Sunday, July 31, 2016

Self-portraits by Jonathan Richardson Senior, 18th century

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 73
1738
etching
British Museum

These Features must in Silent Darkness Rot
No Reason why my Heart should be Forgot

Jonathan Richardson Senior etched this couplet onto the plate of the self-portrait above, made in 1738 when he was 73. Toward the end of his life, Richardson clearly became preoccupied with recording his own heavy serious face. He must have wished for posterity to look at it, but what did he expect posterity to find there?

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 73
1738
etching
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 63
1728
drawing on paper
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 68
1733
drawing on paper
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 69
1734
drawing on vellum
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 70
1735
drawing on vellum
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 68
1733
drawing on paper
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait, based on a painting of 1692 (age 25)
1734-35
drawing on vellum
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 40 (in 1707)
1730s
drawing on vellum
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait at age 75
ca. 1740
drawing on paper
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait
18th century
drawing on paper
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait
18th century
drawing on paper
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait
ca. 1730-35
drawing on paper
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Jonathan Richardson Senior
Self-portrait
18th century
drawing on vellum
British Museum

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Jonathan Richardson Senior's Cabinet of Drawings in Europe III

Peter Paul Rubens
Portrait of Isabella Brant (the artist's first wife)
1621-22
drawing
British Museum

This is the final group of European master drawings acquired by the fashionable Georgian portrait-painter Jonathan Richardson Senior (1667-1745) and now preserved at the British Museum. Scholars and historians raise united voices praising the self-evident perception of this long-ago connoisseur.  

Guercino
St Francis
17th century
drawing
British Museum

Antonio Maria Zanetti
Studies of women's heads
1721
drawing
British Museum

Giacinto Brandi
Figure of a saint
17th century
drawing
British Museum 

Salvator Rosa
Tamar and Judah
ca. 1660-65
drawing
British Museum

Salvator Rosa
Figure study
ca. 1660-65
drawing
British Museum

Salvator Rosa
Figure study
mid 17th century
drawing
British Museum

Salvator Rosa
Figure study
1650s
drawing
British Museum

circle of Lodovico Carracci
Ecclesiastics and crippled man
late 16th-early 17th century
drawing
British Museum

Pier Francesco Mola
Bearded man from above
mid 17th century
drawing
British Museum

Parmigianino
Studies for an allegorical figure of Fortitude carrying a column
early 16th century
drawing
British Museum

Pordenone
Figure study for the Lamentation
ca. 1522
drawing
British Museum

Federico Zuccaro
Praying Monk
16th century
drawing
British Museum

Carlo Maratta
Figure carrying torches
17th century
drawing
British Museum

I am grateful to the British Museum for making these images available.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Jonathan Richardson Senior's Cabinet of Drawings in Europe II

attributed to Pieter de Witte or to Gerrit van Battum
Landscape
ca. 1660
drawing
British Museum

The portrait painter, writer, and art collector Jonathan Richardson Senior (1667-1745) left a manuscript note to accompany the landscape above in the days when he owned it. "For this drawing I have more than once been offered 25 guineas, but refused it, chiefly because I would not suffer so capital a drawing to go out of my collection in my lifetime."  During Richardson's lifetime this work was attributed to Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610), an influential German artist working in Rome at the beginning of the 17th century. It is now believed to have been created about fifty years after Elsheimer's death by one or another of his conscientious imitators. Curators at the British Museum discuss the paradox of a work of art that remains as beautiful as it ever was, but that greatly lost prestige after being reassigned.

More of the idiosyncratic lovelies from the Richardson collection appear below.

Claude Lorrain
Moses and the Burning Bush
1660
drawing
British Museum

François Boucher
Young woman seen from behind
18th century
drawing
British Museum

Peter Oliver
Five heads
17th century
drawing
British Museum

Paul Bril
Forum of Trajan, Rome
1603
drawing
British Museum

Agostino Tassi
Stage set
17th century
drawing
British Museum

Giovanni Andrea Mastelletta
Scene of Earthquake 
17th century
drawing
British Museum

Vincenzo Mariotti
Chapel of St Ignatius in the Church of the Gesù, Rome
1697
engraving
British Museum

Pier Francesco Mola
Expulsion from Eden
mid-17th century
wash drawing
British Museum

Pier Francesco Mola
St Catherine disputing in a temple
mid-17th century
wash drawing
British Museum

Paolo Anesi
Landscape with fountain outside a city
ca. 1740-65
drawing
British Museum

Herman van Swanevelt
Satyr family in a landscape
ca. 1634
drawing
British Museum

Nicolas Poussin
Nymph climbing onto the shoulders of a Satyr
 1620s
drawing
British Museum

Stefano della Bella
Interior of a barn
ca. 1625-65
drawing
British Museum

I am grateful to the British Museum for making these images available.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Jonathan Richardson Senoir's Cabinet of Drawings in Europe I

Pellegrino Tibaldi
Sibyl
ca. 1549
drawing
British Museum

Jonathan Richardson Senior (1667-1745) was a professional London portrait painter who earned a fortune in the early 18th century by means of a "tight, formal style" that pleased the taste of his aristocratic clientele. He is better remembered today as one of the earliest English writers on art theory, publishing titles such as An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting, and an Argument in Behalf of the Science of the Connoisseur (1719). Richardson is also remembered as an inspired collector of Old Master drawings and prints. More than a thousand of these  from his "cabinet of drawings in Europe"  were sold in 1747 after his death. Of that thousand, more than four hundred entered the British Museum, where they have since remained.

Antonio da Trento after Parmigianino
St John the Baptist
ca. 1520-50
chiaroscuro woodcut
British Museum

Domenico Beccafumi
Apostle
1540s
drawing
British Museum

Domenico Ghirlandaio
Costume study, standing woman
ca. 1485
drawing
British Museum

Curators at the British Museum offer an engaging interpretation of the drawing above  "This individual figure study is from the final stages of Ghirlandaio's preparation for the Tornabuoni chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, painted between 1485-90. The related figure in the 'Birth of the Baptist' scene is a portrait. This drawing is a study of her costume, with the dress probably loaned to the artist by the woman depicted in the fresco and probably modeled here by a boy apprentice. Ghirlandaio's fastidious study of every detail was a practice that Michelangelo took away form his brief time in the studio." 

attributed to Raphael
Putto restraining eagle
early 16th century
drawing
British Museum

Niccolò dell'Abbate
Jupiter and Semele
ca. 1550
drawing
British Museum

Correggio
Architectural frame for an altarpiece 
ca. 1525-30
drawing
British Museum

Jacopo Zanguidi Bertoja
Women fleeing
ca. 1559-74
drawing
British Museum

Andrea Schiavone
Antique figure from behind
ca. 1548-50
drawing
British Museum

Marcantonio Raimondi
Pietà
ca. 1515-20
engraving
British Museum

attributed to Lodovico Carracci
Académie
late 1580s
drawing
British Museum

circle of Giulio Romano
Fragment of tapestry cartoon
16th century
watercolor and body color 
British Museum

Michelangelo Anselmi
Seated man
early 16th century
drawing
British Museum

Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi
Landscape with classical figures
mid-16th century
drawing
British Museum

I am grateful to the British Museum for making these images available.