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. 

Often sympathetic, Guercino’s genre drawings were not generally intended as studies for paintings but were produced rather as visual exercises and for his own pleasure. 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.’

David Stone has suggested that the present sheet may be approximately dated to sometime between the late 1630s and the mid-1640s. Probably drawn from life, this drawing is typical of Guercino’s character studies and his interest in physiognomy. The emphasis here is on the man’s hair and face, with the application of numerous small dots of ink to capture the subject’s unshaven appearance. Although Guercino’s use of a stipple and line technique was first developed in drawings intended to be engraved by his associate, the printmaker Giovanni Battista Pasqualini, the artist continued to work in this so-called ‘gravure’ style in drawings of the late 1630s and 1640s, such as the present sheet, that are unconnected with prints.

Among stylistically comparable drawings is a study of Cato of Utica Saying Farewell to his Son, formerly in the collection of Sir Denis Mahon and now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which is a study for a painting of the subject of 1637, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. Indeed, the physiognomy of the man in this drawing is close to that of one of the onlookers at the extreme right edge of the Marseille painting. 

Also comparable to the present sheet are two pen drawings - a Head of a Girl Wearing a Hat and a Necklace and A Franciscan Saint Looking Up - in the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, as well as a drawing of the head of a woman in the Goldman collection in Chicago, which has been regarded as a study for a now-lost painting of The Offering of Abigail of 1636.