Giovanni Francesco Barbieri GUERCINO

The 17th century Roman painter and biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri, who does not appear to have ever met Guercino and whose account of the artist is based on secondhand sources, nevertheless noted that he had seen ‘a number of drawings by his hand, of dances, festivals, and weddings, all decorously conducted in his Rocca di Cento, imitating the ideas, the demeanour and the appearance of these rustics, and of these foretane of the country, which were, in truth, curious and well-captured.’ The present sheet belongs with a group of genre studies, almost certainly drawn from life, which Guercino produced throughout his career. The result of the artist’s acute observation of the people he saw around him in his native town of Cento, these studies - of shopkeepers, peasants, labourers and others - may have been influenced by the example of the Carracci, who were among the first to recognize that peasants, village folk and similar mundane characters were interesting artistic subjects in their own right. Such genre subjects had been introduced into Italy by German and Netherlandish prints of the 16th century, which were particularly influential on Bolognese artists.

Often sympathetic yet sometimes verging on caricature, Guercino’s genre drawings were not generally intended as studies for paintings but were produced rather as visual exercises and for his own amusement. As one scholar has written, ‘For [Guercino], genre drawings were worth executing for their own sake and for their entertainment value. One cannot help but notice the sincere humanity and ‘down-home’ flavor of many of Guercino’s sketches....it is easy to understand why the artist left Rome in 1623 and returned to a ‘piccolo paese’ to continue his career. He seems genuinely to have enjoyed the provincial community where he grew up and learned to paint.’ As Julian Brooks has further noted, ‘Given that Guercino travelled little and spent so much of his career in provincial Cento, it is no surprise that his caricatures and genre scenes reflect local life rather than political subjects. A gentle, sensitive humor and humanity characterize his work in this field and indeed pervade his entire graphic output.’

Probably datable to the second half of the 1620s, the present sheet depicts the head and shoulders of the same figure in a larger pen and ink study of A Street Seller and his Customer, drawn by an artist from Guercino’s immediate circle, that is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The Windsor sheet shows more of the street vendor, and the full composition includes a barrel and a sack which is labelled mandole, or almonds.

The earliest known owner of this drawing was the English portrait painter, author and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1667-1745), whose collector’s mark is found at the lower right corner of the sheet. Richardson owned a remarkable collection of nearly five thousand drawings, mostly Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, assembled over a period of about fifty years. 

The present sheet was later part of a small collection of Old Master drawings assembled by the American model, socialite, designer and TV presenter Nina Griscom (1954-2020).