Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

This spirited, rapidly drawn study must surely have been made as a specific portrait. George Knox, who confirmed the attribution to Giambattista Tiepolo, suggested it might have been made in connection with a major, but apparently unrealised, project to paint a large group portrait of a family, a composition that we know only from three multi-figured studies, two of them in New York (in the Tobey Collection and the Morgan) and one in Florence (at the Fondazione Horne).¹ The subject of this painting has been tentatively identified as the Pisani family, in whose villa at Strà Tiepolo executed (in 1761-2) a series of allegorical ceiling frescoes that include likenesses of several family members. The linearity and the rather minimal, yet highly effective, drawing style seen here are consistent with Tiepolo's works from this late moment in his career, and with the style of the three more elaborate drawings to which this sheet very likely relates.  

1. See L. Wolk-Simon and C.C. Bambach, An Italian Journey. Drawings from the Tobey Collection: Correggio to Tiepolo, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010, pp. 208-10, cat. 65