Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini The Card Players (recto) Pen and brown ink and wash PROVENANCE This delightful drawing shows card players in the flickering light of a Venetian palace interior. The brush-strokes are rapid and impressionistic, the gloomy splendour of the decoration indicated with great economy in a few dashes of ink. Pellegrini was in some respects the link between the late baroque style of Sebastiano Ricci and the exuberant rococo of the young Gianbattista Tiepolo. He was apprenticed to Paolo Pagani, the Genoese baroque painter, and studied in Moravia, Vienna, Bologna and Rome. In the latter city he was profoundly influenced by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, called Baciccio, whose decorations of the nave and cupola of the Gesu had been completed a few years before. These lessons Pellegrini took back to Venice, where he stayed for the next eight years perfecting an elegant and delightful manner of composition, which soon earned him widespread acclaim. He married Angela Carriera, sister to Rosalba, whose letters provide remarkable insight into the lives of eighteenth-century working artists. In 1708 he attracted the attention of the Duke of Manchester, who persuaded him to come to England. Pellegrini’s success condemned him in the end to a peripatetic circuit of the courts of Europe. The attribution of this drawing has been confirmed by Jeffrey Daniels. |
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