Giovanni Francesco Barbieri GUERCINO

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 somewhat similar in pose to the figure of Saint Peter in Guercino’s easel painting of Saint Peter Weeping Before the Virgin of 1647 in the Louvre. 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.’ 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 Castle. 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, are also comparable, in their use of red and black chalk, to the present sheet. These are a Christ Crowned with Thorns and a Mocking of Christ, both in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, and a third Ecce Homo drawing in the Goldman collection in Chicago.

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.