A large group of Punchinelli' by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to be auctioned

I think this drawing is rather fabulous. It's by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the great Italian painter. He was really known for his grand frescoes, his religious pictures, often painted on a monumental scale. But here we see him as a great draftsman, and really having fun. This subject of Punchinello was a subject that captivated him throughout his life. So there are a whole series of a dozen or so works that he drew throughout his long career, really just for probably a bit of fun more than anything. So all of Tiepolo's Punchinello drawings, they're all about eating, and overeating, and cooking, and drinking gnocchi. And here we see with the figures, one or two of them are holding long forks with gnocchi on the end of them. One of them is clutching a bowl, which almost looks like an upturned version of one of their hats, and that's a cooking bowl for gnocchi. And we think that it relates to this festival, which took place in Verona on the last day of Carnival, where the poor of the town would come up to the, I think it was the Villa Podesta, and they would offer the mayor a bowl of gnocchi and a glass of wine, which he would honorably accept. And from then on, the whole town would just party all night, really. They're incredibly humorous, these drawings. And in fact, when you look at the whole series, often painted in different scales, often painted over many decades of Tiepolo's life, his style changed. But you still saw these little figures, some of them passed out on the floor, one or two of them being rather ill. It's been in the Sitwell family since 1936, and it was bought at Christie's at the legendary sale of Henry Oppenheimer's collection of Old Master drawings. Looking at the Sitwell's collection, Punchinello seemed to appeal to them as much as it did to Tiepolo. They had works by Severini, also of Punch. They're full of humor, they're full of fun, and this is a really exciting new discovery, this drawing.