Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Watermark: none.
In the opposite direction of the sheet, there is a faint black chalk sketch of a head.
Not long before his departure for Spain, Giambattista Tiepolo created a series of about seventy variations on the theme of the Holy Family. When the artist left for Madrid, he seems to have entrusted the drawings to his eldest son, Giuseppe Maria, who belonged to the convent of the Somaschi at Santa Maria della Salute, Venice. The drawings were sold in the nineteenth century and thereafter dispersed. This sheet is somewhat unusual in that it includes St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin, rather than Mary's husband, St. Joseph. --Exhibition Label, from "Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings"