Description:

pen and brown ink, over traces of black chalk
230 x 320 mm

Provenance:

Armand Tramptisch (1890-1975), Paris
with Kate de Rothschild, London
Christie’s, London: 3 July 1990, Lot 37
with Baskett & Day, London
where acquired by the present owner in July 1990

Literature

K. de Rothschild, Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1987, no. 5

Exhibitions

London, Didier Aaron (London) Ltd, Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1987, no. 5

Note:

This pen and ink landscape drawing is a characteristic work by Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi, known as il Bolognese. Although the foliage and hillside to the right are Grimaldi’s own invention, the castle and hillside to the left are closely copied from the background of Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated engraving, The Sea Monster (Bartsch 71). Grimaldi meticulously reproduced the landscape and architectural elements of Dürer’s design but transformed the vertical print into a horizontal format, removing the two figures in the foreground and the bathers to the left. Grimaldi replaced the two figures with a hillside which forms a second riverbank, and a tree to the far right, which enters from the edge of the sheet. These elements are slightly looser in style than the cityscape and are typically Grimaldesque, combining the artist’s neat penwork with Dürer’s compositional genius.

Another version of this drawing (mistaken for the present work in the de Rothschild catalogue of 1987) was formerly in the Robert Landolt collection and sold at Christie’s, London, in 2020.