Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
Venice 1727 - 1804
28
A Scene from ‘Everyday Life’: Two Ladies with their Cavaliers Beside a Fountain
Pen and brown ink and wash, within brown ink framing lines. Signed: Dom o Tiepolo f.
375 x 506 mm (14 3 /4 x 19 7 /8 in.)
Provenance: S. H. Weathrall King, part of a group of
Giandomenico drawings sold, Sotheby’s, London, 11
November 1965, lot 25, £4,000 to Regina Shoolman
Slatkin; Vincent Price; Mrs Douglas Williams.
Exhibited: New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
and The Morgan Library, Drawings from New York Collections,
The Eighteenth Century, 1979, cat.266.
Literature: D. Succi, ‘Ironia e delizia comica’, I Tiepolo.
Virtuosismo e ironia, exhib. cat. Mirano, Barchessa
-Villa, XXV, no.46; G. Pavanello, ‘Tutta la vita dal
principio alla fine è una comica assurdità’, Tiepolo:
ironia e comica, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 2004, p.41;
A. Gealt and G. Knox, Giandomenico Tiepolo: Scene
di vita quotidiana a Venezia terraferma, Venice 2005,
pp.41-41, no.45.
This magnificent sheet belongs to Giandomenico’s elegant
depictions of scenes from contemporary Venetian
life, his masterpieces of invention, style and draughtsmanship
which date from the early 1790s. The series is
a unique evocation of Venetian society and the present
example belongs specifically to the group known as
la villeggiatura, variations on the theme of fashionable
excursions in and around Venice. Here, Giandomenico
presents his figures, decoratively dressed, enjoying
the gardens of a simulacrum of Palladio’s Villa
Rotunda. With its garden setting depicting a group of
two women and two men by a sculpture, this work
is described as having a pendant in another drawing
from the same series entitled In front of the Statue of
Acteon; dogs again form part of the company and the
figures are dressed in a very similar way, particularly
the women with their matching hats. The architecture
and the straight lines of the box hedges forming an enfilade
make the setting more formal in the present work
but the brutal fight depicted in the sculpture and the
dog with its head in the fountain add characteristically
earthy touches. Giandomenico very often repeats motifs
in his drawings and from the present drawing, the
figure of the lady seated on the left, turned in profile
with one arm raised, reappears in an example from the
Divertimenti Veneziani entitled La bottega del caffe and
in another known as Conversazione con pappagalli,
while the two statues, the Hercules and Antaeus and the
section visible of a sculpture of a standing draped figure
on the left hand side both recur in other sheets 1 ; the
villa itself can be seen again in a slightly more vertical
manner in one of the grand drawings from the important
series of Biblical drawings, dating from 1786-1790,
Jesus Rebukes the Unclean Spirit, a sheet which is now
in the Louvre 2 .
Giandomenico was in his mid sixties when he made
this drawing and the whole extraordinary series to
which it belongs. The Biblical series had formed his
first huge undertaking after retiring from life as a painter
of grand decorative projects. Where the Biblical
drawings are all vertical in format, the Scenes from
Contemporary Life are all horizontal but on similarly
large sheets of fine paper, drawn within framing lines.
A third important series of such highly finished, narrative
drawings, on the life of Pulcinella, entitled Divertimento
per li regazzi, belongs to the next decade. There
is no indication that the Contemporary Life drawings
were commissioned, nor that they were intended
to be published as engravings and we do not know
when and by whom they were first dispersed; only that
they began to appear in sales towards the end of the
19 th century, the first of which was the sale of parts
of the collection of Louis Auguste, baron de Schwiter
in 1883. A small number of the scenes bear some
relation to the frescoes painted by Giandomenico in
the Villa Tiepolo at Zianigo, to where Giandomenico
had moved more permanently in 1785 and this project
may have been the inspiration for the series. There are
thirteen surviving sheets in the section devoted to La
Villeggiatura, which rather than depicting any kind of
rural pursuits such as hunting or harvesting, focus on
the pleasures of high society, walking and conversing
in villas and gardens, a theme which Giandomenico
made very much his own. Unlike some scenes from
the Contemporary Life series, there is no element of
caricature or exaggeration in the Villeggiatura drawings,
the figures are elegant, modish and, more often
than not, youthful.
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