Master Art

This large sheet is likely to have been intended as a study for a painting - similar hands are found, for example, in Fontebasso’s genre painting of two young boys, in a private collection in Venice - or as a studio exercise, and it is interesting to note here how close Fontebasso’s style is here to the early chalk drawings of Giambattista Tiepolo. A closely related drawing of Four Studies of Hands, of similar technique and dimensions, was on the art market in 2005, while also comparable is a drawing of five hands formerly in the Italico Brass and Benjamin Sonnenberg collections and sold at auction in New York in 1979, and another sheet of studies of five hands that appeared at auction in Paris in 2019.

Similar studies of hands, sometimes juxtaposed with studies of heads, are also found in other drawings by Fontebasso; one such example is in the Szépmuvèszeti Muzeum in Budapest and another, from the collection of Giancarlo Baroni, was on the art market in New York in 1995. Analogous studies of hands, although in pen and ink, appear on a drawing by Fontebasso in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on blue paper, backed.