A Hunting Scene
Pen and brown ink and wash. Laid down. Verso: two head studies one a caricature, faintly visible from the recto.
123 x 185 mm (4 ½ x 7 ¼ in)
Ribera was born near Valencia in Spain. His father was a military man who had served in Italy. He remained proud of his nationality and consistently signed his work as Lo Spagnoletto. Ribera’s paintings were greatly admired in Spain and were hugely influential there and he worked frequently for Spanish patrons but his entire career was spent in Italy and having settled in Naples in 1616, he remained there until his death. Trained by the Valencian painter, Francisco Ribalta Ribera began his career in central Italy; by 1611 he is recorded in Parma where he worked for the Duke Ranuccio Maria Farnese and by 1613 he was in Rome, requesting entry to the Accademia di San Luca. He lived with a group of other Spanish artists, including his brother Juan, but would have encountered the range of painters gathered there: Italian artists from the circle of Caravaggio, Dutchmen such as Terbrugghen and van Honthorst and the French adventurers Valentin and Vouet. By September of 1616, Ribera had married Caterina Azzolino, daughter of a Sicilian painter working in Naples. His first patrons in these early years in Naples were the Prince Marcantonio Doria, to whom a number of works were delivered in Genoa, the Duke of Osuna, who had been Spanish ambassador to the Vatican and became Viceroy of Naples, his wife the Duchess and a number of Italian merchants and collectors. The artistic community of Naples in the 17th century was close-knit but rivalrous. Ribera seems to have had notoriously difficult relations with both Domenichino and Caracciolo but the support of his father-in-law with potential Italian clients will surely have helped. This early period was characterised by a continuing loyalty to the bold naturalism and vivid lighting of Caravaggio. Ribera established himself rapidly, the impact of his paintings with their dramatic realism and painterly effects resonated through the work of his Neapolitan contemporaries. His production as a print maker is confined to these years, a period during which he made most of the known sixteen prints, a small aspect of his output which was both influential and greatly appreciated by connoisseurs1.
Having survived the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631, Ribera’s career continued successfully. In the late 1630s he received a series of commissions from the prior of the Certosa di San Martino, including an order for fourteen canvases depicting Prophets and Patriarchs for the Church. The colours in his work began to show the influence of Venice and his compositions became more light-filled; Nicola Spinosa noted the ‘extraordinarily luminous, Mediterranean beauty’ of the paintings of the 1630s2. The decade from 1632 until Ribera became ill in around 1642 was intensely productive and the range of work accomplished very broad: from the violent and frightening series of depictions of the Damned, two of which are now in the Prado, the formal but inventively sculptural series of prophets for the Certosa, the numerous vivid and profound ‘portraits’ of saints and philosophers, to a small number of airy, Vandyckian religious visions such as the Immaculate Conception now in Madrid and even some idealised landscapes painted for the Duke of Alba.3
Illness forced Ribera to delegate commissions already undertaken to members of his workshop. His prestige fell and his reputation in the proceeding centuries also suffered because of the quantity of repetitive workshop paintings which emerged from private collections during the 19th and 20th centuries. A few exceptional paintings, some tender and delicate in tone, date from this last period but it was also marked by financial straits and a complicated family life. Published in the 18th Century, De’ Dominici’s biography presents an extreme vision of Ribera as arrogant and disdainful but in contrast to later readings of his character, he had the support and admiration of the monks of the Certosa who described him as pious and friendly ‘…always behaving with love and generosity towards the Church’.4
The body of drawings given to Ribera covers a wide spectrum ranging from handsome, energetic and relatively large-scale drawings such as the impressive red chalk heads of the 1620s to certain refined, almost decorative pen studies including the Odysseus discovering Achilles among the Daughters of Lycomedes at Haarlem. In another category, to which the present sheet belongs, is the group of characteristically rapid and inventive pen drawings, a number of which were previously given to Salvator Rosa but analysed and reattributed to Ribera by Michael Mahoney, Jonathan Brown and Walter Vitzthum5. The extent of Ribera’s published graphic work is, nevertheless, small, numbering little more than one hundred drawings6. It must be imagined that considerable amounts of drawings have been lost and that some further survivors are still to be identified. De Dominici described the evenings the artist would spend in the company of friends making drawings for his next day’s work and noted that ‘his continuous study is witnessed by the large number of his drawings that can be found’.7
The present sheet is itself a newly discovered work. It shows one of Ribera’s familiar profile figures8, this time a woman, possibly a servant, standing calmly, bearing a small pail and balancing on her head a basket with food. A huntsman kneeling before her, his dog pointing at his side, aims his huge musket, close range, at two sitting pigeons. A third figure, hidden behind a dead tree fires his own gun at the birds, the peppering shot about to hit the target. The scene is at once humorous and poignant and shows an intruiging correlation with Guercino’s genre and landscape drawings, both in terms of the earthy subject and the pen and wash technique which emphasises light and shade.
Jonathan Brown in the exhibition catalogue of 1973, Jusepe di Ribera, Prints and Drawings, made note of ‘several drawings that fall between genre and caricature.’9 In particular he cited the Beggars in the Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa, a drawing inscribed by Ribera and considered a key autograph work, which shows another profile figure, this time male, standing beside seated figures one of whom points to a similar dead tree, but here peopled with small figures, one of whom dangles by his legs whilst suspending a hanged man holding a crucifix (Fig. 1). The present drawing is relatively unusual for lacking any such ghoulish element but may belong to what could have been a group of hunting subjects, further evidence of which is the pen study of a Man Dragging a Deer Carcass in the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome10.
The range of technique and inspiration in Ribera’s drawings was emphasised by Manuela Marqués in the 1992 monographic exhibition catalogue and his connection to the ‘world of Italian drawing’ was underlined. In a fascinating judgement of style, the 19th century collector, Dezaillier d’Argenville, had perceptively noticed a link with Guercino: ‘One should not look for nobility or grace or refinement of touch: [in Ribera’s drawings] they are jerky in the taste of Guercino.’11 The present drawing must date from the 1630s, a period when Ribera’s pen drawings show a particularly experimental interest in the use of wash and its effects of light12.With Bolognese artists by then visiting and working in Naples, Domenichino and Reni amongst them, and with the spread of engravings, it is possible that Ribera knew Guercino’s work, although the similarity in subject matter, and the Guercinesque touch of the firing gun seen here, may be coincidental. Mena Marques does, however, note in discussing the Man dragging a Deer Carcass, which was dated by Mahoney to 1634-7, that Ribera ‘in keeping with the naturalistic trends of the time and inspired by the Bolognese school of drawings’ made drawings ‘that attest to his fascination with real subjects … in popular themes from everyday life.’ Two other examples of Ribera’s genre drawings which have emerged since Jonathan Brown’s catalogue raisonné of 1973 are the Group of Figures around a Fire in the Uffizi, Florence (published in the catalogue of the Prado exhibition in 1992) and a drawing, of a similar subject in a private collection. The application of the wash in the latter work compares very closely with the present sheet14.
Though the meaning of this drawing may have a dark edge, suggested by the defenceless pair of birds and the silent figure of the woman, its light tone is reinforced by the little caricature of a cleric visible from the verso. Beside that is a profile study of a female head, possibly after an antique model. This newly identified work underlines the inventiveness of Ribera’s drawings, and his fascinatingly anecdotal style, whilst giving further evidence of an already perceived alertness to the style and interests of other Italian masters.
1. See Jonathan Brown, Jusepe Ribera, Prints and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Princeton and Harvard, 1973-4, pp. 7-8.
2. See exhibition catalogue, Jusepe de Ribera, 1591-1652, New York 1992, ch. 3, p. 23.
3. For these examples see exhibition catalogue, op. cit., 1992, cat. 26, figs. 11 and 12, cats. 29 and 35, and cat. 32, pp. 164-5.
4. See Gabriele Finaldi, exhibition catalogue, op. cit., 1992, p. 5.
5. Michael Mahoney, The Drawings of Salvator Rosa, Garland Publishing, New York and London, 1977, see vol. I, group 7, cat. 7.1b.
6. See exhibition catalogue, op. cit., 1992, p. 196.
7. Quoted by Jonathan Brown in Jusepe Ribera, Drawings and Prints, 1973-4, p. 117.
8. For other figures in profile see for example the Woman carrying a Child leading a Child with a Windmill and a Dog (see exhibition catalogue, Ritorno al Barocco, 2009, vol. II, cat. 3.20 and exhibition cat. op.cit., 1992, p. 50 A Noble and his Page.
9. See exhibition catalogue, Princeton and Harvard, p. 148 and fig. 45.
10. See exhibition catalogue, New York, Naples and Madrid, Jusepe de Ribera, 1992, cat.107, p. 220.
11. See Jonathan Brown, op. cit. 1973-4, p.117 and Manuela Mena Marqués, in exhibition catalogue, op. cit., 1992, p. 197.
12. See Jonathan Brown, op.cit. 1973-4, p. 124
13. See exhibition catalogue, op. cit., 1992, p.196.
14. See sale, Christie’s London, 12 December 1985, lot 177.
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