Directors: Florian Härb, Liberté Nuti
5 Dalmeny Court, 8 Duke Street,
St James’s - London SW1Y 6BL
Phone: +44 774 779 16 70
E-mail: info@haerbnuti.com
www.haerbnuti.com

Florian Härb and Liberté Nuti are dealers and agents in master drawings, paintings and, occasionally, sculptures and prints.
Specialising in works on paper from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, they each have well over twenty years’ experience in the art trade and the valuation of works of art for the purposes of sale and insurance, as well as in collection management.
A noted scholar in Florentine Renaissance art, Florian’s particular expertise lies in the field of Italian drawings of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, but he also handles French and German drawings of the nineteenth century. After working as a specialist in the Old Master Drawings department at Christie’s in New York and London, Florian joined P. & D. Colnaghi in the early 2000s to run the Drawings department with Katrin Bellinger. In 2006 he set up his own business, dealing from premises in St. James’s, London.
He has recently joined forces with Liberté Nuti, who has spent over two decades in the Christie’s Impressionist and Modern department, where she was International Director and Head of Private Sales, London, and two years at the contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth in London, where she was Senior Director for Impressionist and Modern Art.
Florian Härb has been participating in the Salon du Dessin since 2000.
Giambattista TIEPOLO
(Venise 1696–1770 Madrid)
An Elegant Man in a Cap and Long Cloak, looking down
Pen and brown ink, brown wash over black chalk
190 x 146 mm
This elegant drawing of a man in a hat and long cloak, his hands clasped together and resting on his left shoulder, was once part of one of two albums of drawings containing studies of single draped figures known as Sole Figure Vestite. These drawings have an illustrious provenance going back to Tiepolo’s own time and, more specifically, to 1762 when the artist left all his previously made drawings bound in several albums with one of his sons, a priest in Venice, for safekeeping, before he left for Spain to serve King Charles III.
After coming to England by the middle of the nineteenth century, nine of these albums were sold at Sotheby’s in 1885. They were most likely purchased by the London art dealership E. Parsons and Sons who sold two albums shortly after to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
One of these volumes, bearing the title Sole Figure Vestite on its spine, contains eighty-nine drawings of which eighty-six are of single draped figures. The immediate subsequent fate of the remaining albums sold at Sotheby’s remains unclear, but nearly thirty years later, in 1914, the London publishers B. T. Batsford sold three albums in one lot at Christie’s, which was bought, again, by E. Parsons and Sons. One of two albums in this lot, both containing some 177 drawings of single figures often strongly foreshortened and seen from below, bore the title Sole figure per Soffitti (‘Single Figures for Ceilings’), while the third album contained another set of some ninety drawings of Sole Figure Vestite, almost certainly including the present sheet.
It was only after the war that E. Parsons and Sons began selling the drawings individually to the leading collectors of the time, such as William Bateson, Sir Robert Witt, the Baron d’Hendecourt or Dan Fellows Platt of New Jersey, as well as to other art dealers, perhaps the most prominent of whom was Richard Owen who had a shop on the Quai Voltaire in Paris. Our drawing was most likely acquired by Robert T. Paine II, a well-known Boston collector of old master drawings and paintings, either directly from Parsons, who stopped trading by 1935, or some other source. The drawing subsequently descended through his family until recently.
According to George Knox, the drawings from the Sole Figure Vestite albums date from the late 1740s to perhaps about 1760. Copies after two drawings from the V&A album, possibly made by the youthful Lorenzo Tiepolo, are preserved at Würzburg. Since Tiepolo and his workshop stayed in Würzburg from December 1750 to November 1753, Giambattista’s drawings in the V&A album cannot have been made later than that period. In his catalogue of the V&A albums Knox placed forty-five such single figure drawings chronologically shortly before the Würzburg period.
Most of the Sole Figure Vestite drawings are of male figures, often bearded and in extravagant hats or turbans, sporting wide cloaks and shown in a great variety of elegant and sometimes excentric poses, some standing still and others in movement, and generally without any further accessories. Essentially, they are variations on figure types that would appear in large numbers in Tiepolo’s vast frescoes, such as those at Würzburg. None, however, have been found to be strictly preparatory for any painting.
As drawing exercises the Sole Figure Vestite and similar drawing sets explore the full range of expressive possibilities within a narrow artistic specification—a single figure— and may perhaps be understood as the pictorial equivalent to, say, Scarlatti’s abundant variations on the theme of a short keyboard sonata.

The Drawings of Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574)
2024
The first catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Giorgio Vasari, Florentine Renaissance painter, architect, and author of the Lives of the Artists.