Description:

pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk
109 x 251 mm

Provenance:

Christie’s, London: 10 December 1991, Lot 147
with Baskett & Day, London
where acquired by the present owner

Literature

Italian 17th Century Drawings from British Private Collections, exh. cat. Edinburgh, 1972, p. 42, no. 109, illustrated p. 108

Exhibitions

Edinburgh, Merchant’s Hall, Italian 17th Century Drawings from British Private Collections, 1972, no. 109

Note:

Little known today as a painter, Stefano della Bella achieved great renown in his lifetime for his work as an etcher, and in more recent times his role as an inventive and highly industrious draughtsman has received greater appreciation. This drawing is a relatively unusual example in della Bella’s considerable graphic oeuvre of a pure landscape, unpopulated by staffage or animals. In the centre of the sheet a farmhouse is bordered by trees, and to the right, a rocky slope runs down towards the left. In the treatment of the details of the landscape the sheet may be compared with A landscape with farm buildings and animals in the Royal Collection, Windsor, and Landscape with a farmhouse at the Uffizi, Florence. These drawings are typical of the landscapes first produced by della Bella in Paris, from the mid-1640s onwards, when he eschewed the parallel-hatching technique garnered from Jacques Callot, and incorporated the newfound influence of Dutch landscape prints, in particular that of the painter-etchers Herman van Swanevelt and Jan Both.

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