The Baptism of Christ

As was typical of his working method, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo drew many different variants of this composition. A group of thirteen drawings with the same subject as The Baptism of Christ was in the album from Earl Beauchamp’s collection dispersed at auction in 1965 (Christie’s, London, 15 June 1965, lots 6-18). A further large group of drawings on this theme is in Stuttgart (see Tiepolo. Drawings by Gambattista, Domenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo from the Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, from Private Collections in Wuerttemberg and from the Martin von Wagner Museum of the University of Wuerzburg, Stuttgart, 1971, no. 44). Other examples are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (K.T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1956, II, no. 1089) and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which possesses six drawings from the group in the Robert Lehman Collection (J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings in the Robert Lehman Collection, New York, 1987, nos. 114-119; here there is a further discussion of drawings from the series in other collections).

The drawings are related to a picture of the same subject in the Museo Stibbert in Florence (A. Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Venice, 1971, p. 119, ill.).