Born in Venice to Giambattista Tiepolo, one of 18th-century Europe’s greatest painters, it’s not surprising that Lorenzo Tiepolo was exposed to art at an early age. Father and son would later travel across Europe for work – to Würzburg in Germany, back to Venice to join the fraglia or painter’s guild and, later, to Madrid. The younger Tiepolo tried to enter the service of King Charles III of Spain but failed. Despite this setback, he chose to stay in the country after his father’s death in 1770.
Tiepolo’s greatest influence was, arguably, his father, although he also took inspiration from the artistry of German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who was active at the Spanish court at around the same period. His work, particularly his fine pastel portraits of the children of Charles III, also reflect hints of the sophisticated portraits of Rosalba Carriera, one of the greatest female painters of all time.
It was also in Madrid where Tiepolo produced his most original, and perhaps his finest, independent works – a series of vibrant half-length pastels of contemporary Spanish characters and types. These distinctive genre subjects give a glimpse of what the artist might have accomplished if he had been freed from his father’s overwhelming influence.
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 his father, Giambattista, and Lorenzo’s older brother, Domenico. Unlike them, he seems to have worked mainly in chalk or pastel rather than in pen and ink, and had a particular penchant for portraiture.
The Tiepolo scholar George Knox noted of Lorenzo: ‘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 EKCART ASIA acquired illustrates this point.
Lorenzo Tiepolo’s works are in the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) in Berlin, the Museo Bardini in Florence, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Martin von Wagner-Museum in Würzburg, the Harvard Art Museums in Massachusetts, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
