Caricature of a Seated Man with a Book and a Cane
1760 (?)
Medium
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over black chalk
Dimensions
6 1/2 x 5 3/8 in. (16.5 x 13.7 cm)
Classification
Drawings
Department
Robert Lehman Collection
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Robert Lehman Collection, 1975
Accession Number
1975.1.455
Tags
Art Historical Context
In the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Battista Tiepolo's *Caricature of aated Man with a Book a Cane* (c. 1760) captures the artist's playful side. Tiepolo, a leading Venetian Rococo master famed for his sweeping frescoes in palaces and churches across Europe, often turned to quick sketches like this one to explore exaggerated human forms. Here, a bespectacled man hunches over a book, at his side, his features comically amplified—bulbous nose, furrowed brow—to poke fun at scholarly pretensions or old age. Rendered in pen and brown ink with brown wash over black ch...
About the Artist
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo · 1696–1770
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) stands as the greatest decorative painter of eighteenth-century Europe, a Venetian master whose luminous frescoes and dynamic compositions defined the Rococo era's aesthetic zenith. Born in Venice on March 5, 1696, to a modest shipping merchant family, Tiepolo's extraordinary talent transcended his humble origins to establish him as the most sought-after artis...