Artist: Jean Claude Richard, abbé de Saint-Non (1730-1792) after Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770)
Title: Polichinelle couché (Punch reclining)
Date: 1765
School: French, XVIIIth-century
Medium: etching and aquatint
Dimensions: 195 x 159mm (plate), 205 x 157mm (sheet)
Watermark: none
Inscriptions/marks: in the plate lower left <<Tiepolo del>>, in the plate lower right <<Saint Non Sc. 1765>>
Condition: good condition, printed on laid paper, mounted at the top edge in an eighteenth-century style card mount with gold fillet frame.
Description: Punch is depicted flat on his back in a drunken stupor, his conical hat beside him. From a drawing by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo now in the Morgan Library, New York https://www.themorgan.org/drawings/item/247018.
The drawing belonged to the great art commentator and polymath Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), whom Saint-Non visited in Bologna with Fragonard in 1761. The print was published in a suite of nearly three-hundred prints under the title Recueil de Griffonis…. n.d. [about 1780].
Reference: Jean de Cayeux, ‘Introduction au catalogue critique des “Griffonis” de Saint-Non et catalogue des “Griffonis”’, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français, 1963, pp. 297-384, cat. no. 91.
Provenance: Dunbar Sloane, Wellington, 2021
