Gaetano Gandolfi

The drawing is overall in good condition and the media is fresh. There are very small losses to the end of the right edge and two tiny holes near the right margin and three at the top center. Very slight buckling of the paper towards the top right margin and below the mid section of the sheet some light traces of lines where the paper was hung up to dry. The drawing is sold mounted and in a modern gilded frame.
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A fully developed compositional study in red chalk, rare in Gaetano's corpus of drawings, the present sheet does not seem to be preparatory for any known painted work.  The degree of finish suggests that it may have served as a presentation drawing, or been executed as a work of art in his own right.  The artist's finished studies in red chalk of this type seem generally to date from the 1770s; see for instance the large compositional study of The Marriage at Cana, in the National Gallery of Canada, executed in the same media as the present sheet, which is a preparatory study for Gaetano's painting, signed and dated 1775, in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna.¹  Mimi Cazort rightly observed that the latter was 'a pivotal work, as it marked the end of Gaetano's flirtation with the crowded compositions and mannered gestures of the French Rococo.' 
The present sheet, with its well balanced composition, is already hinting toward neoclassicism, and could date from the 1780s.

¹ Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, inv. no. 5582; M. Cazort, Bella Pittura, The Art of the Gandolfi, exhib. cat., Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 1993, p. 89, no. 75, reproduced