This drawing is mounted together with another fragment, both of which come from the same album. The second sketch is in a different hand and depicts the Adoration of the Shepherds.1 It is assumed that the drawings are not original to the eighteenth-century album, which contains mostly French artists of that century. Felice Stampfle convincingly posited that the album most likely came with empty pages into the hands of a later collector, perhaps Hippolyte Destailleur, who used them to preserve a number of his smaller drawings, including the present sheet.2
Footnotes:
- Morgan Library & Museum, New York, inv. 2006.27:1-96, fol. 30(a).
- Stampfle, in Miner 1954, 209-15.
Watermark: None.
Recueil de Dessins folio 30(b).
One of ninety-six drawings (2006.27:1-96) that the French architect and collector Hippolyte Destailleur apparently pasted into an empty quarto album. See Recueil de Dessins, folios: 30(2), 39(1), 41(1), and 42(1).
Anonymous, Netherlandish School, 16th cent., Formerly attributed to.
Destailleur, Hippolyte Alexandre Gabriel Walter, 1822-1893, 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.
Stampfle, Felice, with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1991, p. 15, no. 26, repr.