Giovanni Francesco Barbieri GUERCINO

Datable to the decade of the 1640s, this drawing may be intended to represent Flora (or Primavera), the Roman goddess of spring. It does not, however, match the description or appearance of three of Guercino’s known paintings of the subject - executed in 1624, 1632 and 1642 - in which the figure of Flora is, in each case, accompanied by putti. A lost painting of Primavera, commissioned from the artist by Prince Niccolò Ludovisi and paid for on 3 June 1657, would appear, from its price, to have depicted a single full-length figure; however, the present sheet is unlikely to be related to that painting, since it would seem, on stylistic grounds, to be somewhat earlier in date than the 1650s. Guercino also treated the related subject of Ceres in a lost half-length painting of 1640-1641, which is recorded in the Libro dei Conti for 16 October 1640.

A stylistic and thematic connection may be made with a pen and ink drawing by Guercino of a Seated Woman Wearing a Wreath of Foliage on her Head, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, which has been tentatively related to a lost Flora painting of 1632.

An 18th century etching by Francesco Romero, after a lost drawing by or attributed to Guercino, depicts an analogous subject of a woman with a vase of flowers. Also similar in style and subject is another print, after a lost Guercino drawing of a woman holding a flower in her upraised left hand, by James (Giacomo) Nevey, a Scottish painter and engraver resident in Rome, which was one of a series of etchings after drawings by Guercino published by Giambattista Piranesi in 1764 as 'Raccolta di Alcuni Disegni del Barberi da Cento detto Il Guercino'.
 
The present sheet was part of the collection of drawings assembled by the 18th century British politician Sir Erasmus Philipps FRS, 5th Baronet (1699-1743), which remained in the possession of the Philipps family until the 1940s, when it was dispersed. The majority of the drawings - mostly Flemish, Dutch and Italian sheets of fine quality - are thought to have been part of a 17th century Italian collection and to have been acquired by Erasmus Philipps in Italy in the late 1730s or early 1740s.