Giovanni Battista Beinaschi

Dr. Carl Robert Rudolf (1884-1974), London (L.2811b),

his sale, London, Sotheby's, 19 May 1977, lot 78

Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, et al., ritorno al barocco da caravaggio a vanvitelli, 2009-10, pp. 98-99, cat. no. 3.62 (entry by Rossana Muzii)

A rare example of a compositional drawing by Beinaschi in pen and ink and wash, this large and impressive sheet depicts the biblical narrative from the book of Samuel (1 Samuel 16-23) when David takes the harp and plays it, calming King Saul and releasing the evil spirits from him. The majority of the artist's surviving drawings are executed in black chalk heightened with white chalk, often on blue paper.

The drawing is filled with dramatic tension, cleverly created by the fury of gestures and expressions and from the swirling movement of the clothes and twisting of the figures. It is an elaborate and complex composition which has thus far not been connected to any of the artist’s known commissions. 

Rossana Muzii, in her entry for this drawing in the Naples exhibition catalogue (see Exhibited) points out that in the census of the inventories of Neapolitan collections by Gérard Labrot, there is a work depicting King David tuning the harp, recorded in the Astuto collection.¹  Muzii also refers to a full-length, foreshortened drawing with King David playing the harp, housed in Copenhagen.²

1. G. Labrot, Neapolitan Palaces, Naples, 1993, p. 480
2. Naples, exhib.cat., op.cit., 2009-2010, p. 98