Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino

As a Bolognese artist, active in the first half of the 17th century, it comes as little surprise that Guercino wholeheartedly embraced the concept of caricatura, as he finely demonstrates in the present work, an artistic tradition which undoubtedly permeated down to him from the highly influential Carracci studio, which was itself widely recognized as having been the creative melting pot from which caricature in Western art originated, in the mid 1580s.

The present drawing, which depicts a crowd of peasants, seen head and shoulders, some in profile to the left with others face on, is a characteristic example of Guercino's economical, yet highly effective use of the pen and wash medium. He has chosen to portray the faces of those standing in the foreground, in their varying degrees of age and physical stature, whilst indicating the presence of the remaining crowd through an assortment of cursory strokes, which cleverly allude to the heads of both the balding men and veiled woman seen in the foreground.

While establishing a chronology for Guercino's caricature drawings is rather difficult, it is more straightforward to contextualize them through the presence of comparable works. In this instance there are two drawings in particular that are closely comparable, both in their subject matter and execution. The first of these is a caricature drawing depicting Five male heads in a row,¹ in the Royal Collection at Windsor, while a second drawing, showing Peasants in a crowd, in profile to the right, was offered in these rooms in 2017.²

1. D. Mahon and N. Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge 1989, p. 121, no. 342, reproduced fig. 307

2. Sale, New York, Sotheby's, 25 January 2017, lot 38