Pietro Antonio Novelli

This highly finished watercolour, in excellent condition, is most probably a modello for a painting, but is equally pleasing as a complete work of art, boldly signed and dated, lower left. Grand in scale, it sensitively portrays its poignant subject matter using soft colours and tones. Whilst it does not appear to be directly connected with any of the artist’s surviving paintings, Novelli’s many and varied drawings are generally studies for his commissioned works, which included altar pieces, paintings, book illustrations, prints and frontispieces.

Novelli, a pupil of Jacopo Amigoni, became a prolific draughtsman and printmaker and also had an extremely successful career as a decorative painter in Venice and the surrounding terra ferma. We glean much of Novelli’s life and career from the artist’s own memoirs, published posthumously in Padua in 1834. Many examples of Novelli’s exuberant and colourful works are today in the Museo Correr in Venice, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York.