Giovanni Antonio Guardi Vienna 1699 - 1760 Venice

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Description

Giovanni Antonio Guardi
the supper at emmaus
pen and brown ink and wash, over black chalk

Provenance

John B. Skippe (L.1529b);
By descent to Mrs. A.C. Rayner Wood;
By descent to Edward Holland-Martin;
Sale, London, Christie's, 21-21 November 1958, lot 109 (£900, to Mr. Eisermann).

Exhibited

London, Royal Academy of Art, Drawings by the Old Masters, 1953, cat. no. 191;
Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Mostra dei Guardi, 1965, drawing cat. no. 4

Literature

J. Byam Shaw, 'Unpublished Guardi Drawings', Art Quarterly, Winter 1953, p. 333, reproduced p. 331, fig. 1;
T. Pignatti, 'Un disegno di Antonio Guardi donato al Museo Correr', Bolletino dei Musei civici veneziani, 1957, pp. 26, 31;
T. Pignatti, Critica d'Arte, vol. XXIII, 1957, p. 403, reproduced p. 400;
K.T. Parker and J. Byam Shaw, Canaletto e Guardi, exhib. cat., Venice 1962, p. 49;
Antonio Morassi, Guardi, I Disegni, Venice 1975, p. 81, cat. no.10, reproduced fig. 9a;
P. Rosenberg, 'Un capolavoro di Gian Antonio Guardi', Arte Veneta, 1995, no. 47, pp. 63-67, reproduced, fig. 3.

Catalogue Note

James Byam Shaw was the first to recognize this as the work of Gian Antonio Guardi, when it was still in the collection of Mrs Rayner Wood, and it was sold as such in the Skippe sale. Morassi records two other drawings of this subject, one in a private collection in Zürich, which he identifies as a copy after Piazzetta, and one in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, similar in composition to the present work but less attractive in execution (Morassi, op. cit., cat. nos. 9 and 11, figs. 8 and 9b).

Both our drawing and the one in Frankfurt have been recently published by Pierre Rosenberg as preparatory studies for Gian Antonio Guardi's Supper at Emmaus, a masterpiece by the artist which he discovered in the collegiate church of Notre-Dame at Les Andelys. The painting, until then unattributed, has only been in that church since 1988; previously, it resided in a chapel of a silk-mill, founded in 1829 by local industrialist Jean-Baptiste Hamelin (see P. Rosenberg, op.cit., p. 64, fig. 1). In publishing these works, Pierre Rosenberg pointed out the strong influence of Piazzetta's Supper at Emmaus, now in the Museo Civico in Padua, on the much younger Gian Antonio Guardi (see P. Rosenberg, op.cit., p. 65, fig. 4). He proposes a dating of circa 1745 for Piazzetta's painting, and suggests that Guardi's interpretation of the same subject must have been executed very shortly thereafter.