numbered and dated: ‘4 January 1656’ on the verso and inscribed with a presentation stanza: ‘Chi serve Iddio con purita di Cuore / Vive felice e puoi beato muore’ (Who serves God with purity of heart / lives happy and can die blessed), gouache on
93 x 151 mm.
Provenance
Christie’s London, 12 April, 1983, lot 170; Baskett and Day, London, ‘Exhibition of Fifty Old Master Drawings’, 1983, nos. 30 & 31; Private collection, London, until 2004
These are two leaves from an Album Amicorum assembled in Nürnberg in 1655-6. Intended for the private enjoyment of a patron and his closest friends, and painted with exquisite finesse, they remain today as a historical record of the time. Strauch spent his entire life in Nürnberg where, according to an anonymous contemporary, he was ‘very good in small things like miniatures and watercolours’ (H. Mahn, ‘Lorenz und Georg Strauch’, Reutlingen, 1927).
