Italian (Roman) School, Mid-17th Century

An African Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus)
gouache on paper
13 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches.

This lot is located in Palm Beach.

Provenance:

Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657) or possibly his younger brother Carlo Antonio

By descent, as part of the ‘Museo Cartaceo’ to Gabriele dal Pozzo

By descent to his son Cosimo Antonio dal Pozzo

Bought in 1703 by Pope Clement XI

Bought in 1714 by his nephew Cardinal Alessandro Albani

Bought in 1762 for King George III by James Adam

In the Royal Collection in Buckingham House and, from 1834, at Windsor Castle, from where dispersed

Stefan Pollak Collection

Sale, Bonhams, London, 9 December 2002, lot 43

Exhibited:

London, The Matthiesen Gallery, Birds and Beasts, 29 May – 4 July 1953, no. 103, as by Giovanni Pozzuoli

Literature:

Henrietta McBurney, Ian Rolfe, Caterina Napoleone, Paula Findlen, Birds, Other Animals and Natural Curiosities (Paper Museum of Cassiano Dal Pozzo. Series B: Natural History), 2017

For the dispersal of the collection see Henrietta McBurney, 'The later history of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s “Museo cartaceo”’, The Burlington Magazine, cxxxi, no. 1037, August 1989, pp. 549–53.

The present drawing formed part of one of the most remarkable collections ever assembled, the Paper Museum, or Museo Cartaceo, of the dal Pozzo family. Cassiano dal Pozzo was one of the leading patrons of seventeenth century Italy, commissioning more than forty works from Nicolas Poussin and in his Paper Museum he attempted to chronicle the classical and natural world in thousands of drawings.

Former curator of prints and drawings in the Royal Library, Henrietta McBurney, who has studied the present drawing in the original, notes that it is on a George III mount and that it formed part of the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, having been acquired by George III in 1762. The sheet is laid down on D&C Blauw paper, the same as was used to back many of the Cassiano drawings at Windsor when they were remounted by George’s librarian Richard Dalton.

Compared to other drawings of birds from the Paper Museum, the parrot in the present work is unusually pictorial and expressive. The illustrations that Cassiano commissioned from various artists for his ornithological treatise Uccelleria, or The Aviary, were generally more analytical in conception and stiffer in execution with the birds set parallel to the picture plane. For this reason McBurney believes that the present drawing is unlikely to have been a Cassiano commission but rather an acquisition by either Cassiano himself or possibly his young brother Carlo Antonio who shared Cassiano’s passion for ornithology. Carlo Antonio inherited the Paper Museum after Cassiano’s death and continued to add to the collection.

We would like to thank William Laffan for contributing the cataloguing entry for this lot.