Claude Lorrain

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Claude Lorrain
1600-1682
Two Cows and a Bull Reclining on a Slope
ca. 1645
Black chalk and gray wash.
4 3/4 x 7 9/16 inches (120 x 192 mm)
Thaw Collection.
2017.152
Notes: 

Cattle nearly identical to the three seen here are included in a herd in the middle distance of A Pastoral Landscape, an idealized scene of about 1645, now part of the collection of the Barber Institute, Birmingham. The complete composition can also be seen in the artist's copy in the Liber Veritatis (British Museum, London; LV 93).
This sheet was no. 46 of the Animal Album, and Roethlisberger noted that it was one of only two drawings from the group used in a painting. It is on a thinner paper than other studies in the album. When the dealer Hans Calmann acquired the Animal Album at sale in 1957, it had purportedly been kept intact in the Odescalchi family in Rome since at least the eighteenth century. Calmann dismantled the album and sold the 64 sheets individually.

Provenance: 
Prince Don Livio Odescalchi (1652-1713), Rome (in an album listed in his 1713 inventory as “Sei Quinternetti di carta legati assieme con sessanta due disegni rappresentanti Animali, e Painte de Claudio Gelle Lorenese”); by descent to Donato Sanminiatelli (1929-1979) and Maria Odescalchi (b. 1930), Rome; sale, Sotheby's, London, 20 November 1957, lot 67; the album acquired and dismembered by Hans M. Calmann (1899-1981), London; Galerie Claude Aubry, Paris; Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw, New York.
Associated names: 

Odescalchi family, former owner.
Calmann, Hans M., 1899-1982, former owner.
Thaw, Eugene Victor, former owner.
Thaw, Clare, former owner.

Bibliography: 

Thaw Catalogue Raisonné, 2017, no. 237, repr.
Stampfle, Felice, and Cara D. Denison. Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1975, no. 19, repr.
Roethlisberger, Marcel, Claude Lorrain. The Drawings, 1968, no. 595.

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