drawing
- Museum number
- Pp,4.79
- Description
-
Two women play tambourine and triangle whilst a girl dances holding a rattle above her head.
Pen and brown ink, on three conjoined sheets of light grey-brown prepared paper
- Production date
- 1575-1644
- Dimensions
-
Height: 110 millimetres
-
Width: 107 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Lit.: N. Turner, 'Italian Drawings in the BM, Roman Baroque Drawings', London, 1999, I, no. 302
Turner 1999
This and Pp,4.80 are mounted together. Two other drawings in the collection (Pp,4.80 and Pp,4.81) show similar Turkish, oriental or 'antique' figures, such as might appear as 'Staffage' in some landscape painting. Hess believed the subject matter to have been inspired by the work of the decorator Giulio Parigi, which Tassi would have encountered during his visits to Florence and Livorno in the second decade of the century. Pugliatti similarly dates the drawings c. 1615 (Pugliatti, 1977, p. 148).
Two similar music-making women, one with cymbals, the other with a tambourine, appear in a drawing in the Boymans van-Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (inv.no. 1.1230), while a drawing of a woman playing a wind instrument is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv.no. 9129.B.3; Ward-Jackson, 1980, no. 811). Both these studies, like the British Museum drawings, are in pen and brown ink and wash and would appear to belong to the same series. All of the sheets give the impression of being working drawings, and, in style and general character, anticipate to a remarkable degree Claude's figure studies for landscape.
Literature: Hess, 1935, pp. 36-7 and fig. xxxva; Pugliatti, 1977, p. 148 and fig. 220.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1824
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- Pp,4.79
