Antonio Grano

Colonel Gould Weston,
sold by his Executors, London, Christie's, 15 July 1958, in lot 125 (an album of drawings bound in red morocco), purchased by Ralph Holland 

Hinged in few places to the modern mount. The oval is incised with a stylus but part of the same sheet . White in the portrait oxidized. Overall in good condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

This intriguing sheet came from an album containing 89 drawings and engravings of different subjects by John Massey Wright, Henry Alken and other hands, sold at Christie's in 1958.  Ralph Holland rightly noted that the drawing closely resembles the series of artists' portraits and self-portraits collected by the early 18th-century Roman Nicola Pio for his projected illustrated biographical dictionary of artists.  A copy of Pio's manuscript, dated 1724, is in the Vatican Library, where it came as part of the Biblioteca Capponi.  Surprisingly, considering his activity, very little is known about him and the only contemporary to mention him is Mariette, who used Pio as a source for his Abecedario. 

Pio's information on the lives of the artists active in Rome in his lifetime is of considerable value, and he also endeavoured to collect drawings by these artists to complement the biographies.  A large group of portrait drawings connected with Pio's project was discovered by Anthony Clark in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm and published in Master Drawings.¹  These portraits from the Pio collection, which were acquired at the Crozat sale by Count Tessin, are very similar in conception to the Holland drawing, but are generally larger.  The life of Grano does not appear among Pio's biographies, so if this drawing was indeed intended to be part of the Vite, either it was not ultimately included, or the portrait is not of Grano.  The central oval portrait was, however at some stage engraved, in reverse, and an untitled impression of this print (fig. 1), which was most probably also in the album when Mr. Holland purchased it, is here sold together with the drawing.

Catherine Monbeig Goguel has described the style of the previously almost unknown draughtsman Antonio Grano in two informative articles, the first of which also includes a reconstructed corpus of more than one hundred drawings which she attributes to the artist.²  There are seventy in the Louvre, which is the largest holding of his works.  His drawings have borne many attributions, starting with the group of twenty-two which were catalogued by Walter Vitzthum under the name of Nicola Maria Rossi at the time of the 1967 exhibition of Neapolitan drawings at the Louvre.³  Although the majority seem to be compositional studies, executed in pen and ink and wash, often with a characteristic blue-mauve wash, the two putti here are very comparable to his style, and reminiscent of Solimena, one of the other names under which his drawings can be found. 

Catherine Monbeig Goguel has kindly confirmed the attribution to Grano, having seen the drawing in original.

1.  A. Clark, 'The Portraits of Artists Drawn for Nicola Pio,' Master Drawings, V, no. I, 1967, pp. 3 - 23, pls. 1 to 16
2.  C. Monbeig Goguel, 'Dans le sillage de Walter Vitzthum. De Naples à Palerme: L'identification du 'Pseudo Nicola Maria Rossi', Antonio Grano,' Le Dessin Napolitain, Actes du colloque international (6-8 March 2008), Rome 2010, pp. 153-168; see also: idem., 'Le génie de Palermo. Pour Antonio Grano,' Per Citti Siracusano. Studi sulla pittura del Settecento in Sicilia, Messina 2012, pp. 19-24
3.  C. Goguel and W. Vitzthum, Le dessin à Naples du XVI^e au XVIII^e siècle, exhib. cat. Paris, Musèe du Louvre, 1967, pp. 50-51