View of a Walled Town

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