GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, CALLED IL GUERCINO | An extensive landscape with a fortified castle and buildings, figures in the foreground

The Earl of Gainsborough (from a 19^th Century label on the backing of the frame: Drawing/by/Guercino 1591-1666/View of. the Castle St.Angelo/From the Earl of Gainsborough Coll.)

Hinged at the top. Some very slight discolouration to the left edge, there are to the left and right margins indications of an original brown framing line. A few pin point spots, overall fresh and in good condition. Sold in a modern painted black and gold and wooden frame.
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This extensive landscape with fortified buildings and a castle, animated by figures in the foreground and strongly lit throughout, is a fine example of Guercino’s talent for creating elaborate imagery views of this type.  Though they were never central to his artistic production, Guercino made landscape drawings for much of his artistic career, and a good number of these drawings have survived, constituting a distinctive section of his oeuvre.  These drawings were made for their own sake, not in relation to any painting or print, and although Guercino was surely extremely busy with his numerous commissions and it is hard to imagine he had much time to devote to these sophisticated views, as Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner observed, ‘the making of such images satisfied a deeper need.’¹  The imaginative process required in inventing finished scenes of this type, which are in many ways more like paintings than drawings in terms of their function and composition, is totally different from the experimental genesis of Guercino’s figure studies, yet just as demanding of the artist’s fecund imagination.  Here, Guercino has drawn a fully finished view in pen and brown ink, his favourite media for such drawings.  The light is skilfully suggested, creating and diversifying the space within the scene and defining a variety of different planes.  The strong contrasts, especially in the darker buildings, are offset by the wide space in the foreground, where the white of the paper is brilliantly exploited by Guercino with his extraordinary sense of light.  The different planes and various elements are fused into a very harmonious composition, which seems to be drawn without any hesitation. 

These grand landscape drawings by Guercino are difficult to date, as they manifest an attachment to the countryside, and to the natural world, that remained with the artist throughout his life.  One possible clue is, though, provided by one of the outstanding group of landscape drawings by Guercino in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, the Landscape with a winding road leading up to the gate of a town, a drawing that is very similar to the present work in terms of the use of the media and the approach to light and shade, which bears a dating of 1635 on the verso.² 

The mention, on the 19^th-century label on the back of the frame, that this drawing comes from the collection of the Earl of Gainsborough raises the possibility that although it does not bear his mark, the drawing may have been part of the very important group of Guercino’s drawings brought to England in the 18^th century by John Bouverie (c. 1722-1750), whose collection is often associated with the very best of Guercino’s drawings.  On two different visits to Italy during the 1740s, Bouverie acquired substantial numbers of drawings by Guercino, including an entire album purchased from the Abbé Bonducci in Florence, drawings which originated directly from the Gennari family, who had in turn acquired them from Guercino himself.

We are most grateful to Nicolas Turner for confirming the attribution from a digital image.

^1.  D. Mahon and N. Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge 1989, p. 101
^2. Ibid., p. 107, no. 247, reproduced fig. 231