GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO (1727-1804)

STUDY OF A MAN'S HEAD
Bears collector's stamp l.l. (L.2604a)
Red chalk, heightened with white, on blue paper
20.5 x 13.5 cm 
PROVENANCE:
William Bateson (1861-1926), London (Lugt 2604a);
His sale, London, Sotheby's, 23-24.04.1929, lot 109 (as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo);
Where acquired by Savile Gallery, London (for £22);
Possibly Stephen Higgins, Paris (by 1951) [cf. Knox, p.226, M.142];
Karl Eric Maison, London (by 1956);
Private Collection, Wiltshire
 
 
LITERATURE:
G. Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: A Study & Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, Oxford (1980), p.212, no. M.20 (as Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo); and possibly M.142 (based on the description, per Knox)
 
 
 
This sheet may be grouped with a number of Giovanni Domenico’s chalk head studies that include the Head of a Boy in the Rhode
Island School of Design Museum, Providence (inv. 73.078; D.J. Johnson, Old Master Drawings from the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1983, no. 23, ill.) and the Head of an Old Man in the Achenbach Foundation, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (inv. 1961.38; E. F. Weeks, The Tiepolos: Painters to Princes and Prelates, 1978, no. 62, ill.).
 
 
Following his father’s design practice, the artist produced these portrait drawings throughout his career - at least through the
1770s – for a variety of purposes: in preparation for paintings, as exercises to be kept in the workshop as a repertoire of motifs to be studied and copied, or as finished works of art for the market. 
A further drawing of this type that was once owned by William Bateson - one of the foremost collectors of both Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo's drawings from the early 20th century - was thought when sold in 1929 to perhaps depict the same model as the present sheet, based on the physiognomy. Another head study from Bateson's collection can now be found in the Morgan Library, New York. The curator's notes for that sheet state ' Although traditionally given to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (and identified as the head of a boy), this sheet seems more likely to depict a young woman and is surely by the young Domenico.'