Gaetano Gandolfi San Matteo della Decima near Bologna 1734 - 1802 Bologna

Bears unidentified collector's mark, verso

This sheet of studies, and other more or less elaborate and elegantly composed capricci of heads, are a type of drawing which must have been very sought after by collectors and which Gandolfi must have made with the intention of selling as finished works of art.  Donatella Biagi Maino has connected some of these studies to a group of engravings executed by Luigi Tadolini after Gaetano's drawings (see Donatella Biagi Maino, 'Gaetano Gandolfi's capricci of heads: drawings and engravings', The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXXVI, no.1095 (June 1994), pp. 375-79).  Gaetano was already making such studies of heads in the 1770s and he continued to produce them for the rest of the century, followed by his son Mauro.