Giovanni Francesco Barbieri GUERCINO

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 as highlights, which serves to accentuate 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…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.’

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 pen and ink drawings such as a study of A Woman in Profile to the Left in the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, a Seated Woman in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, 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 Francisco, 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.’

Other comparable pen drawings include a study of a young man in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice 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 Jersey.