Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615–1673)
The Prodigal Son Kneeling Repentant Among Swine, ca. 1650
Pen and brown ink, brown wash
The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Rogers Fund, 1966
This drawing fetched one of the highest prices at the sale of Mariette’s collection, which attests to the passion of eighteenth-century collectors for the works of the Neapolitan artist. Mariette greatly admired Rosa’s drawings, particularly his landscapes, and was among the first in France to write about the painter and his art. The connoisseur described the artist’s inventive and often eccentric creations as the product of “the almost irrepressible ardor of a genius.”