Punchinello Collapses on the Road

Prints and Drawings

c. 1791

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
Italian, 1727–1804

Between 1797 and his death in 1804, Domenico Tiepolo created 104 inventive wash drawings for what he called Divertimenti per li ragazzi (diversions for children). This series described the life, from birth to death, of the tragicomic commedia dell’arte figure Punchinello (identified by his conical hat and beaked mask), in a loosely structured tale of an everyman.

In Punchinello Collapses on the Road, we see the protagonist, surrounded by eleven of his companions and three lamenting women, in the final days before his death. While Punchinello is indeed a kind of everyman, Tiepolo also made references throughout the series to the life of Christ. This drawing calls to mind one of Christ’s falls as he carried the cross.

Currently Off View: Prints and Drawings

Artist: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
Title: Punchinello Collapses on the Road
Origin: Italy
Date: 1791
Medium: Pen and brown ink and brush and brown washes, over traces of charcoal, on off-white laid paper, with framing lines in pen and brown ink
Inscriptions: Signed, lower right, brown ink: "Domo Tiepolo"; inscribed, lower right, graphite: "14"; inscribed, upper left, brown ink: "13"; inscribed, upper left, graphite: "O"
Dimensions: 360 × 475 mm
Credit Line: Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
Reference Number: 2019.869

James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo (Faber, 1962), p. 56 n. 3.
Marcia E. Vetrocq, Domenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello Drawings, with an introductory essay by Adelheid Gealt, exh. cat. (Indiana University Art Museum, 1979), pp. 122 (ill.); 145, S20.
George Knox, “Domenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello Drawings, Satire, or Labor of Love?” in Satire in the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Dudley Browning (Garland, 1983), p. 127.
Adelheid Gealt, Domenico Tiepolo: The Punchinello Drawings (G. Braziller, 1986), p. 191, no. 100 (ill.).

Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1921. [no known title].
Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Chefs-d’oeuvre des Collections Parisiennes, 1950, p. 57, cat. 151.
Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Tiepolo et Guardi, 1952, cat. 56, pl. 36.
Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie des Tuileries, Venise au dix-huitième siècle, 1971, cat. 311.
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Pure Drawing: Seven Centuries of Art from the Gray Collection”, January 25 - May 10, 2020, pp. 42-43, cat. 16, p. 139, GC 80.

Estate of the artist; sold Hôtel des Ventes, Paris, Nov. 10–12, 1845. Sold, Sotheby’s, London, July 6–7, 1920, lot 41, to Colnaghi, London; sold to Richard Owen, Paris, to at least 1950 [Paris 1950 exh. cat.]. Léon Suzor, Paris, by 1952–at least Nov. 1971 [Paris 1952 and Paris 1971 exh. cats.]. Sold by Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, London, to a private collection, 1995; sold, Sotheby’s, New York, Jan. 29, 2014, lot 38, through François Borne to the Gray Collection Trust, Chicago; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2019.

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