SOFA Summer Catalogue 2017 V3.qxp 06/06/2017 10:53 Page 66
18 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727–1804 Venice Two Monkeys on a Rock Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. Signed Dom.o Tiepolo f. in brown ink at the lower right. 284 x 201 mm. (11 1/ 8 x 7 7/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Trinity Fine Art, London and Milan; Flavia Ormond, London; Private collection. LITERATURE: Clifford S. Ackley, ‘Master drawings from the collection of Horace Wood Brock’, The Magazine Antiques, February 2009, p.55, illustrated p.55, fig.7; Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.156, no.108, illustrated p.110. EXHIBITED: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.108. James Byam Shaw has noted of the younger Tiepolo’s drawings of animals that, ‘if most of these drawings belong to the latter part of Domenico Tiepolo’s career, it is also evident that his interest in drawing animals goes back a good deal further in date...twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier perhaps; and that he collected from one source or another, at that time, certain animal patterns that he kept by him, as he kept other models, for the rest of his life. From one source or another: for the truth is that relatively few of these animals, certainly not the more exotic ones, were observed from life.’1 Indeed, a number of studies of animals by Domenico seem to have been based on prints by other artists, notably Johann Elias Ridinger and Stefano della Bella, as well as paintings and frescoes by his father Giambattista. As Byam Shaw has written, ‘Many of the individual drawings of animals, from whatever source...must have remained in Domenico’s portfolios, to be used again and again to the end of his career...It is perhaps a little disappointing, or at least disconcerting to our present ideas of artistic proprieties, to find that so few of the animals were drawn from life...But experience of Domenico’s methods does not encourage illusions in this respect; and generally it was not his way to trouble himself with a living model if a pictorial one, his own or someone else’s, was at hand.’2 The sitting monkey in this drawing, who seems to be catching a flea, appears in a number of other works by Domenico Tiepolo. It can be found at the extreme left of a drawing of eight monkeys in a landscape, in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York3, as well as a drawing of Dancing Bears and Monkeys on a Country Road, at one time in the Beurdeley and Lehman collections4, and a related drawing of a similar subject formerly in the collection of Alfred Strolin in Paris5. A similar, though not identical, monkey is found, in reverse, in A Procession with a Camel and Monkeys, which, like the ex-Beurdeley and Lehman sheet, was part of the group of genre drawings known as the ‘Scenes of Contemporary Life’, which are datable to c.17916. The same monkey also appears, in reverse, in Giambattista Tiepolo’s etching of A Young Shepherdess and Old Man with a Monkey7, one of the series of prints known as the Scherzi di fantasia. Monkeys are found in a handful of other drawings by Domenico, notably a sheet of studies of animals in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon8 and a drawing of a Monkey Swinging on a Parapet, and Two Monkey Skeletons, in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York9, as well as two drawings from the late Punchinello series; in the British Museum in London10 and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa11. A drawing of a seated camel and a monkey holding a dead bird was formerly in the collections of Thomas Fine Howard and William S. Paley in New York12, while a drawing of Four Bears and a Monkey in a Landscape is today in a private collection13.