Giovanni Domenico TIEPOLO

A very similar putto carrying a laurel wreath or crown is found in a drawing that was once part of an album that belonged to the Earls Beauchamp, while several other drawings from the same album also depict flying putti holding martyr’s crowns. The Beauchamp album, which contained more than 160 drawings by Domenico Tiepolo, including numerous drawings of cupids, is known to have been sold during the artist’s lifetime, since the title page bore the bookplate of Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-1797), who died when Domenico was seventy years sold and still active. The album was broken up and the drawings dispersed at auction in London in 1965. A number of other drawings by Domenico incorporating putti with laurel crowns, which were not part of the Walpole/Beauchamp album, are also known.

Drawings of cupids and putti by Domenico Tiepolo are today to be found in numerous museum collections, including the Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Czartorsyki collection at the National Museum in Cracow, the Uffizi in Florence, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Louvre in Paris, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, among many others. As Felton Gibbons noted of these drawings, they ‘all exhibit the same aerated touch with which this rococo artist gave lightness and humor to his designs in this series. Washes are dashed on in translucent thinness, contours waver tremulously to suggest constant childish motion, and unformed pudgy bodies are articulated only by spots or curlicues of ink at nodal points of their anatomies. This airborne cycle was an ideal undertaking for the last artist of the great Venetian tradition.’