Guercino

Guercino's early, large-scale life drawings of nude models posing in the studio represent one aspect of an artistic practice founded on the academic principles espoused in the Bologna studios of Pietro Faccini and especially of the Carracci, and a series of genre drawings representing tradesmen and beggars is another. Like the academic nudes, these are grounded in a fundamentally naturalistic approach to art, one in which the careful study of a beggar or tradesman was as valid as that of a muscular model. Caricatures and genre scenes of a different type are another manifestation of the same idea. As has been often noted, Guercino's drawing of a beggar is particularly close in spirit to several images of beggars drawn by Annibale Carracci in the 1580s or early 1590s. Most of those drawings are lost, but they are known today through the prints after them, including examples by Faccini and those published only in 1646 by Simon Guillan in the "Diverse Figure," otherwise known as the "Arti di Bologna." It is surely not coincidental that the present drawing, and several related sheets including the Grain merchant at the National Gallery of Art and a Beggar holding a rosary and a cap in a private collection, are in the same technique used for Guercino's early academic nudes. All are on large sheets of rough brown paper, approaching 400 mm high (the Morgan drawing, at 358 x 258 mm, is the smallest of the set, but it has clearly been trimmed at bottom and left), and are drawn in what is often described as "oiled black chalk" and white chalk. An examination undertaken by Margaret Holben Ellis determined that the Morgan drawing was in charcoal rather than chalk, and technical study undertaken by Marjorie Shelley at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has revealed that the black chalk or charcoal used in the early drawings was dipped not in oil, but in a gum solution that gave its marks a very dark black and sometimes waxy appearance. It was a technique that Guercino used exclusively in his pre-Roman period. Apart from the inspiration of seeing similar drawings in Bologna (both Pietro Faccini and the Carracci made such studies), the chalk or charcoal dipped in gum solution perhaps appealed to Guercino because the intense, bold effect it created corresponded to the forthright study that underlay the drawings' conception, something different from the furious sketching of his pen drawings or the refinement of a more delicate chalk study. -- Catalog entry: Guercino : virtuoso draftsman, Morgan Library & Museum, 2019, p. 28.