Head in Profile Wearing a Veil and a Wimple
Red chalk with a touch of red wash.
138 x 126 mm (5 3/8 x 4 7/8 in.)
The sheet bears a watermark of five stars in a crest (close to Briquet 1441, Amalfi 1613).
Provenance: Possibly France (on account of the word Espagne written on the verso. Acquired by the art critic Brian Sewell (1931-2015) in the 1960s or 1970s; his sale, Christie’s, 27 September 2016, lot 34.
Literature: Gabriele Finaldi et al., Jusepe de Ribera, The Drawings, Catalogue raisonné, Madrid, Seville and Dallas 2016, cat.14, pp.82-83.
The 2016 catalogue raisonné of Ribera’s drawings describes this work as being typical of the artist both in its iconography and technique. The head is most likely a woman’s and possibly a nun’s given the nature of her headdress. Hats and head coverings seem to have held a particular fascination for Ribera as they appear in profusion and variety in both his painted and drawn works. Here, the manner in which the material falls over the forehead, obscuring the eyes, makes the figure faintly comical and somewhat mole-like – or even birdlike given the long and beakish nose. Gabriele Finaldi, who dates the drawing to the 1620s, suggests that the depiction of blindness or impaired sight recurs as a kind of ‘leitmotiv’ in certain works dating from after the time of the Norton Simon painting of The Sense of Touch (1615-16). But could there also be some connection to the lost drawing (destroyed 1942) usually identified as a Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter, known from a photograph, which shows a beautiful young woman also wearing a wimple and a hitched up headdress partially covering her forehead?1
Technically, the handling of red chalk is extremely refined; sinuous, fine and unbroken lines trace the outline of the profile and the curves of the delicately contoured mouth. Broader strokes scratch out the shaded areas of the eye sockets and, with a gentler touch, define the folds of the wimple. The single brush stroke of red wash and the minute and darker workings of the chalk around the nose, lips and chin define both shape and light, heightening the contrast with the brightness of the paper.
Formerly Naples, Museo Civico Gaetano Filangieri (Destroyed 1942)
1.See Gabriele Finaldi et al., Jusepe de Ribera, The Drawings, Catalogue raisonné, Madrid, Seville and Dallas 2016, cat.51.