatively rare in Italian art. The episode is not found in the Bible, and indeed the life of the saint in the years after the childhood of Jesus remains something of a mystery. Saint Joseph disappears from the canonical Gospel texts when Jesus is still around twelve years old, after the episode where the young Christ is found debating with the elders in the Temple. Unlike Mary, Joseph does not appear in any New Testament accounts of Christ’s adult life, and he is assumed to have died before Christ began his ministry. Apocryphal texts claim that Joseph died peacefully, at an advanced age and with Jesus and Mary by his side, and as such he is venerated as the patron saint of a happy death.

Among stylistically comparable late drawings by Guercino is a study of Saint Luke Painting a Canvas of the Virgin and Child on an Easel, drawn in a combination of black and red chalk, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle4. Also comparable to the present sheet, in their use of red and black chalk, are three highly finished drawings related to an Ecce Homo painting, commissioned from Guercino in 1647 and now in the Bavarian State Painting Collection in Munich. These are a Christ Crowned with Thorns and a Mocking of Christ, both in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York5, and a third Ecce Homo drawing (fig.2) in the Goldman collection in Chicago6

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

An Evangelist Seated at a Table Writing

Pen and brown ink. Laid down on part of an old mount. Inscribed Guercino in pencil at the lower left and Guerchino in pencil on the backing sheet. 173 x 157 mm. (6 3/4 x 6 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2011, lot 544; Private collection, London and Paris.

‘Pen and ink was perhaps Guercino’s most natural medium of expression. This technique more than any other allowed for rapidity of execution, but it also required great presence of mind, since the possibility of correcting what had been drawn before was of course limited. It thus gave scope to Guercino’s spontaneity, a quality so evident in his drawings but less apparent in the more formal process of painting. In his pen studies he combined the expansive movements of the free drawing of some parts with the tighter rhythms of the more measured drawing of others; in these more controlled passages he picked out certain details with the utmost care. Such contrasts in the pace of the line can be seen in practically all his drawings in the medium.’1

Datable to the second half of the 1640s, this highly finished drawing does not appear to be related to any extant painting by Guercino, and as such its purpose is difficult to determine. As Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta have written of Guercino’s drawings of the 1640s, ‘The drawings in this decade, especially those in pen and ink, are surprisingly uninhibited compared with the disciplined finish of the pictures for which many are preparatory. Characteristic of the pen drawings of this moment is an almost heavy-handed line, accompanied by equally emphatic passages of cross hatching.’2

Among stylistically comparable drawings of this period is a compositional study, at Holkham Hall in Norfolk3, for a 1646 easel painting of Samson and Delilah, and a drawing of A Pope and a Bearded Saint Conversing at Windsor Castle4, which is a study for an altarpiece of All Saints in Glory, commissioned from Guercino in 1645 and completed two years later.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Saint Kneeling in Prayer, with Other Figures Beyond Red chalk.

282 x 207 mm. (11 1/8 x 8 1/8 in.)

Watermark: Fleur-de-lys (similar to Churchill 372; Bologna 1654).

PROVENANCE: By descent from the artist to his nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; By descent to Cesare Gennari’s grandson, Carlo Gennari, Bologna; Probably Francesco Forni, Bologna; Acquired in the 1740s by John Bouverie, Betchworth, Surrey; By descent to his sister, Anne Bouverie, Betchworth, Surrey, until 1757; Her son, Christopher Hervey, London and Betchworth, Surrey, until 1786; His aunt, Elizabeth Bouverie, Barham Court, Teston, Kent, until 1798; Bequeathed to Sir Charles Middleton, later 1st Baron Barham, Barham Court, Kent; By descent to his grandson, Charles Noel, 3rd Baron Barham and later 1st Earl of Gainsborough of the second creation; His son, Charles William Francis Noel, 3rd Earl of Gainsborough, Exton Park, Oakham, Rutland; Thence by descent to Anthony Gerard Edward Noel, 5th Earl of Gainsborough, Exton Park, Oakham, Rutland; His sale (‘The Property of the Rt. Hon. The Earl of Gainsborough, removed from Exton Park, Rutland’), London, Christie’s, 23 November 1971, lot 103 (bt. Baskett & Day for 600 gns.); Baskett & Day, London, in 1972; Private collection, San Francisco.

LITERATURE: Frederick J. Cummings, ‘The Assumption of the Virgin by Guercino’, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1972, p.62, note 15; The Burlington Magazine, January 1973 [advertisement]; David M. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman. Works from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, Ottawa and Cleveland, 1991, pp.131-135, no.58 (as The Apostles at the Tomb, and dated to the early 1650s); Sir Denis Mahon, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri il Guercino 1591-1666: Disegni, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1991 [pub. 1992], p.218, under no.140; Sir Denis Mahon, Guercino: Master Painter of the Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1992, p.289, under no.49 (where dated c.1650); R. Ward Bissell, Andria Derstine and Dwight Miller, Masters of Italian Baroque Painting: The Detroit Institute of Arts, London, 2005, p.110, under no.34; Nicholas Turner, The Paintings of Guercino: A Revised and Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rome, 2017, p.663, under no.373.

EXHIBITED: London, Baskett & Day, Exhibition of Drawings, 1972, no.9; Cambridge, Harvard University Art Museums, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, and Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, Guercino: Master Draftsman. Works from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, 1991, no.58.

When this fine drawing last appeared on the art market in 1971, it was suggested by Denis Mahon that it should be associated with a large altarpiece thought to depict The Assumption of the Virgin, in the Detroit Institute of Arts1. Mahon posited that this red chalk drawing – which he Identified as showing the Apostles praying at the tomb of the Virgin – was an early study for the Detroit painting. That painting has long been regarded as the altarpiece depicting the Assumption of the Virgin with attendant apostles that was recorded by both Guercino’s biographer Cesare Malvasia and the Libro dei Conti as having been painted in 1650 for an unknown church in Naples. The painting is described by Malvasia as ‘An Assumption with the angels and Apostles in the distance at the tomb of the Blessed Virgin, an altarpiece in Naples.’2 In the Detroit painting, however, the apostles surrounding the tomb are replaced by minute figures barely visible in the far distance, at the very bottom of the composition.

As David Stone has pointed out, with reference to both the Detroit painting and the present sheet, ‘one can hypothesize that instead of placing the apostles at the tomb in lontananza (in the distance), as Malvasia says…the artist at first may have considered situating medium-size figures of the apostles in the middle distance and placing one full-size apostle (St. Peter?) in the foreground. The large apostle in [this]

drawing stares transfixed at a miraculous sight overhead, which is clearly that of the ascendant Virgin, who has risen from the tomb where the other apostles – not yet aware of the assumption – have gathered to mourn…Owing to the higher price such a picture would inevitably have cost (since Guercino charged by the figure), it is possible that the client decided to eliminate the traditional scene from the foreground and to make do with just the Virgin, two large angels, and two putti (the equivalent of three and a half figures at 350 ducats.)’3 A preparatory study by Guercino for the Detroit picture, a double-sided red chalk sheet, is also in the Detroit Institute of Arts4. As Stone has pointed out of the recto of that drawing, one of the angels supporting the Virgin shows an interesting pentiment: ‘At first the angel on the left was looking down, as if he were observing the actions of the apostles below. However, almost certainly after the decision to remove the full-length apostles from the composition, Guercino redrew the angel’s head and body so that he now looks up towards the Virgin.’5

Recently, however, a faithful painted copy of the Detroit painting, by Guercino’s nephew and assistant Cesare Gennari, has been identified in the church of Sant’Antonio in Salsomaggiore, west of Parma6 The Salsamaggiore painting includes more of the landscape at the bottom of the composition, which had been trimmed from the lower part of the Detroit canvas, and it is this landscape element that identifies the true subject of both it and the Detroit altarpiece as The Virgin of the Snow. Listed in the Libro dei Conti, the Virgin of the Snow was a much later work commissioned by Guercino’s longstanding client Sebastiano Fabri, for which an initial advance payment or deposit was received on 7 May 16617. The lower portion of the Salsomaggiore painting depicts the legendary miracle of the snowfall in August that marked the outlines of the future Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, with the patch of snow surrounded by numerous figures – the same figures previously assumed to be apostles in the Detroit painting – observing the miracle in amazement8. Thus the angel noted by Stone in the preparatory drawing in Detroit can be understood to be gazing down at the snow on the ground.

Guercino’s 1650 painting of The Assumption of the Virgin, noted by both the Libro dei Conti and Malvasia as intended for an unknown church in Naples and long thought, incorrectly, to be the painting in Detroit, has only recently been identified with a large altarpiece (fig.1) in the church of San Francesco in the city of Aversa, some twenty kilometres north of Naples9. (The Aversa painting is in poor condition, and its composition is best judged in a reduced studio copy (fig.2) in the Catholic church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Latchford, a suburb of Warrington in Cheshire10.) The Aversa painting includes very small figures at the badly damaged bottom of the composition, which may be tentatively identified as the apostles. Thus Mahon’s supposition that the present sheet may have been a first idea for the apostles in the 1650 The Assumption of the Virgin is still valid, albeit not for the painting in Detroit – which is now known to be eleven years later in date – but for the newly discovered Aversa painting instead.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Saint Teresa Receiving a Necklace from the Virgin, with Saint Joseph Behind

Black chalk, with stumping, and with framing lines in black chalk. Laid down. Faintly inscribed Guercino in black chalk at the lower left.

361 x 238 mm. (14 1/4 x 9 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 16 April 2008, lot 21; Gérard Lhéritier (Aristophil), Nice.

LITERATURE: Nicholas Turner, The Paintings of Guercino: A Revised and Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rome, 2017, p.761, under no.486.

The 16th century Spanish Carmelite nun and mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila was canonized in 1622, during the brief papacy of Pope Gregory XV Ludovisi, at a time when Guercino was working in Rome in the service of the Bolognese Pope and his family. The artist is likely to have been familiar with the saint’s life and writings, and he included the figure of Saint Teresa in a number of his paintings, notably an altarpiece of Christ Appearing to Saint Teresa, commissioned by a French collector in 1634, and a Saint Teresa Receiving the Habit from the Virgin and Child, a very late work painted for a church in Messina in 1665 but destroyed by an earthquake in 1908.

This fine compositional study drawn in matita nera is a study for another late altarpiece by Guercino, The Vision of Saint Teresa of Ávila (or Saint Teresa Receiving a Necklace from the Virgin in the Presence of Saint Joseph)1, painted for the convent church of San Gabriele delle Monache Carmelitane Scalze in Bologna (fig.1). Guercino began working on the painting in 1660 and received payment of 800 Bolognese lire for the altarpiece on 21 March 16612. The painting remained in the church of San Gabriele until 1811, when it was transferred to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Exhibited there between 1811 and 1965, the painting has since been returned on loan to the Carmelite convent in Bologna.

Saint Teresa had a particular and lifelong devotion to Saint Joseph, which explains his prominence in the composition of the altarpiece. As the saint wrote, ‘I took for my advocate and lord the glorious Saint Joseph and commended myself earnestly to him... I do not remember that I have ever asked anything of him which he has failed to grant. I am astonished at the great favours which God has bestowed on me through this blessed saint…I wish I could persuade everyone to be devoted to this glorious saint, for I have great experience of the blessings which he can obtain from God.’

The scholar and curator Jacob Bean once noted that, ‘When Guercino took pen in hand and jotted down alternative solutions to a compositional problem, he was almost invariably bursting with ideas. Often a series of preparatory drawings for a picture proposes figure groupings so radically different that only certain fixed iconographical features of the subject and a stylistic unity identify the drawings as preparatory for the same picture.’3

Two further compositional studies by Guercino for the 1661 altarpiece of The Vision of Saint Teresa of Ávila, both with significant differences to the final painting, were formerly in the collection of Sir Denis Mahon and are now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford4; one is a rapid study in pen and wash (fig.2) and the other a more highly finished drawing in two shades of red chalk (fig.3). A third compositional drawing, executed in pen and wash (fig.4), appeared at auction in London in 1983 and is now in a private collection5; this last drawing is somewhat closer to the present sheet than the two Ashmolean sheets, particularly in the poses of both the Virgin and Saint Theresa, as well as the prominent angel just above them.

Finally, two drapery studies in red chalk for the altarpiece are part of the large group of such drawings by Guercino today in the Koenig-Fachsenfeld collection at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. These are a highly finished drawing for the mantle of the seated Virgin6 and a double-sided sheet which contains studies for the drapery of both the Virgin and Saint Joseph7.

GIOVANNI

FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Head of a Bearded Man (Saint Joseph?)

Red chalk, with stumping. Laid down on an old mount with double framing lines in brown ink. Numbered N782 and 114 in brown ink and N 5222 in black chalk on the reverse of the old mount. 196 x 140 mm. (7 3/4 x 5 1/2 in.) [sheet]

Although Guercino used chalk throughout much of his long career, it never really replaced pen and ink as his preferred medium until late in his life. While the artist remained very busy with commissions right up until his death in 1666, he seems to have drawn less in his later years. Indeed, compared to his output as a draughtsman before 1650, relatively few drawings – many of which are in red chalk –survive from the last fifteen years of his life.

Both David Stone and Nicholas Turner have suggested that the present sheet should be dated, on stylistic grounds, to the late 1650s or the first half of the 1660s, towards the end of Guercino’s career. The hint of a framing line in red chalk at the bottom of the composition might suggest that this drawing was intended to study a bust-length painting of the head of a saint, most likely Saint Joseph. Indeed, the head in the present sheet is close to that in a late painting of Saint Joseph of c.1659-1660, recently on the art market1, which was one of several half- and three-quarter length paintings of saints commissioned from Guercino between 1659 and 1662 by the textile merchant Francesco Magnanoni Rimini.

Among stylistically similar late red chalk drawings by Guercino is a study of the head of a young woman, of similar dimensions and with an identical framing line at the bottom (fig.1), in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford2. Also comparable is one of the artist’s last known compositional studies; a red chalk drawing of The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist which recently appeared at auction in New York3 and has been identified as a study for a lost painting on copper of 1660.

actual size

CESARE GENNARI

Cento 1637-1688 Bologna

Recto: Sheet of Studies with a Youth Addressing a Man and an Elderly Man with a Baby (Saint Joseph and the Christ Child?)

Verso: Landscape with a Bridge and a City in the Distance

Pen and brown ink on buff paper. The recto inscribed with various numbers and computations in brown ink.

225 x 157 mm. (8 7/8 x 6 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anthony Powell, London1; Thence by descent.

The nephew of Guercino – his mother Lucia Barbieri was the painter’s sister – Cesare Gennari was born in Cento into an artistic dynasty that also included his father Ercole, uncle Bartolomeo and brother Benedetto. He settled with his family in Bologna at the age of six, living in a house close to that of his uncle Guercino, whose workshop he joined, probably sometime in the early 1650s. Together with his elder brother Benedetto, Cesare was trained as a painter by Guercino, and both brothers worked as the master’s chief assistants in the last decade of his career. Their early styles as painters are often difficult to distinguish from each other, although Cesare is generally regarded as the more gifted of the two brothers. Following Guercino’s death in 1666, Cesare and Benedetto inherited the master’s studio – which came to be known as the Casa Gennari – and its contents. Following Benedetto’s move to Paris in 1672, and his later extended stay in London, Cesare chose to remain in Bologna, where he ran an art academy at the Casa Gennari.

More so than his brother, Cesare Gennari modelled his style on that of his famous uncle, and his paintings and drawings remained particularly close to the example of Guercino throughout his life. One of his first independent works was an altarpiece of The Penitent Magdalene for the high altar of the church of Santa Maria Maddalena in Cento, completed around 1662. Among other significant commissions received by the artist were a pair of large paintings depicting the story of Adonis, executed in 1665 for the Conte Alfonso II Gonzaga of Novellara and destroyed during the Second World War, and three canvases – an Annunciation, a Nativity and an Adoration of the Magi – for the Chartreuse du Val de Bénédiction in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, painted at the end of the 1660s. Other important works by the artist include a Holy Family commissioned by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici in 1674, now in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, and a Virgin and Saint Nicholas of Bari for the Bolognese church of San Nicolò degli Albari, installed there in 1680. Cesare Gennari died in Bologna in 1688, at the age of fifty, and is buried in San Nicolò degli Albari.

Cesare Gennari remains little studied as a draughtsman, and only relatively few drawings may be definitively attributed to him. It has at times proved difficult to distinguish between the drawings of Cesare and Benedetto Gennari, although it is evident that the younger brother was perhaps a more gifted draughtsman. In general, Benedetto seems to have preferred red chalk, while Cesare’s drawings are predominantly executed in pen and ink, although a number of chalk studies by him are known. An inventory of the Casa Gennari made in 1719 lists, alongside numerous drawings by Guercino, two albums of drawings by the Gennari themselves, containing 287 sheets, among which are noted a large number of landscapes by Cesare.

Of the generally accepted drawings by Cesare Gennari, among the most significant is a doublesided sheet of studies in pen and ink, formerly in the collection of Sir Denis Mahon and today in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford2, which is stylistically comparable to the present sheet. The recto of the Ashmolean drawing is a preparatory study for the artist’s altarpiece of The Virgin and Saint Nicholas

recto (actual size)

of Bari of 1680 in San Nicolò degli Albari, while the verso contains part of a letter and other sketches. Another securely attributable drawing, in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice3, is a red chalk study for a figure in Gennari’s Adoration of the Magi in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, while a chalk drawing of the Holy Family in the Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig4 is a preparatory study for a painting by Gennari, signed and dated 1674, in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

A handful of other autograph studies by Cesare Gennari are either signed or dated in his hand, or are drawn on letters written by him or addressed to him. That the artist’s drawing style was heavily indebted to that of Guercino is readily seen in all of his studies, even in such whimsical drawings as a Caricature of a Cook, inscribed (or signed) and dated 1671, in the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey5. Other drawings by or attributed to the artist are in the collections of the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge (MA), the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, the Uffizi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, and elsewhere.

The pen and ink studies on the recto of this drawing include, at the lower left, what appears to be Saint Joseph with the Christ Child. A very similar sketch of the same subject is found in a black chalk study by Cesare, drawn on the back of a letter, in the collection of the Biblioteca Civica ‘Romolo Spezioli’ in Fermo6. The two figures at the top of the sheet might be studies for a composition of Christ or an apostle blessing or perhaps a Biblical episode such as the Supper at Emmaus. In stylistic terms, the recto of the present sheet can be compared to a small pen and ink sketch by Gennari of an Oriental man in a turban and a youth in the Uffizi, which is also drawn on the reverse of a letter written by the artist7.

The landscape sketch on the verso of this sheet can be likened to the view seen in the left background of Cesare Gennari’s preparatory drawing (fig.1), now in the Witt Collection of the Courtauld Gallery in London8, for the engraved frontispiece to Jean Pesne’s series of fourteen etchings after landscape drawings by Guercino, published in the 1670s. Both the present sheet and the Courtauld drawing include a similar round tower and bridge, as well as a striding figure with a staff in the foreground. Also similar in handling is a landscape drawing in a private collection, which is inscribed ‘del S Cesare Gennari Nipote del Guercino d.84’ in a contemporary hand9

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI

Mogliano 1720-1778 Venice

Title Page for the Raccolta di Alcuni Disegni del Barberi da Cento detto Il Guercino

Etching on laid paper.

535 x 386 mm. (21 x 15 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Howard Hodgkin, London.

LITERATURE: Henri Focillon, Giovanni-Battista Piranesi: Essai de catalogue raisonné de son œuvre, Paris,1918, p.66, no.983; Alberto Alberghini, Guercino: Le Collezione di Stampe, Cento, 1991, p.215, fig.430; John Wilton-Ely, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings, Vol. II, San Francisco, 1994, pp.1108-1109, no.1015.

The inscription reads in full ‘RACCOLTA DI ALCUNI DISEGNI / DEL BARBERI [sic] DA CENTO DETTO IL GUERCINO / Incisi in rame, e presentati al singular merito del Sig. Tommaso / Jenkins Pittore, ed Accademico di S. Luca, in atto di rispetto, e / d’amicizia dall’ Architetto, e suo Coaccademico / Gio. Battista Piranesi.’1

This large print by Giambattista Piranesi served as the frontispiece to the Raccolta di Alcuni Disegni del Barberi [sic] da Cento detto Il Guercino; a series of twenty-eight etchings after drawings by Guercino and a handful of other artists. The series was published by Piranesi in Rome in 1764, although he only etched this frontispiece and three of the plates; two after drawings by Guercino in his own collection2 and one after a drawing by Pier Leone Ghezzi. The remainder of the plates in the volume were etched by other printmakers, in particular Francesco Bartolozzi, who was responsible for the bulk of the etchings, as well as Aureliano Milani and Giovanni Ottaviani. Each of the twenty-one etchings after Guercino in the series noted the name of the owner or the location of the original drawing. While most of the drawings reproduced in the volume were in Venetian collections, a few were made from the vast corpus of Guercino drawings that at the time were still held at the Casa Gennari, the home of the artist’s heirs in Bologna. These were the work of Bartolozzi, who seems to have sold the plates to Piranesi before his departure for England in 1764.

While the collecting of Old Master drawings was relatively common by the middle of the 18th century, the concept of publishing a group of them as prints in order to create a market for them was unusual, and it is interesting to note that it was the drawings of Guercino that were chosen for this project. As the Piranesi scholar John Wilton-Ely has further noted of these prints, and of the present etching in particular, ‘The group is particularly notable for Piranesi’s attempt to reproduce the pictorial quality of Guercino’s brush drawings by applying two colored inks, red and black, simultaneously to the copper plate. The title page to the collection, dedicated to Thomas Jenkins, the British dealer and a close collaborator of Piranesi’s who was elected to the Accademia di San Luca shortly before Piranesi himself, includes a reproduction of a Guercino drawing of St. Joseph belonging to another colleague, the restorer and dealer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi.’3

Impressions of this etching are in a number of institutional collections, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This etching was until recently part of the collection of the noted British painter and printmaker Sir Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017).

A

SELECTION OF DRAWINGS BY GUERCINO

RECENTLY SOLD BY

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Lot and his Daughters

Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Laid down on an 18th century English mount, inscribed Guercino at the bottom. Numbered 544. at the upper right of the mount. 180 x 235 mm. (7 1/8 x 8 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Nathaniel Hone, London (Lugt 2793); Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (Lugt 2364); Sir Thomas Lawrence, London (Lugt 2445); Probably purchased after Lawrence’s death, together with the rest of his collection, by Samuel Woodburn, London, in 1834; The Earls of Crawford and Balcarres, Balcarres House, Colinsburgh, Fife; Thence by descent to a private collection.

Acquired by a private collector, New York.

A preparatory compositional study for Guercino’s large canvas of Lot and His Daughters, painted in 1617 for Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, archbishop of Bologna and later Pope Gregory XV. The painting is today in the monastery of San Lorenzo at El Escorial, near Madrid.

GIOVANNI

FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Study of an Angel

Pen and brown ink. A variant study for the same angel, in reverse, drawn in pen and brown ink on the verso.

176 x 237 mm. (6 7/8 x 9 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Margot Gordon, New York, in 1998; John Nabholtz, Chicago.

Acquired by a private collector, Paris.

Possibly a first idea for the angel at the top of a lunette fresco of The Annunciation to the Shepherds, part of the decoration of the cupola of the Duomo at Piacenza, painted by Guercino between 1626 and 1627. Similarities may also be noted with angels in paintings of The Annunciation of 1628-1629, in the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, and The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, painted in 16351636 for the church of San Martino in Siena.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

A Young Man with an Owl on a Stick

Pen and brown ink and brown wash. 225 x 155 mm. (8 7/8 x 6 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified collector’s mark faintly stamped at the lower right; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 1 April 1987, lot 12 (as Attributed to Guercino); Marcello Aldega, Rome, and Margot Gordon, New York, in 1988; Private collection.

Acquired by the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, Providence, Rhode Island.

The iconography of this drawing is difficult to elucidate, although the presence of the owl, as a symbol of wisdom, may indicate that the man is a fortune-teller. A similar subject is found in a recently identified early painting by Guercino of A Landscape with Rinaldo Corradino on a Mule, datable to c.1615-1617, which is now in the Pinacoteca Civica in Cento. The painting depicts Rinaldo Corradino (a close friend of Annibale Carracci, who made several caricature drawings of him) riding a mule and holding in front of him a staff on which rests a small owl. A fortune-teller may also be the subject of a pen drawing attributed to Guercino, in the Art Institute of Chicago, which depicts a group of figures surrounding a man with an owl on a stick.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Landscape with Falconers by a Tree

Pen and brown ink. Laid down on an 18th century English mount. Inscribed Guercino. on the mount. Further inscribed (by John Barnard) J:B. No:332. / 10 3/4 by 7 3/4. / Engraved by Mr. Pond & / out of his Collection. on the reverse of the mount.

195 x 269 mm. (7 5/8 x 10 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly the artist’s nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari (the ‘Casa Gennari’), Bologna; Thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna; Arthur Pond, London; Possibly his posthumous sale, London, Langford, 25 April – 3 May 1759; John Barnard, London, on his mount and with his initials J:B (Lugt 1419) at the lower right corner of the mount, and with his numbering (Lugt 1420) on the verso; Benjamin West, London (Lugt 419); An unidentified collector’s mark P.H. (Lugt 2804) inscribed in ink on the reverse of the mount; Mrs. A. Rosenheim; Her sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1940, lot 72; Aydua Scott-Elliot, London; Given by her to A. Paul Oppé, London, in 1940; Thence by descent until 2006.

Acquired by a private collector, New York.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Saint Christopher and the Christ Child

Red chalk, with framing lines in red chalk. 285 x 260 mm. (11 1/4 x 10 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably the artist’s nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; Thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna, and probably sold in the second half of the 18th century.

Acquired by a private collector, New York and Monaco.

Although this large drawing remains unrelated to any surviving painting by Guercino, nor is any painting of this subject recorded in the Libro dei Conti, the existence of such a highly finished drawing would suggest that the artist was thinking of a painted composition. A counterproof of the present sheet is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Roman Charity: Cimon and Pero

Pen and brown ink, with traces of framing lines in brown ink. Inscribed Guercino at the lower left. Numbered d.82 at the lower right.

216 x 170 mm. (8 1/2 x 6 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Padre Sebastiano Resta, Rome; Presented by him, as part of an album of drawings, to Monsignor Giovanni Matteo Marchetti, Arezzo, in 1698; By descent to his nephew, Cavaliere Orazio Marchetti da Pistoia; Sold in 1710 with the Resta collection of drawings, probably through John Talman, to John, Lord Somers, London (Lugt 2981), with the Resta-Somers number d.82 at the lower right; Richard Houlditch, London (Lugt 2214), with his associated number 13 at the lower right; Private collection, London, by 1950; Thence by descent until 2013.

Acquired by a private collector, London.

A study for a painting of Cimon and Pero, commissioned from Guercino in 1639 by the Marchese Cornelio II Bentivoglio as a gift for the then Monsignor Mazarin. See also No.10 in the present catalogue.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

River Landscape with a Hunter and his Dog

Pen and brown ink.

240 x 371 mm. (9 1/2 x 14 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably the artist’s nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, the ‘Casa Gennari’, Bologna; Thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna, and probably sold in the second half of the 18th century; Private collection, Austria; Prisco Bagni, Milan; Thence by descent until 2017.

Acquired by a private collector, New York and Italy.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Hercules

Pen and brown ink. Inscribed with the Casa Gennari numbering 12 Pr. Fo. at the lower left of the backing sheet.

183 x 170 mm. (7 1/4 x 6 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari (the ‘Casa Gennari’), Bologna; Thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna; Acquired with a large group of Guercino drawings in Bologna in c.1745 by John Bouverie, East Betchworth, Surrey; By descent to Elizabeth Bouverie, Barham Court, Teston, Kent, until 1798; By bequest to Sir Charles Middleton, later 1st Baron Barham, Barham Court, Kent, until 1813; Thence by descent to the Earls of Gainsborough, Exton Park, Oakham, Rutlandshire.

Acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

A preparatory study for Guercino’s painting of Hercules, commissioned by the collector Alessandro Argoli of Ferrara, who paid eighty scudi for the work when it was delivered to him on 6 March 1642. A few months later the painting was gifted to Cardinal Francesco Barberini in Rome, where it is recorded by July 1642. The Hercules remained in the Barberini collections, recorded in several family inventories, until the early 19th century, after which it was considered lost until its reappearance at auction in 2002.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Four Winged Putti

Red chalk.

220 x 335 mm. (8 5/8 x 13 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album of twenty-eight drawings by Guercino purchased in Italy between 1741 and 1746 by Chaloner Chute; By descent in the Chute family, The Vyne, Basingstoke, until 1949; Their sale, London, Sotheby’s, 22 June 1949, lot 1; R. E. A. Wilson, London, by whom the album broken up and the drawings sold individually; Private collection, United Kingdom.

Acquired by the National Trust for The Vyne, Basingstoke.

A preparatory study for the putti in Guercino’s altarpiece of The Virgin and Child Presenting Rosaries to Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena, painted in 1642 for the church of San Marco in Osimo. A reworked counterproof of this drawing is at Windsor Castle. See also No.12 in the present catalogue.

GIOVANNI

FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

Andromeda

Red chalk, with framing lines in red chalk.

297 x 208 mm. (11 3/4 x 8 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Henry Scipio Reitlinger, London (Lugt 2274a); His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 December 1953, part of lot 59; Dennis J. Ward, in 1954; Private collection, France.

Acquired by a private collector, Austin, Texas.

A preparatory figure study for Guercino’s large painting of Perseus and Andromeda, commissioned by the Bolognese collector Giovanni Battista Manzini in 1648. The painting was until recently in the Palazzo Balbi Senàrega in Genoa and is today in a private collection.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento

1591-1666 Bologna

Saint Jerome in a Landscape

Red chalk, with stumping.

368 x 263 mm. (14 1/2 x 10 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Massachusetts.

Acquired by a private collector, London.

NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE

Introduction and Acknowledgements

1. ‘Qui vi è un giovane di patria di Cento, che dipinge con somma felicità d’invenzione. E gran disegnatore, e felicissimo coloritore: è mostro di natura, e miracolo da far stupire che vede la sua opera.’; Letter of 25 October 1617; Quoted in Giovanni Gaetano Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura scritte da’ piu celebri personnaggi dei secoli XV, XVI e XVII, Milan, 1822, Vol.I, p.286.

2. John Marciari, ‘Guercino Drawings. Los Angeles and London’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, April 2007, p.276.

The Life of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino

1. Letter of 25 October 1617 (see note 1 above).

2. David M. Stone, ‘Prefazione’, in Negro, Pirondini and Roio, p.10.

3. ‘Ha fatto cento sei tavole d’Altare. Cento quarantaquattro quadri a diversi Principi, cioè alli Papi, Gregorio, Urbano, Innocenzo, Alessandro, Imperatore, ed Imperatrice, Regi di Francia, di Spagna, d’Inghilterra, e Regina di Francia, Duchi, e Duchessa di Savoia, di Toscana, di Modena, di Mantova, Principi, Cardinali, Ambasciatori di Corone ec.’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.273.

The Drawings of Guercino

1. ‘cosi spiritosi, guizzanti, bizzarri, e galanti’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.273.

2. Stone 1991a, p.xxi.

3. Marciari, p.11.

4. Turner and Plazzotta, p.16.

5. Inv. RCIN 902797; Mahon and Turner, p.77, no.137, pl.143. The drawing, which was among the contents of the artist’s studio at the time of his death, is drawn with a shaky hand, and is inscribed, probably by Benedetto Gennari, ‘Questo e stato l’ultimo disegno / de[?] Sig Gio Franco ’, with the remainder of the inscription cut off at the bottom of the sheet.

6. Marciari, p.10.

7. Loire 1991, p.146.

8. Brooks, p.14.

9. ‘Ce Peintre à outre cela une plume tout-à-faite séduisante’, & lorsqu’il y joint quelques coups de lavis, il met dans ses Desseins une Vaghesse qu’on ne trouve dans les Desseins d’aucun autre Maître.’; Pierre-Jean Mariette, Description sommaire des desseins de grand maistres d’Italie, des Pays-Bas, et de France, du cabinet de feu M. Crozat, Paris, 1741, pp.57-58.

10. Turner 1991-1992, p.13.

11. Marciari, p.21.

The Later History and Collecting of Guercino’s Drawings

1. Mahon 1968b, p.347.

2. ‘Dieci libri di disegni, parte à penna, parte di lapis rosso e nero, con diversi paesini disegnati con esquitezza’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.273.

3. Frances Vivian, ‘Guercino Seen from the Archivio Barberini’, The Burlington Magazine, January 1971, p.25, note 55.

4. ‘Les Anglois sont passionées pour les desseins de Guerchin.’; Pierre-Jean Mariette, Abecedario de P.J. Mariette et autres notes inédits de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes, ed. Philippe de Chennevières and Anatole de Montaiglon, Paris, Vol.I, 1851-1853, p.64.

5. Henry Reveley, Notices Illustrative of the Drawings and Sketches of some of the most distinguished Masters in all the principal Schools of Design, London, 1820 [posthumously published], p.77.

6. Russell, p.20.

No.1

1. According to what appears to be a contemporary inscription on the verso of the sheet, this drawing was at one time in the possession of two Italian artists of the late Baroque period; the noted Venetian painter Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734), whose peripatetic career saw him working in Venice, Bologna, Turin, Florence, London and Paris, and the lesser-known Ferrarese artist Giacomo Parolini (1663-1733), who was trained in Bologna but was mainly active in Ferrara, where he painted several altarpieces for local churches. If the inscription is accurate, it seems that this drawing was given by Ricci to Parolini in Bologna as a sign of friendship. As Denis Mahon has pointed out, both Ricci and Parolini studied in Bologna around 1680, in the circle of the local painters Carlo Cignani and Giovan Gioseffo dal Sole. Furthermore, Parolini is known to have

made a copy of Guercino’s altarpiece of Saint William of Aquitaine Receiving the Monastic Habit, then in the church of San Gregorio in Bologna, that was much praised by Cignani.

2. The Milanese industrialist Francesco Dubini (1848-1932) began collecting drawings, with an emphasis on works by Italian artists, at the end of the 19th century, advised by the art historian and critic Gustavo Frizzoni. Dubini is known to have owned a number of drawings by Guercino. While this large sheet does not bear Dubini’s collector’s mark, this is true of several of the drawings in his collection. Instead, the collector often inscribed the dimensions of the work, written in pencil, on the sheet itself, as is the case with this drawing. Although Dubini presented a group of forty-one drawings to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan in 1906, the rest of his collection was dispersed several years after his death.

3. According to Cesare Malvasia, Guercino was shown Faccini’s drawings of male nudes by his patron Padre Antonio Mirandola, and he may even have owned some examples himself.

4. Robert Randolf Coleman et al, Master, Pupil, Follower: 16th- to 18th-Century Italian Works on Paper, exhibition catalogue, Athens [GA], 20192020, p.32, under no.6.

5. Marciari, p.30, under no.1.

6. Guercino did, however, produce a number of anatomical and figure drawings intended to illustrate a technical manual of draughtsmanship, instigated by Padre Mirandola in 1618. In the same year these drawings were taken by Guercino to Venice, to be shown to the painter Jacopo Negretti, known as Palma Giovane. The drawings were eventually engraved by the printmaker Oliviero Gatti and published in 1619.

7. Faietti, p.47.

8. Inv. 1638F; Marangoni, p.16, no.62, pl.62; Mahon 1968-1969, p.57, no.27, fig.27 recto and verso; Montreal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Dessins italiens du XVIIe siècle du Musée des Offices de Florence / Italian XVIIth-Century Drawings from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, exhibition catalogue, 1986, pp.118-121, no.27; Eliot W. Rowlands, The Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Italian Paintings 1300-1800, Kansas City, 1996, p.249, under no.28, figs.28d and 28e; Turner 2008-2009, pp.44-45, no.6, figs.6a and 6b and also illustrated on the cover; Turner 2017, p.65, figs.52-53. The Uffizi drawing, which measures 411 x 275 mm., is unusual among Guercino’s drawings in that one side of the sheet is squared for transfer.

9. Mahon 1968a, pp.58-59, no.24, pl.24; Salerno, p.121, no.41; Stone 1991, p.59, no.39; Diane De Grazia, ‘Guercino as a Decorator’, in Mahon 1992, p.44, fig.3; Rowlands, ibid., pp.246-251, no.28; David M. Stone, ‘“Frescante riluttante”’, in Buscaroli and Stone, p.21, fig.5; Turner 2017, p.321, no.63, illustrated in colour p.64. Other preparatory studies for the Nelson-Atkins fresco are in the Louvre and Windsor Castle. [Photo credit for Fig.2: Guercino, David with the Head of Goliath, c.1618. Fresco. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust through the George H. and Elizabeth O. Davis Fund, 75-48. Image courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services.]

10. Stone 1991a, p.148, under no.64.

11. Mahon 1937a, pl.I, fig.E, pl.II, fig.D, pl.III, figs.A-D; Salerno, pp.88-89, no.7; Stone 1991b, pp.23-24, no.6; Diane De Grazia, ‘Guercino Decoratore’, in Mahon 1991, p.XLII, fig.1; Turner 2017, pp.263-267, nos.9.2, 9.4, 9.7, 9.9, 9.12, 9.14, 9.17 and 9.19.

12. Inv. 2004.250; Carmen C. Bambach, ‘Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, detto il Guercino’, in Philippe Costamagna, Florian Härb and Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinó, ed., Disegno, giudizio e bella maniera: Studi sul disegno italiano in onore di Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Cinisello Balsamo, 2005, pp.178-179, no.107; Marciari, p.16, fig.3 (where dated c.1618-1619); Francesco Gonzales, ‘Da allievo a maestro: l’Accademia del Nudo’, in Bava and Spione, p.80, fig.3. The drawing measures 584 x 418 mm.

13. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 13 January 1993, lot 89 (sold for $112,500); Marciari, p.16, fig.4 (where dated c.1618). The dimensions of the drawing, which, like the present sheet, is executed on a blue-grey paper, are 443 x 349 mm.

14. Inv. 89.GB.52; Julian Brooks, Guercino: Mind to Paper, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles and London, 2006-2007, pp.22-23, no.2.

15. Turner and Plazzotta, p.36, under no.4. Other large-scale life studies of this type by Guercino are today in the collections of the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, the Civica Pinacoteca il Guercino in Cento, the Uffizi in Florence, the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, and elsewhere.

No.2

1. Stone 1991a, p.13, under no.6.

2. An old photograph of the sculpture of the Madonna of Loreto is illustrated in Yusuke Kawase, ‘Un’opera visionaria di Guercino: San Bernardino da Siena e San Francesco d’Assisi in preghiera davanti alla Madonna di Loreto’, in Tokyo 2015, p.173, fig.1.

3. Bagni 1988, p.70, no.101 (as after a lost painting or drawing by Guercino). It is interesting to note, as David Stone has pointed out, that on the recto of the present sheet Guercino has drawn the Christ Child looking outwards, as He appears in the statue itself, but on the verso the artist drew the Child looking slightly to the right, which would suggest that Guercino was not attempting to produce a straightforward copy of the famous sculpture.

4. Turner 1991, p.186. This disparity in quality between Guercino’s original designs and the contemporary prints made after them was already recognized in the early 19th century. As the Irish art critic and dealer William Paulet Carey, writing in 1815, commented, ‘Perhaps no other great master had been so grossly misrepresented by his engravers as Guercino, until [Francesco] Bartolozzi, by entering so fully into their particular spirit, rescued his fame from their durance. In Pasqualini’s numerous engravings from his designs, the spirit and expression of the originals were wholly lost, and that clumsy workman substituted his own unmeaning coarseness and defective drawing in their place.’; William Carey, ‘Memoirs of Bartolozzi’, The European Magazine and London Review, July 1815, p.28.

5. Stone 1991a, p.14, note 2. The present sheet may be the lost drawing by Guercino mentioned by both Stone and Bagni (see note 3 above).

6. The archpriest of San Biagio in Cento at the time the print was made was Zaccaria (or Andrea?) Pasqualini, a relative of the printmaker.

7. Mahon 1968a, pp.61-62, no.26, pl.26; Salerno, p.123, no.44; Stone 1991b, p.57, no.37; Mahon 1991, pp.88-89, no.29; Vodret and Gozzi, pp.84-85, no.10; Tokyo 2015, pp.64-67, no.13; Benati, pp.72-75, no.6; Turner 2017, p.313, no.54; Lorenzo Lorenzini, ed., La Civica Pinacoteca il Guercino di Cento: Catalogo generale, Cinisello Balsamo, 2023, pp.219-220, no.13.

8. Inv. 6837; A. E. Popham and K. M. Fenwick, European Drawings (and two Asian drawings) in the Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, 1965, pp.55-56, no.79; Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada and Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Master Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada, exhibition catalogue, 1988-1989, pp.44-46, no.10; Stone 1991a, pp.13-15, no.6 (where dated c.1618).

9. Inv. 2349; Alfred Stix and Anna Spitzmüller, Beschreibender Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung Albertina: Die Schulen von Ferrara, Bologna, Parma und Modena, der Lombardei, Genuas, Neapels und Siziliens, Vienna, 1941, p.23, no.219, pl.50, fig.219; Vancouver, Ottawa and Washington, ibid., p.46, fig.1; Stone 1991a, p.14, fig.6a; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.II, Vienna, 1994, pp.1229-1230, Inv. 2349.

10. The drawing was formerly in the collections of John Barnard, Defer-Dumesnil, Louis Deglatigny and Denys Sutton; Sale (‘The Collection of Denys Sutton’), New York, Christie’s, 25 January 2005, lot 7 (sold for $78,000); Pulini 2005-2006, pp.202-205, no.73; Rossoni and Berretti, pp.142143, no.28.

11. Pulini 2005-2006, p.204, under no.73.

12. Bagni 1988, p.89, fig.123; Pulini 2005-2006, p.202, under no.73.

13. Inv. 1624F; Turner 2008-2009, pp.63-64, no.24, fig.24.

No.3

1. Ohio, Dayton Art Institute, Fifty Treasures of The Dayton Art Institute, 1969, pp.92-93, no.32, Salerno, p.192, no.111; Stone 1991b, p.128, no.105; Boccardo 1992, op.cit., illustrated p.40, under no.6; Alexander Lee Nyerges et al, Selected Works from the Dayton Art Institute Permanent Collection, Dayton, 1999, p.233; Turner 2017, op.cit., pp.415-416, no.141. When the Dayton painting was exhibited at the Richard L. Feigen Gallery in New York in 1992, Denis Mahon expressed some reservations about its attribution to Guercino, suggesting, in conversation, that it may be a workshop piece.

2. Ohio, Dayton Art Institute, ibid., p.141, fig.27; Bagni 1988, p.63, no.89; Alberghini, p.183, fig.374.

3. Inv. D 1682; Marangoni, p.14, no.30, pl.30; Ohio, Dayton Art Institute, op.cit., p.141, fig.26; Piero Boccardo, ed., Maestri del disegno nelle civiche collezioni genovesi, exhibition catalogue, Genoa, 1990, pp.62-63, no.27 and illustrated in colour on the cover; Boccardo 1992, op.cit., pp.40-42, no.6 (where dated 1620).

4. Inv. 1895,0915.706; Mahon 1968-1969, pp.173-175, no.185, fig.185; Turner and Plazzotta, p.52, no.54 and p.240, App. no.9, illustrated in colour pl.12 (where dated 1622-1626). A drawing of the same subject recently attributed to Guercino, an Allegory of Christian Charity formerly in the collection of Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville and now in the Burrell Collection at Glasgow Museums, is stylistically later in date, and may be dated to the middle of the 1640s (Inv. 36.41; Robert Wenley, ‘Guercino in Glasgow’, Master Drawings, Summer 2010, p.180, fig.1).

5. Turner and Plazzotta, p.191.

No.4

1. ‘…alcuni disegni di sua, balli, feste, e sponsalizi costumati nella sua Rocca di Cento, imitando l’idee, Il portamento e le sembianze di quei rusticani, e di quelle foretane del Paese, li quali, per verità, erano curiosi, e bene imitati’; Jacob Hess, Die Künstlerbiographien von Giovanni Battista Passeri, Leipzig and Vienna, 1934, p.347.

2. Stone 1991a, p.178, under no.77.

3. Brooks, p.15.

4. Inv. RCIN 902403; Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.161, no.555 (not illustrated). The drawing, which measures 262 x 188 mm., is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/45/collection/902403/a-street-seller-and-his-customer [accessed 12 May 2024].

No.5

1. William Carey, ‘Memoirs of Bartolozzi’, The European Magazine and London Review, July 1815, p.27-28.

2. Inv. NT 851988. The painting measures 97.8 x 83.8 cm, and is visible online at https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/851988 [accessed 29 April 2024].

3. The Sibyl Hellespontica was acquired by the National Trust at a Sotheby’s auction of the contents of Ickworth in 1996 and was returned to the house; Sale (‘The East Wing, Ickworth’), Bury St. Edmunds, Sotheby’s, 11-12 June 1996, lot 478 (as Attributed to Guercino and Studio). The painting has been dated to both the late 1620s and the 1640s; on stylistic grounds the later dating would seem to be more appropriate.

4. Inv. NG.K&H.B.15244; Mahon 1991-1992, pp.99-101, no.61; Bagni 1994, p.147, pl.111. An image of the drawing is also visible online at https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/collection/object/NG.K_H.B.15244 [accessed 21 April 2024].

5. Inv. 2318; Nicholas Turner, ‘Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox: Guercino Drawings’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, November 1986, p.843, illustrated p.841, fig.69; Bagni 1994, p.162, pl.126. An image of the drawing is also visible online at https://www.mfab.hu/artworks/11420/ [accessed 21 April 2024].

6. Inv. 1641 F; Massimo Pulini, ‘Racconti di paese. Il paesaggio e la scena popolare nella pittura emiliana del XVII secolo’, in Pulini 2001, p.46, fig.46; Turner 2008-2009, p.143, no.2 (not illustrated), where dated to the middle of the 1620s.

7. Inv. RCIN 902374; Mahon and Turner, p.87, no.167, pl.172 (where dated to 1628-1634).

8. Inv. RCIN 902675; Mahon and Turner, pp.87-88, no.168, pl.173; Turner and Plazzotta, pp.102-103, no.75 (where dated to the early 1630s); Mahon 1991-1992, pp.254-256, no.162; Turner 1991-1992, pp.96-97, no.38 (where dated c.1630).

9. New York, Trinity Fine Art at Newhouse Galleries, An Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, Prints and Paintings, 1998, pp.30-31, no.13; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 11 July 2001, lot 169 (bt. Artemis for £22,350). The drawing was dated to the 1640s by both Sir Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner.

10. Inv. RCIN 903148; Mahon and Turner, p.202, no.722 (not illustrated). An image of the counterproof, which measures 173 x 249 mm, is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/1/collection/903148/a-woman-holding-a-large-parchment-or-scroll [accessed 28 April 2024].

11. Inv. RCIN 903184; Mahon and Turner, p.202, no.723 (not illustrated). An image of this second counterproof, which measures 206 x 235 mm, is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/2/collection/903184/a-young-woman-facing-the-viewer [accessed 28 April 2024].

12. Mahon and Turner, p.177.

No.6

1. This drawing bears the collector’s mark of the 19th century French administrator and politician François Régis Alziary, Baron de Malaussena (1837-1905), who owned several drawings by Guercino.

2. The French architect Paul Frantz Marcou (1860-1932), who served as inspecteur général des Monuments historiques et du service des objets mobiliers from 1893 onwards, began collecting Old Master drawings from quite an early age, around 1880. His interesting and varied collection was made up mainly of 17th and 18th century Italian drawings, as well as sheets by Northern and French artists. On his death in 1932, Marcou’s collection was divided between his two daughters, Valentine (Mme. Jean Trouvelot) and Catherine, later Mme. Henry Dumas. The former presented her share of the Marcou collection, numbering just over two hundred drawings, to the Louvre in 1980. The second half of the Marcou collection, including the present sheet, was dispersed at auction in Paris in 2007 by the heirs of Catherine Marcou and Henry Dumas.

3. Fausto Gozzi, ‘Il Guercino e la caricatura’ / ‘Guercino and caricature’, in Pulini 2005-2006, p.45.

4. Turner 1991-1992, p.36, under no.9.

5. Brooks, p.15.

6. Turner and Plazzotta, pp.131-134, no.104, (where dated to the middle of the 1630s).

7. Inv. RCIN 902663; Mahon and Turner, p.120; no.337, pl.302; Turner 1991-1992, pp.116-117, no.48; Turner 2023, p.142, fig.6.10.

No.7

1. An identical watermark is found on a drawing by the Bolognese artist Lionello Spada (1576-1622) in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (Inv.1992.169). Images of both the drawing and its watermark are visible online at https://www.themorgan.org/drawings/item/142700 [accessed 22 April 2024].

2. Mahon and Turner, p.xvii.

3. Turner 2017, op.cit., p.552, under no.261.

4. This drawing may also have been intended to depict a subject from the 16th century epic poem Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, namely Angelica in the act of carving her name on a tree trunk and turning to look at her lover Medoro, who is doing the same. Guercino made two paintings of the subject of Angelica and Medoro, one in 1642 for a client in Cento and the other in 1647 for César de Choiseul, Comte de Plessis-Praslin and Maréchal de France, but both are now lost.

5. Inv. F 261 inf. N.226; Giorgio Fubini, ed., Cento tavole del Codice Resta, Milan, 1955, p.207; Giulio Bora, I disegni del Codice Resta, Milan, 1978, unpaginated, no.226 (p.207 of the album); Cecilia Frosinini, ed., Leonardo e Raffaello, per esempio…Disegni e studi d’artista, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 2008, pp.116-117, no.13. An image of the drawing is visible online at https://digital-exhibits.library.nd.edu/2d498adc70/inventorycatalog-of-the-drawings-in-the-biblioteca-ambrosiana/items/5179ae3268 [accessed 1 May 2024]. The Codice Resta was one of several albums of drawings assembled by the Milanese priest Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635-1714), one of the leading collectors of drawings in Italy in the 17th century.

6. Salerno, p.177, no.93; Stone 1991b, p.109, no.86; Mahon 1992, pp.218-219, no.27; Turner 2017, op.cit., p.383, no.118.II. The painting was commissioned by the Ludovisi family and is recorded in a family inventory of November 1623. Turner has further suggested that a second version of the painting, today in the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, which has been long regarded as a copy of the Goethe Academy canvas, is an autograph work by Guercino (Inv. 2160; Turner 2017, op.cit., p.382, no.118.I).

7. Inv. 1895,0915.709; Marangoni, p.15, no.51, pl.51; Turner and Plazzotta, pp.145-146, no.120, illustrated in colour pl.19 (where dated to the late 1630s); Carel van Tuyll and Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Le dessin à Bologne. Carrache, Guerchin, Dominiquin…Chefs-d’oeuvre des Beaux-Arts de Paris, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2020, p.90, under no.20, fig.2.

No.8

1. A native of Alsace, the art historian and museum curator Hans Haug (1890-1965) served as the director of both the Musée des Beaux-Arts and the Hohenlohemuseum (later renamed the Musée des Arts Décoratifs) in Strasbourg, from 1919 until his retirement in 1963.

2. Inv. Ff,2.136; Turner and Plazzotta, pp.248-249, App. no.23 (where dated to the mid-1630s); Nicholas Turner, Drawn to Italian Drawings: The Goldman Collection, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2008-2009, p.233, under no.98, fig.1; Turner 2017, p.521, under no.230, fig.230b. The dimensions of the drawing are 222 x 211 mm.

3. Turner and Plazzotta, p.248, under App. no.23 (not illustrated); Holkham sale (‘Old Master Drawings from Holkham’), London, Christie’s, 2 July 1991, lot 23 (sold for £26,400); Turner, ibid., 2008-2009, pp.232-233, no.98 and illustrated on the cover; Turner 2017, p.521, under no.230, fig.230a. The dimensions of the drawing are 158 x 127 mm.

4. Sale (‘The Property of Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina’), New York, Sotheby’s, 20 November 1980, lot 49 (as School of Guercino); Turner 2017, p.521, no.230; Anonymous sale, Antibes, Carvajal Maison de Ventes, 15 July 2023, lot 119 (sold for €50,000). A recent image of the painting, which in the opinion of David Stone is a workshop production, is also visible at https://www.gazette-drouot.com/article/leguerchin-du-sentiment-avant-tout/45332 [accessed 19 May 2024].

5. Malvasia, Vol.II, p.316; Ghelfi, p.88, no.159.

6. Inv. 2299; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.II, Vienna, 1994, p.1203, Inv. 2299 (as Circle of Guercino). The dimensions of the drawing are 215 x 270 mm.

7. Turner 2017, p.521, under no.230. The present sheet was apparently unknown to Turner at the time of the publication of his 2017 catalogue raisonné.

8. Carey, p.16, figs.8 and 9, respectively. The latter drawing was formerly in the collection of Prisco Bagni and was sold at auction in 2017; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2017, lot 47 (sold for $18,750).

8. Inv. 6863; Pierre Rosenberg, Les dessins de la collection Mariette: Écoles italienne et espagnole, Paris, 2019, Vol.II, p.591, no.I964.

No.9

1. The appearance of the figure in this drawing is akin to that of the hermit Saint Paul in a number of paintings by Guercino, although the present sheet cannot be regarded as a study for any of them.

2. Salerno, p.258, no.172; Turner 2017, p.527, no.238.

3. Inv. RCIN 902588; Mahon and Turner, p.91, no.186, pl.368. The drawing has been severely damaged by both iron gall ink corrosion and recent attempts at restoration, and has partly disintegrated. The image illustrated in Mahon and Turner shows the drawing in its original state.

4. Inv. 517; Michael Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings: Bolognese and Emilian Schools, London, 1994, p.143, no.563 (where dated to the late 1630s).

5. Carel Van Tuyll, ‘The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, March 1990, p.217.

6. William Carey, ‘Memoirs of Bartolozzi’, The European Magazine and London Review, July 1815, pp.28-29.

No.10

1. ‘Dall Ill.mo Sig. Marchese Bentivoglio, si è ricevuto per intiero pagamento del quadro della Carità Romana fattagli lir. 274. in ducatoni di Fiorenza, che fano scudi 66-.’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.319; Ghelfi, pp.98-99, no.204.

2. Turner 2017, p.542, no.251, where it is stated that the attribution of the painting to Guercino had also been accepted by Sir Denis Mahon.

3. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 29 June 1971, lot 26 (sold for 1,100 gns. to Agnews); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 July 2006, lot 27 (sold for £33,600). The drawing, which measures 190 x 228 mm., is now in the collection of Bernd and Verena Klüser in Munich; Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum, Zeichnungssammlung Berndt und Verena Klüser, exhibition catalogue, 2011, Vol.I, pp.64-65, unnumbered; Hans-Peter Wipplinger, ed., Die Sammlung Klüser. Zurück in die Zukunft: Zeichnungen von Tiepolo bis Warhol / Back to the Future: Drawings from Tiepolo to Warhol. The Klüser Collection, exhibition catalogue, Krems, 2014, illustrated p.31.

4. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 April 1994, lot 62 (sold for £13,225). The drawing measures 195 x 184 mm.

5. London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, 2014, no.10; Vitek Tracz, London; His (anonymous) sale (‘Traits et Portraits: Une Collection Particulière’), Paris, Sotheby’s, 28 March 2019, lot 103 (sold for €41,250). See No.35 in this catalogue.

6. The posthumous Henry S. Reitlinger sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 December 1953, lot 58 (‘Roman Charity, red chalk, 9 7/8 by 8 11/16 in.’, sold for £20).

7. New York, Hill-Stone Inc., Fine Old Master & Modern Prints & Drawings. Catalogue 15, 2012, no.5 (as Guercino); Turner 2017, p.542, under no.251 (as Guercino). The drawing measures 239 x 187 mm.

8. Written correspondence, 2022.

9. Written correspondence, 2022.

10. Inv. RCIN 903130; Mahon and Turner, p.201, no.720 (not illustrated). An image of this counterproof, which measures 239 x 205 mm, is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/903130/roman-charity [accessed 7 May 2024]. Although Nicholas Turner had posited that the Windsor offset was taken from the copy drawing sold in 2012 (see note 7 above), it is clear that, as Stone noted in 2022, it was, in fact, taken from the present sheet, since the counterproof includes the vertical line and the drawn areas to the left of it, which are missing in the other drawing.

11. Inv. RCIN 902573; Mahon and Turner, pp.91-92, no.187, pl.184.

12. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 15 December 1999, lot 28 (as Follower of Guercino).

13. Alberghini, p.73, no.149. The print states that the original drawing by Guercino was then in the collection of Stefano Sanvitale in Parma.

No.11

1. Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.101.

2. Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.101.

3. ‘Questo disegno…sono tipici esempi di come il Guercino lavorasse, schizzando rapidamente sommarie idee di paesaggi.’; Mahon 1991-1992, op.cit., p.286, under no.183.

4. Turner and Plazzotta, p.191.

5. Turner 2017, p.34.

6. Inv. 207.1164; ‘Supplement: Guercino Drawings in North American Collections. A Selective Checklist’, in Stone 1991a, p.224, no.196, illustrated p.243, pl.O. An image of the drawing is also visible online at https://blanton.emuseum.com/objects/15708/a-landscape-with-acentral-tree-and-spire?ctx=4f9eb77669005271370e7d3ff18d56df0eef6a38&idx=11 [accessed 14 May 2024].

7. Bagni 1986a, p.24, no.6; Mahon 1991-1992, op.cit., p.287, no.184.

8. Inv. RCIN 902452; Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.169, no.584 (not illustrated). An image of the drawing, which measures 147 x 234 mm., is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/1/collection/902452/a-landscape-with-a-building-on-the-right-and-wooded-groundfalling-away-to-the [accessed 4 May 2024].

9. ‘Dieci Libri di dissegni, parte à penna, parte di lapis rosso, e nero, con diversi paesini dissegnati con esquitezza’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.273.

10. Quoted in Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.xxi.

No.12

1. This drawing bears the collector’s mark of the 20th century French art dealer Charles Férault (1877-1957), who began acquiring drawings from around 1910 onwards. Férault’s mark was applied only to those drawings – mostly by French and Italian artists – in his own collection, and not works held as stock.

2. Salerno, pp.282-283, no.202; Stone 1991b, p.197, no.182; Mahon 1991, pp.238-239, no.86; Vittorio Sgarbi, ed., Da Rubens a Maratta. Le meraviglie del Barocco nelle Marche. 2. Osimo e la marca di Ancona, exhibition catalogue, Osimo, 2013, pp.122-123, no.27; Turner 2017, pp.569-570, no.279; Cerioni, p.74, fig.13. Other images of the altarpiece, in which the small figures in the background are probably the work of a studio assistant, possibly Bartolomeo Gennari, are visible online at https://www.progettostoriadellarte.it/2021/07/15/la-madonna-del-rosariodi-guercino-ad-osimo/ [accessed 15 May 2024].

3. Inv. H 006; Mahon 1968b, p.357, fig.15; Mahon 1968-1969 [2013 ed.], p.139, no.145, fig.145; Van Tuyll, pp.108-109, no.41; Cerioni, p.74, fig.14; Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, The Italian Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Teyler Museum, Leiden and Haarlem, 2021, Vol.I, pp.316-317, no.374.

4. Inv. 515; Turner and Plazzotta, op.cit., pp.156-157, no.129; Mahon 1991-1992, op.cit., pp.174-176, no.110; Michael Jaffé, Old Master Drawings from Chatsworth, exhibition catalogue, London, 1993, p.75, no.76, pl.VI; Michael Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings: Bolognese and Emilian Schools, London, 1994, p.145, no.566.

5. Inv. RCIN 902851; Mahon and Turner, pp.57-58, no.98, pl.103; Turner and Plazzotta, op.cit., pp.155-156, no.128.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 21 November 1974, lot 55 (sold for £1,050).

7. Inv. NT 2900386. See No.38 in the present catalogue. The drawing was one of twenty-eight drawings by Guercino assembled into an album belonging to the Chute family of The Vyne in Basingstoke. The Chute album was sold as a single lot at an auction in London in 1949 and its contents were then dispersed; several sheets are now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The red chalk drawing of putti for the Osimo altarpiece was acquired in 2019 by the National Trust and has returned to The Vyne estate in Hampshire.

8. Sale (‘Catalogue d’une Belle Collection de Dessins Anciens, Collection de M. C. Morin a Paris et une Collection Allemande’), Amsterdam, R. W. P. de Vries, 10-11 May 1927, lot 19.

9. Mahon 1968b, pp.165-166, no.68, pl.68; Salerno, p.255, no.168; Stone 1991b, p.168, no.149; Turner 2017, p.516, no.227; Bava and Spione, pp.112-113, no.IV.8, p.211, no.IV.8.

10. Inv. 1910,0212.8; Mahon 1968-1969, p.136, no.141, fig.141; Roli, p.31, pl.55; Turner and Plazzotta, op.cit., pp.138-140, no.113.

11. Inv. 167; Felice Stampfle and Jacob Bean, Drawings from New York Collections II: The Seventeenth Century in Italy, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1967, p.39, no.42, pl.42; Mahon 1991-1992, op.cit., pp.158-159, no.90; Marciari, op.cit., pp.78-79, no.20. An etched copy of this drawing, made by William Wynne Ryland in 1763, was included in Charles Rogers, A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings, published in London in 1778.

12. Stampfle and Bean, ibid., p.39, under no.42.

13. Inv. 1377; Alfred Stix and Lili Fröhlich-Bum, Beschreibender Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung Albertina: Die Zeichnung der Venezianischen Schule, Vienna, 1926, p.190, no.440, p.192, fig.440; Birke and Kertész, op.cit., p.743, Inv.1377. The dimensions of the drawing are 427 x 272 mm.

No.13

1. Turner and Plazzotta, p.184, under no.156.

2. Turner 1991-1992, pp.126-126, under no.53.

3. Inv. 85; Salerno, p.300, no.226; Mahon 1991, pp.274-277, no.101; Stone 1991b, p.219, no.207; Mahon 1992, pp.262-265, no.39; Turner 2017, p.603, no.314, illustrated in colour p.125. The connection of the present sheet to the Louvre painting was first made by David Stone in 2021.

4. Stone 1991a, pp.116-118, no.50. The drawing is in the collection of Janet Mavec.

5. Inv. H 033; Mahon 1968-1969, pp.134-135, no.140, fig.140; Van Tuyll, pp.116-117, no.46; Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, The Italian Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Teyler Museum, Leiden and Haarlem, 2021, Vol.I, pp.320-321, no.377.

6. Inv. 1948-718; DeGrazia, unpaginated, no.24; Felton Gibbons, Catalogue of Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, 1977, Vol.I, p.100, no.264, Vol.II, fig.264.

7. Inv. RCIN 902854; Mahon and Turner, p.66, no.115, pl.120; Turner and Plazzotta, pp.171-172, no.142, illustrated in colour pl.20; Mahon 1991-1992, pp.192-193, no.212; Turner 1991-1992, pp.126-127, no.53.

No.14

1. Brooks, p.13.

2. Inv. 2017.1173; ‘Supplement: Guercino Drawings in North American Collections. A Selective Checklist’, in Stone 1991a, p.224, no.184, illustrated p.233, pl.E; Jonathan Bober, I grandi disegni italiani del Blanton Museum of Art dell’Università del Texas, Cinisello Balsamo, 2001, p.39, fig.XXII.

3. Inv. WA1948.162; K. T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum; Volume II: Italian Schools, Oxford, 1956 [1972 ed.], pp.446-447, no.867 (not illustrated); Mahon and Ekserdjian, p.41, no.XV; Pulini 2005-2006, pp.172-173, no.60.

4. Inv. 1976.2.19; Bagni 1990, p.47, no.26; Stone 1991a pp.108-109, no.46 (where dated 1645-1650).

5. Stone 1991a, p.108, under no.46.

6. Inv. 316; Mario di Giampaolo, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia: Disegni emiliani, Milan, 1993, p.80, no.61; Pulini 2005-2006, p.200, under no.72.

7. Inv. 1948-714 and 1948-716; Jacob Bean, Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, 1966, p.35, no.44, pl.44 (Inv. 48-716 only); DeGrazia, unpaginated, nos.21-22; Felton Gibbons, Catalogue of Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, 1977, Vol.I, pp.99-100, nos.261 and 264, Vol.II, figs.261 and 263.

No.15

1. Turner and Plazzotta, p.18.

2. Frederick Peter Seguier, A Critical and Commercial Dictionary of the Works of Painters, London, 1970, p.11.

3. Inv. IV 168G; Bagni 1988, p.97, fig.133; Mahon 1991-1992, pp.257-258, no.163; Marciari, pp.75-77, no.19.

4. Inv. RCIN 902895; Mahon and Turner, p.179, no.600 (not illustrated); Marciari, p.75, fig.19.1.

5. Bagni 1988 p.97, no.132; Alberghini, p.92, fig.190; Negro, Pirondini and Roio, p.31, fig.68; Marciari, p.76, fig.19.2.

No.16

1. Salerno, pp.224-225, no.130; Stone 1991b, p.139, no.115; Turner 2017, p.449, no.160.

2. Salerno, pp.216-217, no.123 bis; Stone 1991b, p.142, no.119; Turner 2017, p.455, no.167.

3. Salerno p.242, no.151; Stone 1991b, p.158, no.139; Turner 2017, pp.489-490, no.201.

4. Salerno p.329, no.257; Stone 1991b, p.250, no.240; Turner 2017, p.649, no.359.

5. Anonymous sale, Monaco, Sotheby’s, 2 December 1989, lot 112; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 23 June 2009, lot 25. The identification of the subject of the drawing as Argantes is confirmed by an inscription taken from the Gerusalemme Liberata at the bottom of the sheet.

6. Turner 2017, pp.608-609, nos.318.I and 318.II. The attribution of both paintings to Guercino is not accepted by Salerno or Stone, however.

7. Turner 2017, p.608, under no.318.1.

8. Inv. 1956.15; Van Tuyll, p.186, no.84.

9. Turner and Plazzotta, pp.161-165, no.134 (where dated to the 1640s).

10. Inv. D.1952.RW.1368; Turner and Plazzotta, p.171, no.141; Brooks, pp.88-89, no.31.

11. Inv. 1949-49; Felton Gibbons, Catalogue of Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, 1977, Vol.I, pp.99-100, no.376, Vol.II, fig.376 (as School of Guercino); Laura Giles, Lia Markey and Claire Van Cleave, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, 2014, pp.150-152, no.61.

12. Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 30 January 1998, lot 70; New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1999, no.25, where acquired by William Angus Shorey, Chicago. The drawing, which has framing lines in red chalk on all four sides, was probably intended as a study for a bust-length easel picture.

No.17

1. Inv. RCIN 902510; Mahon and Turner, p.116, no.310, pl.279.

2. Inv. RCIN 902941; Mahon and Turner, p.97, no.217 (not illustrated). An image of the drawing is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/ search#/7/collection/902941/an-old-bearded-man [accessed 10 May 2024].

3. Inv. RCIN 902828; Mahon and Turner, p.97, no.216 (not illustrated). An image of the drawing is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/ search#/4/collection/902828/a-bearded-man-with-his-left-shoulder-bare [accessed 10 May 2024].

4. Inv. RCIN 902594; Mahon and Turner, p.59, no.99, pl.104.

5. Inv. RCIN 902715; Mahon and Turner, pp.96-97, no.213, pl.202.

6. Inv. 116; Lorenzo Lorenzini, ed., La Civica Pinacoteca il Guercino di Cento: Catalogo generale, Cinisello Balsamo, 2023, pp.291-292, no.67 (where dated c.1630-1631).

7. Salerno, p.310, no.236; Loire 1990, pp.60-62, no.11, illustrated in colour p.9; Stone 1991b, p.231, no.219; Mahon 1991, pp.288-289, no.106; Turner 2017, p.626, no.332.

No.18

1. Dall’ Ill.mo Sig. Marchese Albergati si è ricevuto lir. 300 a buon conto delli due quadri fatti ad istanza del Principe Ludoviso, cioè la Primavera, e il Quadro della Pittura del Disegno – scudi 75.’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.337.

2. ‘Dal Sig. Governatore Ciavattini, della Pieve si è ricevuto N. 3 doppie di Parma per caparra di una mezza figura di una Cerere d’ accordo in ducatoni 55 – scudi 16.’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.320.

3. Inv. RCIN 902492; Mahon and Turner, p.41, no.71, pl.75.

4. An impression of the print, which is dated 1778 and states that the original drawing by Guercino was in Romero’s own collection, is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and is visible online at https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/28372 [accessed 18 May 2024].

5. Alberghini, p.168, fig.340. An image of the print is visible online at https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/158058/woman-holdingflower-her-raised-left-hand [accessed 18 May 2024]. The legend on the etching states that the original drawing by Guercino was at the time in the collection of the Venetian nobleman Principe Abbondio Rezzonico, senator in Rome.

6. See No.29 in the present catalogue.

No.19

1. Turner 2017, p.249.

2. David M. Stone in Bologna, Fondantico, Fondantico: TEFAF Maastricht 2019, 2019, pp.39-43, no.6.

3. Inv. D.1952.RW.1358; Turner and Plazzotta, p.75, no.46; Brooks, pp.34-35, no.7. The drawing is inscribed ‘34. Pr. Fo.’

4. Inv. WA2012.56; Turner and Plazzotta, pp.43-44, no.10. The drawing is inscribed ‘58. Pr. Fo.’

5. Turner and Plazzotta, p.43, under no.10. Several other Guercino drawings are known with similar inscriptions, such as ‘5 T. Fo.’, ‘9 No T. T. Fo.’, ‘35 S Fo.’ and ‘C 4 S. Flo.’, which are likewise indicative of a Casa Gennari and Bouverie provenance.

6. Mahon and Turner, p.xx.

7. Sale (‘The Property of the Rt. Hon. The Earl of Gainsborough, removed from Exton Park, Rutland’), London, Christie’s, 23 November 1971, lot 99 (bt. Colnaghi for 950 gns.); London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1972, no.30; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 25 June 1974, lot 48 (bt. Leavett for 700 gns.); Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 21 June 1978, lot 17 (sold for £1,000). Like the present sheet, the drawing is inscribed with a Casa Gennari inventory number ‘35 Pr: Fo’.

8. Inv. 1949-50; DeGrazia, unpaginated, no.15; Felton Gibbons, Catalogue of Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, 1977, Vol.I, p.109, no.318, Vol.II, fig.318. The attribution of this drawing to Guercino has been confirmed by David Stone.

9. Henry Reveley, Notices Illustrative of the Drawings and Sketches of some of the most distinguished Masters in all the principal Schools of Design, London, 1820 (posthumously published), p.77.

10. Turner and Plazzotta, p.25.

No.20

1. Inv. 521; Michael Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings: Bolognese and Emilian Schools, London, 1994, p.142, no.561 (as Guercino, and dated by Nicholas Turner to the 1640s).

2. Inv. RCIN 902471; Mahon and Turner, p.154, no.499 (as School of Guercino, not illustrated). This very large sheet, which is in poor condition, measures 206 x 603 mm., and is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/902471/an-old-man-and-three-boys [accessed 19 April 2024].

3. Alberghini, p.102, no.214.

4. Assuming the print by Denon reverses the composition of the original drawing, the pose of the older boy is very close to that of the youths in the present sheet.

5. Genesis 48: 1, 8-11, 13-14, 17-20. The Biblical episode was understood by early Christian theologians to represent the primacy of Christianity, as represented by Ephraim, over Judaism, as embodied by Manasseh. Similarly, the act of Jacob’s blessing was regarded as a precursor to the Christian rite of baptism, while the crossing of the patriarch’s hands over each other, into an X shape, was seen as symbolic of Christ – whose name in both Greek and Latin begins with the letter X – on the cross.

6. Salerno, p.145, no.66; Stone 1991b, p.87, no.65; Turner 2017, p.344, no.89. The painting was formerly in the collection of Sir Denis Mahon.

7. Brooks, p.11.

8. Turner and Plazzotta, pp.153-154, no.127 (where dated to the early 1640s); Massimo Pulini, ‘La testa di Trarivi’, in Pulini, Gozzi and Zavatta, p.148, fig.3. The drawing has been considered as a possible study for one of two half-length canvases of The Return of the Prodigal Son painted in 1642 by Guercino, both of which are now lost.

No.21

1. Inv. D.999-1900; Peter Ward-Jackson, Victoria and Albert Museum Catalogue: Italian Drawings, Volume Two, 17th-18th Century, London, 1980, p.56, no.716; Turner and Plazzotta, pp.178-179, no.150; Pasquale Stenta, ‘Una tavola “di non ordinaria bellezza”: Il San Bruno in Adorazione della Madonna col Bambino’, in Ghelfi and Morselli, p.55, fig.5.

2. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 23 March 1978, lot 160; Mahon 1991-1992], p.293, no.188; Anonymous (Prisco Bagni) sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 17 January 2017, lot 33 (unsold).

No.22

1. D. Stephen Pepper, The School of Bologna 1570-1730: Calvaert to Crespi, exhibition catalogue, London, Harari and Johns Ltd., 1987, p.38, no.19; Salerno, p.327, no.255; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 31 May 1989, lot 80; Stone 1991b, p.248, no.238; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 18 May 1995, lot 33 (unsold); Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 24 January 2003, lot 86 (unsold); Turner 2017, p.648, no.357.

2. ‘Dall’ Ill.mo Sig. Marchese Cospi si è ricevuto ducatoni N. 30 per la Testa del Profeta Isaia da esso mandato a Roma – scudi 38 e mezzo.’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.329; Ghelfi, pp.140-141, no.399. The Marchese Ferdinando Cospi (1606-1686) was the Medici agent in Bologna and formed a fine collection of natural history and archeological specimens, known as the ‘Museo Cospiano’. The painting may be same as the ‘Isaia in tela di testa’ by Guercino recorded in an inventory of the Barberini collection in Rome, drawn up between 1692 and 1704.

3. Written correspondence, 1 February 2020.

4. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2006, lot 67 (sold for $15,600).

5. Written correspondence, 1 February 2020.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 2 July 1991, lot 267 (sold for £9,900); ‘Supplement: Guercino Drawings in North American Collections. A Selective Checklist’, in Stone 1991a, p.224, no.184, illustrated p.233, pl.E; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), New York, Christie’s, 11 January 1994, lot 203 (unsold).

7. Inv. 1948-712; Jacob Bean, Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, 1966, p.34, no.42, pl.42; DeGrazia, unpaginated, no.20; Felton Gibbons, Catalogue of Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, 1977, Vol.I, pp.98-99, no.259, Vol.II, fig.259; Sue Welsh Reed and Richard Wallace, Italian Etchers of the Renaissance & Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Boston and elsewhere, 1989, pp.136-137, no.66. The drawing, which measures 123 x 161 mm., is on the reverse of part of draft of a letter signed by Guercino and dated Cento 1631, but has nevertheless been dated by scholars, on stylistic grounds, to the 1640s.

8. Inv. 2303; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.II, Vienna, 1994, p.1205, Inv.2303. The dimensions of the drawing are 190 x 260 mm.

No.23

1. The present sheet bears the collector’s mark of William S. Brough (d.1919), a Justice of the Peace who collected both prints and drawings, and may also have worked as a dealer in works on paper.

2. Salerno, p.310, no.236; Loire 1990, pp.60-62, no.11, illustrated in colour p.9; Stone 1991b, p.231, no.219; Turner 2017, p.626, no.332.

3. Written communication, 2008; Quoted in Paris, Nicolas Schwed, op.cit., under no.9.

4. Inv. RCIN 902728; Mahon and Turner, p.129, no.371, pl.320 (as Ascribed to Guercino); Nicholas Turner, ‘Disegni per i dipinti reggiani del Guercino nel più contesto della sua produzione grafica’, in Mazza and Turner, p.45, fig.7, p.51 (as Guercino). An image of the drawing is also visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/1/collection/902728/st-luke-painting-the-virgin-and-child [accessed 28 April 2024]. The drawing is tentatively related to a canvas of Saint Luke Painting the Virgin of 1652-1654, formerly in the collection of the Earls Spencer at Althorp and now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

5. Inv. I, 101a and I, 101c, respectively; Marciari, pp.97-103, nos.29-30.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s, 6 July 2011, lot 2 (unsold); Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s, 2 May 2012, lot 254 (sold for £7,500); Nicholas Turner, ‘Disegni per i dipinti reggiani del Guercino nel più ampio contesto della sua produzione grafica’, in Mazza and Turner, p.44, fig.6; Jean Goldman and Nicholas Schwed, Strokes of Genius: Italian Drawings from the Goldman Collection, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2014-2015, pp.148-151, no.51 (entry by David Stone and Jean Goldman).

No.24

1. Mahon and Turner, p.xvi.

2. Turner and Plazzotta, p.155.

3. London, Thos. Agnew and Sons Ltd., Old Master Drawings from Holkham, Collected by the 1st Earl of Leicester (1697-1759), exhibition catalogue, 1977, p.43, no.47 (not illustrated); Turner and Plazzotta, pp.172-173, no.143.

4. Mahon and Turner, pp.66-67, no.116, pl.121.

No.25

1. Inv. 71.1; Cummings, op.cit., pp.52-62; Salerno, p.340, no.270; Stone 1991b, p.266, no.257; Mahon 1992, op.cit., pp.289-290, no.49; Ghelfi, p.283, pl.20; Bissell, Derstine and Miller, op.cit., pp.108-111, no.34; Ghetti, pl.52; Massimo Pulini, ‘Racconta aversano’, in Pulini and Sgueglia, p.21, fig.8; Enrico Ghetti, ‘Originali e copie nella bottega del Guercino: Dalla copia all’originale du Guercino: da Madonna della Neve ad Assunzione della Vergine e ritorno’, in Pulini and Sgueglia, p.33, fig.2.

2. ‘Un’ Assonta con gli angeli & Apostoli in lontananza al sepolcro di B.V. tavola d’altare in Napoli’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.269. Two payments for the altarpiece, totaling about 437 scudi (equivalent to about 350 ducats) were received by Guercino in May and October of 1650.

3. Stone 1991a, p.134, under no.58.

4. Inv. 2016.32; Cummings, op.cit., pp.58-59, figs.3-4; Stone 1991a, op.cit., pp.131-134, no.58; Mahon 1991-1992, op.cit., pp.217-219, no.140; Massimo Pulini, ‘Sull’ultimo Guercino’, in Pulini 2003, recto illustrated p.64; Ghetti, op.cit., pl.56. The drawing was formerly in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Morton Harris in New York.

5. In un primo momento l’angelo a sinistra guardava in basso, come se stesse osservando le azioni degli apostoli sulla zona inferiore. Però, quasi sicuramente dopo la decisione di eliminare dalla composizione gli apostoli a figura intera, Guercino ridisegnò la testa e il corpo dell’angelo in modo che egli adesso guarda su verso la Vergine.’; Stone 1991b, p.266, under no.257.

6. Ghetti, pl.53; Pulini in Pulini and Sgueglia, p.21, fig.8; Ghetti in Pulini and Sgueglia, p.32, fig.1. The painting was originally in the Capuchin church of San Secondo Parmese, a town to the northwest of Parma.

7. No other payments for this painting are recorded in the Libro dei Conti, however, and the canvas seems to have remained in Guercino’s studio after his death. The Detroit painting is next recorded in the 1690s, when it was being considered for purchase by Prince Johann Adam Andreas of Liechtenstein, but must have left the Casa Gennari before 1719, as it is not mentioned in the inventory undertaken that year.

8. Ghetti, pl.54b; Pulini in Pulini and Sgueglia, p.21, figs.10-11; Ghetti in Pulini and Sgueglia, p.33, figs.4 and 6.

9. The identification of the painting in Aversa as Guercino’s 1661 altarpiece is due to the scholar Massimo Pulini, and a thorough account of the Aversa painting, with several images of the work, is given in Pulini and Sgueglia. An image of the painting, which has dimensions of 300 x 200 cm., is also visible online at https://news-art.it/news/la-pala-del-guercino-ad-aversa--massimo-pulini-spiega-com-e.htm [accessed 1 May 2024].

10. Pulini and Sgueglia, p.26, fig.26.

No.26

1. Mahon 1968a, pp.215-216, no.104, pl.104; Bagni 1986b, p.49, no.20; Salerno, p.399, no.338; Stone 1991b, p.333, no.324; Ghelfi, p.294, pl.31; Turner 2017, op.cit., p.761, no.486. It is thought that the rosary which the Virgin hands to Saint Teresa was painted by one of Guercino’s assistants, probably his nephew Benedetto Gennari the Younger.

2. ‘Dal Magnifico Messer Giovanni Zecchini Fattore delle Madri Scalze di santa Teresa qui di Bologna si è ricevuto lir. 800 moneta di Bologna, e questo è il pagamento del quadro della santa Teresa, con la Madonna, e s Giuseppe fatto alle medesime Madri; sono – scudi 200’; Malvasia, Vol.II, p.341; Ghelfi, p.191, no.563.

3. Jacob Bean, ‘Guercino as a Draughtsman’ [review], Master Drawings, Winter 1969, p.430.

4. Inv. WA2012.88 and WA2012.89; Mahon 1967, pp.55-56, nos.31-32, pls.33-34; London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Drawings by Guercino: A loan exhibition from the Collection of Denis Mahon, exhibition catalogue, 1968, nos.31-32; Mahon 1968-1969, p.161, no.172, fig.172; Mahon and Ekserdjian, pp.22-23, nos.35-36, one illustrated in colour p.xi; Turner and Plazzotta, pp.186-187, nos.158-159; Pulini 2005-2006, pp.138-141, nos.44-45.

5. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 15 June 1983, lot 56 (sold for £9,900); Mahon 1991-1992, pp.239-240, no.151; Turner 2017, op.cit., p.761, under no.486, fig.486.a.

6. Inv. SF III/78; Thiem, pp.412-413, p.417, no.26, pl.32a. An image of the drawing is also visible online at https://www.staatsgalerie.de/de/ sammlung-digital/studie-zum-mantel-madonna?term=guercino&filter%5Bmedium%5D%5B0%5D=Zeichnung&filter%5Bperson%5D%5B 0%5D=Guercino&start=24&context=collection&position=35 [accessed 24 April 2024].

7. Inv. SF III/32; Mahon 1968-1969, pp.161-162, no.173, fig.173. An image of the drawing is visible online at https://www.staatsgalerie.de/de/ sammlung-digital/studie-zum-gewand-des-hl-joseph-verso-gewandstudie?term=guercino&filter%5Bmedium%5D%5B0%5D=Zeichnung&s tart=84&context=collection&position=92 [accessed 24 April 2024].

No.27

1. Turner 2017, p.754, no.479. The painting, which is one of several canvases by Guercino recorded in a 1689 inventory of the Manganoni collection in Rimini, was with Moretti Fine Art in 2016.

2. Inv. WA1936.192; K. T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum; Volume II: Italian Schools, Oxford, 1956 [1972 ed.], p.448, no.871 (not illustrated); Mahon and Ekserdjian, p.45, no.XX; Pulini 2005-2006, pp.178-179, no.63.

3. Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 27 January 2016, lot 14 (unsold); Turner 2017, p.760, under no.485, fig.485.a, illustrated in colour p.235, fig.193. The drawing has been related to a painting on copper of The Holy Family that was commissioned from Guercino by Don Antonio Ruffo in 1660 and is now lost.

No.28

Cesare Gennari

1. The film and stage costume designer Anthony Powell (1935-2021) won three Academy Awards for costume design, in 1973, 1979 and 1981.

2. Inv. WA2012.100; Mahon 1967, pp.74-75, no.47, pls.50-51; Mahon and Ekserdjian, pp.30-31, no.47.

3. Inv. 306; Mario di Giampaolo, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia: Disegni emiliani, Milan, 1993, p.123, no.104.

4. Negro, Pirondini and Roio, p.218, fig.360.

5. Inv. 1948-690; Felton Gibbons, Catalogue of Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, 1977, Vol.I, p.91, no.235, Vol. II, fig.235; Negro, Pirondini and Roio, p.219, fig.364.

6. Massimo Pulini, ‘I disegni della bottega’, in Pulini, Gozzi and Zavatta, p.69, fig.5.

7. Inv. 12477F; Turner 2008-2009, pp.107-108, no.63, fig.63.

8. Inv. D.1952.RW.567; Bagni 1986a, p.65, no.38; Negro, Pirondini and Roio, p.216, fig.357; Brooks, p.5, fig.C; Alessandra Bigi Iotti, ‘“Figatelli degno di Guercino”. Giuseppe Maria Ficatelli e i disegni di paesaggio alla maniera di Guercino’, in Pulini, Gozzi and Zavatta, p.69, fig.5; Francesco Gatta, ‘Rappresentare la realtà: Guercino e il paesaggio’, in Bava and Spione, p.64, fig.1.

9. Negro, Pirondini and Roio, p.217, fig.358.

No.29

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

1. ‘Collection of several drawings after Barbieri da Cento known as Guercino, etched on copper, and presented to Thomas Jenkins, painter and member of the Academy of Saint Luke, out of respect and friendship from the architect, and his fellow academician Gio. Battista Piranesi.’

2. Wilton-Ely, op.cit., pp.1110-1111, nos.1016-1017.

3. Wilton-Ely, op.cit., p.1108, under no.G.IV.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alberghini

Alberto Alberghini, Guercino: Le Collezione di Stampe, Cento, 1991.

Bagni 1986a

Prisco Bagni, Il Guercino e il suo falsario: I disegni di paesaggio, Bologna, 1986.

Bagni 1986b

Prisco Bagni, Benedetto Gennari e la bottega del Guercino, Bologna, 1986.

Bagni 1988

Prisco Bagni, Il Guercino e il suoi incisori, Rome, 1988.

Bagni 1990

Prisco Bagni, Il Guercino e il suo falsario: I disegni di figura, Bologna, 1990.

Bagni 1994

Prisco Bagni, Gli affreschi del Guercino nel Duomo di Piacenza, Cittadella, 1994.

Bava and Spione

Annamaria Bava and Gelsomina Spione, ed., Guercino: Il mestiere del pittore, exhibition catalogue, Turin, Musei Reali – Sale Chiablese, 2024.

Benati

Daniele Benati, Guercino tra sacro e profano, exhibition catalogue, Piacenza, Palazzo Farnese, 2017.

Boccardo

Piero Boccardo, Genova e Guercino: Dipinti e Disegni delle Civiche Collezioni, exhibition catalogue, Genoa, Galleria di Palazzo Rosso, 1992.

Brooks

Julian Brooks, Guercino: Mind to Paper, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum and London, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, 2006-2007.

Buscaroli and Stone

Beatrice Buscaroli and David M. Stone, Il Gesto Trattenuto: Torna a Bologna un affresco del Guercino. La Madonna che offre’un bocciolo di rosa al Bambino, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, Casa Saraceni, 2006.

Carey

Juliet Carey, King David and the Wise Women: Guercino at Waddesdon, exhibition catalogue, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 2024.

Cerioni

Chiara Cerioni, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri detto il Guercino nelle Marche (1631-1662), unpublished MA thesis, Università di Bologna, 2021.

DeGrazia

Diane DeGrazia, Guercino Drawings in The Art Museum, Princeton University, exhibition catalogue, Princeton, Art Museum, 1969.

Faietti

Marzia Faietti, ‘Two New Guercino Drawings in Bologna’, Master Drawings, Spring 1993, pp.47-54.

Ghelfi

Barbara Ghelfi, Il libro dei conti del Guercino 1629-1666, Bologna, 1997.

Ghelfi and Morselli

Barbara Ghelfi and Raffaella Morselli, ed., Guercino nello studio, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale, 2023-2024.

Ghetti

Enrico Ghetti, ‘Da ‘Madonna della neve’ ad ‘Assunzione della Vergine’. Un’altra pala del Guercino per Sebastiano Fabri’, Paragone, September 2018, pp.51-67.

Helston and Henry

Michael Helston and Tom Henry, Guercino in Britain: Paintings from British Collections, exhibition catalogue, London, National Gallery, 1991.

Loire 1990

Stéphane Loire, Le Guerchin en France, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1990.

Loire 1991

Stéphane Loire, ‘Prints after Guercino’, Print Quarterly, June 1991.

Lynes

Mildred Akin Lynes, The Drawings of Guercino in the Dan Fellows Platt Collection, Englewood, New Jersey, unpublished M.A. thesis, New York University, 1940.

Mahon 1937a

Denis Mahon, ‘Notes on the Young Guercino I. – Cento and Bologna’, The Burlington Magazine, March 1937, pp.112-122.

Mahon 1937b

Denis Mahon, ‘Notes on the Young Guercino II. – Cento and Ferrara’, The Burlington Magazine, April 1937, pp.177-189.

Mahon 1967

Denis Mahon, I disegni del Guercino della collezione Mahon, Bologna, 1967.

Mahon 1968a

Denis Mahon, Il Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591-1666): Catalogo critico dei dipinti, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, Palazzo dell’ Archiginnasio, 1968, reprinted 1991 [2013 ed.].

Mahon 1968b

Denis Mahon, ‘Drawings by Guercino in the Casa Gennari’, Apollo, November 1968, pp.346-357.

Mahon 1968-1969

Denis Mahon, Il Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591-1666): Catalogo critico dei disegni, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, Palazzo dell’ Archiginnasio, 1968, 2nd corrected ed. 1969 [2013 ed.].

Mahon 1991

Sir Denis Mahon, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri il Guercino 1591-1666, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico and Cento, Pinacoteca Civica and Chiesa del Rosario, 1991.

Mahon 1991-1992

Sir Denis Mahon, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri il Guercino 1591-1666: Disegni, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico, 1991 [catalogue published 1992].

Mahon 1992

Sir Denis Mahon, Guercino: Master Painter of the Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1992.

Mahon and Ekserdjian

Denis Mahon and David Ekserdjian, Guercino Drawings From the Collections of Denis Mahon and the Ashmolean Museum, exhibition catalogue, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum and London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, 1986.

Mahon and Turner

Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989.

Mahon, Pulini and Sgarbi

Denis Mahon, Massimo Pulini and Vittorio Sgarbi, Guercino: Poesia e sentiment nella pittura del ‘600, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Palazzo Reale, 2003-2004.

Malvasia

Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: Vite de’ pittori Bolognesi, Bologna, 1678, edition supplemented and annotated by Giampietro Zanotti, Bologna, 1841.

Marangoni

Matteo Marangoni, Guercino, Milan, 1959.

Marciari

John Marciari, Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, New York, Morgan Library and Museum, 2019-2020.

Mazza and Turner

Angelo Mazza and Nicholas Turner, Guercino a Reggio Emilia: La genesi dell’invenzione, Reggio Emilia and Milan, 2011.

Negro, Pirondini and Roio

Emilio Negro, Massimo Pirondini and Nicosetta Roio, La scuola del Guercino, Modena, 2004.

Perlove

Shelley Karen Perlove, ‘Power and Religious Authority in Papal Ferrara: Cardinal Serra and Guercino’, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 1999, pp.19-30.

Pulini 2001

Massimo Pulini, Guercino: racconti di paese. Il paesaggio e la scena popolare nei luoghi e nell’epoca di Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, exhibition catalogue, Cento, Pinacoteca Civica, 2001.

Pulini 2003

Massimo Pulini, ed., Le collezioni ritrovate del Guercino, exhibition catalogue, Iglesias, Palazzo Bellavista, 2003.

Pulini 2005-2006

Massimo Pulini, ed., Nel segno di Guercino: Disegni dalle collezioni Mahon, Oxford e Cento / Guercino as Master Draughtsman: Drawings from the Mahon Collection, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and the City of Cento Pinacoteca Civica di Cento, exhibition catalogue, Cento, Pinacoteca Civica and London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2005-2006.

Pulini and Sgueglia

Massimo Pulini and Alessandra Sgueglia, ed., Guercino e l’Assunta di Aversa: un dipinto dimenticato dalla riscoperta al restauro, Aversa, 2020.

Pulini, Gozzi and Zavatta

Massimo Pulini, Fausto Gozzi and Giulio Zavatta, Delineavit. Guercino e il caso del Falsario, exhibition catalogue, Rimini, Museo della Città, 2018.

Roli

Renato Roli, G. F. Barbieri Guercino, Milan, 1972.

Rossoni and Beretti

Elena Rossoni and Luisa Berretti, ed., Il Guercino: Opere da quadrerie e collezioni del Seicento, exhibition catalogue, Bard, Forte di Bard, 2019.

Russell

Archibald G. B. Russell, Drawings by Guercino, London, 1923.

Salerno

Luigi Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988.

Stone 1991a

David M. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman. Works from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, Harvard University Art Museums, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, and Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1991.

Stone 1991b

David M. Stone, Guercino: Catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, 1991.

Thiem

Christel Thiem, ‘Unpublished Chalk Drawings by Guercino in the Collection of Schloss Fachsenfeld’, Master Drawings, Winter 1979, pp.401-416, pls.10-23.

Tokyo 2015

Shinsuke Watanabe, ed., Guercino, exhibition catalogue, Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, 2015.

Turner 1991

Nicholas Turner, ‘Guercino and his Engravers’ [book review], Print Quarterly, June 1991, pp.185-193.

Turner 1991-1992

Nicholas Turner, Guercino: Drawings from Windsor Castle, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Washington, National Gallery of Art, and New York, The Drawing Center, 1991-1992.

Turner 1994

Nicholas Turner, ‘John Bouverie as a collector of drawings’, The Burlington Magazine, February 1994, pp.90-99.

Turner 1996

Nicholas Turner, ‘Guercino and Pasqualini’s Working Proofs’, Print Quarterly, September 1996, pp.239-250.

Turner 2008-2009

Nicholas Turner, Guercino: la scuola, la maniera. I disegni agli Uffizi, exhibition catalogue, Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, and Bern, Kunstmuseum, 2008-2009.

Turner 2017

Nicholas Turner, The Paintings of Guercino: A Revised and Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rome, 2017.

Turner 2023

Nicholas Turner, ‘Guercino’s Grotesque Heads and Caricatures’, in Lucia Tantardini and Rebecca Norris, ed., Grotesque and Caricature: Leonardo to Bernini, Leiden, 2023.

Turner and Plazzotta

Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, exhibition catalogue, London, British Museum, 1991.

Van Tuyll

Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, Guercino (1591-1666): Drawings from Dutch Collections, exhibition catalogue, Haarlem, Teyler Museum, 1991.

Vodret and Gozzi

Rossella Vodret and Fausto Gozzi, Guercino (1591-1666): Capolavori da Cento e da Roma, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Palazzo Barberini, 2011-2012.

White

Veronica Maria White, ‘Guercino’s ‘Beggar holding a broken jug’: a drawing from the Gennari inventory of 1719’, The Burlington Magazine, March 2015, pp.169-171.

Back cover:

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino (1591-1666)

The Head and Torso of a Bearded Old Man No.9