GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO (Venice 1696-1770 Madrid)

According to a handwritten note by Dan Fellows Platt on the verso of the sheet, this drawing once belonged to the Lodnon dealers E. Parsons and Sons, which between the end of the 19th Century and the first decades of the 20th, acquired at auction several albums of drawings by Tiepolo which had belonged to Edward Cheney. Some of these albums were sold intact, while others were broken up and the drawings sold separately (G. Knox, Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1960, pp. 3-9). Among Parsons’ most avid buyers after World War I, Platt would later bequeath the larger part of his graphic collection to the Princeton Art Museum. This drawing of a figure seen di sotto in sù recalls a sheet of similar subject, also presumably from the Cheney albums, now in Princeton (inv. x1948-831; see C. Whistler in Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, 2014, no. 80, ill.). Studies of individual figures abstractly floating on the blank sheet of paper are recurrent in Tiepolo’s drawings, and he
would often employ these decorative characters to fill his expansive ceiling decorations.