Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Mogliano Veneto 1720-1778 Venice)

Piranesi’s exceptional talent at capturing instant tranches de vie is expressed in this study depicting a seated man wearing a hat. A record of the artist’s sensibility for real-life subjects, the drawing can be listed among Piranesi’s earliest separate figure drawings, datable to the late 1740s. A similar study in red chalk was sold at Christie’s, New York, 31 January 2013, lot 77, and another is in The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (inv. 1983.38). In general, Piranesi did not transpose images from his numerous figure drawings directly into his etchings, but this one might have served that purpose, since it appears incised with a stylus along the contours.

We are grateful to Andrew Robison for his assistance in cataloguing this drawing and for confirming the attribution.