Description:

red chalk
210 x 280

Provenance:

Giuseppe Vallardi (1784-1863), Milan [L.1223]
Private collection, New York
with Day & Faber, London, 2002
where acquired by the present owner

Note:

This dramatic scene belongs to a small group of red chalk landscapes by the eccentric Genoese painter Alessandro Magnasco. Red chalk drawings by Magnasco are rare, and red chalk landscapes are rarer still. At the time of the 1996 Magnasco retrospective held at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, Mary Newcombe Schleier identified just six red chalk drawings, two of which were landscapes. The first landscape, depicting drovers before a tree, is housed at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in San Francisco. Previously attributed to Salvator Rosa, it was correctly identified by Catherine Monbeig Goguel as a work by Magnasco. The second landscape, a windswept scene featuring a traveller with a donkey, is in the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, formerly from the collection of Janos Scholz. It was Scholz who first proposed an attribution to Magnasco in 1967, a suggestion subsequently supported by Schleier. A third landscape has since been added to this group: a duck-hunting scene that appeared at Sotheby’s in 1997.

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