Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

View of a Walled Town

Guercino
1591-1666

View of a Walled Town

ca. 1625-1630
10 1/4 x 16 3/16 inches (260 x 411 mm)
Pen and brown ink on paper.
I, 100

Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.

Notes
Guercino's landscape drawings were for the most part autonomous works of art and have been notoriously difficult to date because they cannot be connected to paintings that might serve as benchmarks. Instead, one must rely on comparisons between the pen work of a landscape and that of connected, datable compositional drawings and to a lesser degree, on comparisons with the landscapes occasionally seen in Guercino's paintings. An additional benchmark for these two drawings is the similarly handled Landscape with travelers in the rain in the Uffizi, which has an inscription dating it to 1626.1 These two sheets (I, 100 and I, 101d) also resemble other landscapes that Turner and Mahon have tended to date to the later 1620s due to their relatively dense compositions and prominent foreground features. They are full of anecdotal detail and clever touches of the pen, such as the stipple used to depict the fading frescoes on the façade of the church in cat. 10. As Mahon has noted, a drawing in the Royal Collection has a very similar, if not identical, church. -- Catalog entry: Guercino : virtuoso draftsman, Morgan Library & Museum, 2019, p. 48
Inscriptions/Markings
Watermark: Six-pointed star above letter "M" in escutcheon.
Associated names
Greville, Charles, 1762-1832, former owner.
Warwick, George Guy Greville, Earl of, 1818-1893, former owner.
Murray, Charles Fairfax, 1849-1919, former owner.
Morgan, J. Pierpont (John Pierpont), 1837-1913, former owner.
Morgan, J. P. (John Pierpont), 1867-1943, former owner.
Bibliography
Marciari, John. Guercino : virtuoso draftsman. New York : Morgan Library & Museum, in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2019, no. 9, repr.
Mahon 1968b, no. 211; Stone 1991a, 219.
Collection J. Pierpont Morgan : Drawings by the Old Masters Formed by C. Fairfax Murray. London : Privately printed, 1905-1912, I, 100, repr.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department