Giulio Pippi, called Giulio Romano

Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), London (L.2092);

Jan Pietersz. Zomer (1641-1724), Amsterdam (L.1511);

Richard Houlditch (d. 1760), London (L.2214);

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), London (L.2364);

Private collection, England, until 2013;

with W. M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York, Old Master and 19th-Century Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2014, no. 3,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

This gracefully composed scene by Giulio Romano, showing a young woman possibly looking towards her newborn child, her solicitous handmaiden standing beside her bed, seems to date from the artist’s first years in Mantua.

Giulio was the most talented artist in Raphael's Roman workshop. In 1524, the young Federico II, Gonzaga (1500-1540), Duke of Mantua, offered Giulio, who was just one year his senior, the opportunity to enter his service, marking the beginning of an extraordinary working relationship. They shared the same sophisticated passion both for the antique and for licentious subjects, and Giulio was exactly the right artistic personality to realize the Duke's desire to transform the city of Mantua, and introduce grandeur and elegance into the courtly life of the city.

Giulio became an artist-courtier, responsible for designing everything from the architecture of a palace to a decorative piece of silver. All these projects required numerous drawings, and Giulio had an extraordinarily fertile mind, typically jotting down rapidly his first ideas in drawings of enormous spontaneity. The Nixon drawing, quickly sketched but with some delicate touches of brown wash to indicate the shadows, seems not to relate to any extant works by the master. Adopting the same system used in the workshop of Raphael, Giulio seemed to favour disegno and invenzione over execution, often leaving the latter to his assistants.

The illustrious provenance of this drawing can be traced from the celebrated collection of Sir Peter Lely, dispersed after his death in 1681, through those of the Dutch dealer Jan Pietersz. Zomer and two major English collectors of the eighteenth century, Richard Houlditch and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Famous as both a portraitist and a history painter, Reynolds was a renowned collector of drawings, and a dominant artistic personality during the reign of King George III, becoming the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768.