Caricature of a man resting his hands on his hips

The present sheet was part of an album of caricatures once in the Arthur Kay collection and inscribed with the title Tomo terzo de Caricature. The album, dispersed at Christie's in London in 1943, contained over one hundred caricatures and had been acquired by Kay in 1926 from John Grant, an Edinburgh bookseller, who had purchased it from Langton House in Berwickshire (see G. Knox, Tiepolo. A Bicentenary Exhibition, Cambridge, 1970, no. 87). George Knox advanced the hypothesis that the album was one of the two mentioned in 1854 in a catalogue of the Algarotti-Corniani collection as: 'due grossi libri' with 'una copiosa collezione di disegni umoristici del Tiepolo' (see M. Levey, ‘Two Footnotes to any Tiepolo monograph’, The Burlington Magazine, CIV, 1962, p. 119). The caricatures from the album, now dispersed in numerous museum and private collections, can be dated to 1757-1762.

Caricatures, such as the present one, show another aspect of Tiepolo’s extraordinary skill as a draftsman, able to capture with just a few rapid lines the features and the personality of individuals around him.