Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino

From an album of drawings and prints assembled around the middle of the 19th century by Susan Neill,
thence by descent to the present owners 

Unframed. The corners cut and the sheet laid down. Was previously also laid down in an album of blue paper. There are three small worm holes in the upper left quarter and some light foxing overall. The ink is a little sunk in parts but the image is still strong.
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The young and beautiful Esther was chosen by the Persian King Ahasuerus to be his new Queen, without realizing that she was Jewish.  When his chief minister, Haman, ordered the massacre of all Jews in the Persian Empire, Esther defied protocol and entered the King's presence without his summons to plead with him on behalf of her people.  As Ahasuerus raised his golden sceptre to signify that he would receive her, the Queen fainted with relief, as we see in the present drawing.

The drawing is one of a number made by Guercino in preparation for his painting of the subject (fig. 1) which was commissioned by Cardinal Lorenzo Magliotti, Bishop of Ferrara in 1637, before passing to Pope Urban VIII.¹  Six other sheets have been connected to the painting:  in the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, Christ Church, Oxford, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Arkansas Arts Center, one formerly in the collection of Curtis O. Baer and another in a private collection.²  The series reveals Guercino's meticulous formulation of the composition and the relationships between the central figures, each of them serving a slightly different purpose and drawn with a different approach. 

Nicolas Turner, who has kindly confirmed the attribution, noted how comparable the Windsor sheet (now thought by him to be autograph) is in style to the present sheet, albeit more heavily worked.  Both are executed in fine pen lines, with close hatching and freer, calligraphic lines as well as Guercino's distinctive technique of lines and dots to articulate Esther's face.  Our drawing must, however, date from a later stage in the creative process, as the positioning of the figures, with the Queen swooning forwards (towards Ahasuerus) and the attendant to the left supporting her with her hand across her chest, is closer to that of the finished painting.          

1. Now in The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, see D. M. Stone, Guercino Master Draftsman, exhib. cat., Harvard 1991, pp. 96-101, fig. 40a
2. Ibid.