Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)

Exhibited by Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Material Pen and brown ink and brown wash

Dimensions 40.1 x 26.7 cm.

Status Vetted

About the Work

Only recently rediscovered in a French private collection, this important drawing can be related to two major altarpiece commissions of the same subject, undertaken by Guercino in the late 1630s and early 1640s. The present sheet is most closely related to the large altarpiece of The Virgin and Child Presenting Rosaries to Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena, 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 there.

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, painted for the Compagnia del Rosario in Turin and placed in the church of San Domenico there in 1637. 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.

A later copy of the present sheet by the 18th century Florentine engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815), in the Albertina in Vienna, is part of a group of around fifteen copies of Guercino drawings by Bartolozzi in that collection.

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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)
Private collection, France.