Charles Nicolas Cochin

Watermark: PRO PATRIA (similar to Churchill 145).
This sheet belongs to an ensemble of eighteen preparatory sketches (seven for vignettes and eleven for headpieces) for illustrations and two prints after Cochin for an 1784-85 edition of Torquato Tasso's "La Gerusalemme Liberata" published in Paris by François Ambroise Didot. These illustrations were commissioned by Monsieur, the Comte de Provence and the brother of Louis XVI who later reigned as Louis XVIII (1755-1824). The eighteen drawings were part of an album of 102 drawings broken up and sold in several lots by Sotheby's, London, in 1970.
Cochin's design can tentatively be connected to the frontispiece for his "Recueil de Dessins." The Recueil comprises eighty-two finished designs for illustrations to "La Gerusalemme Liberata", and is now in the Spencer Collection at the New York Public Library.
The final frontispiece to the Recueil shares a few motifs with the Morgan sheet suggesting, if anything, the present sheet might be an early idea for the composition. Both drawings include the shield with the three fleurs-de-lis held by the female figure above the scene and the figure of Generosity--identified as such on her belt in the Spencer sheet--at center. In this sketch, Generosity looks up at the members of the royal family, to the King in his ermine-collared coat, and to Monsieur, Cochin's patron, seated below him, to whom she extends her right hand. Her left hand points to two male figures on the right, perhaps the poet and the artist. In 1790, about six months after the fall of the Bastille, there was good reason to eliminate the royal personages from the finished drawing for the title page. The inscription below the design on the Morgan Library sketch, "7 Lignes", probably indicates the space to be reserved for the quotation from Goldoni, which is added to the finished drawing.