UNITED-STATES
Directors: W. Mark Brady, Laura Bennett
28 East 73rd Street
New York, NY 10021
Phone: (917) 744 9095
E-mails: mark@wmbrady.com laura@wmbrady.com
W. M. Brady & Co., established in 1987 in New York, specializes in Old Master and 19th-century drawings and paintings, primarily of the Italian, French, and English schools.
The clientele of the gallery is international and consists of private collectors as well as museums. These include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Morgan Library & Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the British Museum, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Institut Néerlandais, and the Louvre.
Lorenzo Baldissera TIEPOLO
Venice 1736-1776 Madrid
A Young Man Wearing a Studio Cap, Resting His Head on His Left Hand
Inscribed in a later hand, lower right, Tiepolo
Black and red chalk, with some stumping, on white paper; pin holes at the edges
16 1/4 x 11 ¼ inches
412 x 285 mm
Provenance
Comte André Lefèvre d’Ormesson (1921-2014), Paris
Then by descent
This unpublished, recently discovered drawing by Lorenzo is from a group of about ten drawings of this type which are considered the artist’s most original and expressive drawings, demonstrating vividly his technical prowess and inventiveness.
Others from the series include three sheets at the Morgan Library; one formerly in the collection of Wolfgang Ratjan and now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; one at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris; one in the Lepow collection, New York; one in a private collection, New York (fig. X); and another formerly in the collection of the late A. Alfred Taubman.
All are life-size in scale, drawn with a powerful mixture of black, red and other colored chalks, enriched with stumping and sharp re-heightening, on white rag paper.
Drawn in a painterly style, each head is rendered in a naturalistic manner, with a deep psychological understanding of the sitter that conveys an individual personality. These are portraits not types.
The present example, powerful and one of the most poetic of the series, is particularly sensitive in its portrayal of a person distracted from his surroundings and absorbed with his own thoughts.