The Tiepolo scholar George Knox has noted of Lorenzo Tiepolo, ‘One receives the impression from the authenticated works of later years of an artist who was above all interested in the human head…all his early work consists of studies of heads, and the later works which are inscribed with his name are also studies of heads.’ The portrait we acquired illustrates this point.
Lorenzo and his older brother Domenico (nine years his senior) trained with their famous father Giambattista. They traveled for work to Würzburg, to Venice to join the Fraglia (painter’s guild) and later to Madrid. Lorenzo tried and failed to enter the service of King Charles III of Spain but he chose to stay in the country after his father’s death in 1770.
In Madrid, he produced his most original works —-a series of vibrant half-length pastels of contemporary Spanish characters and types. These distinctive genre subjects, perhaps his finest independent works, give a glimpse of what the artist might have accomplished, freed from his father’s overwhelming influence. Lorenzo’s style is mostly indebted to that of his father but during his time in Spain he was also particularly influenced by the work of the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who was active at the Spanish court at around the same period. Lorenzo made his name as a draughtsman and pastellist, and painted a number of fine pastel portraits of the children of Charles III which reflect something of the sophisticated portraits of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757 Venice, one of the greatest female painters of all time and known for her pastel portraits).
He died prematurely, after a long illness in 1776. Relatively few drawings by Lorenzo Tiepolo are known, certainly in comparison with the much more extensive oeuvre of Giambattista and Domenico. Unlike them, he seems to have worked mainly in chalk or pastel rather than in pen and ink, and he had a particular penchant for portraiture.
Drawings by Lorenzo Tiepolo are in the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Museo Bardini in Florence, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Martin von Wagner-Museum in Würzburg among many.
