A lessandro M agnasco
Genoa 1667 - 1749
7. A Quaker, a study for the Quaker Sermon
Dateable 1712
Drawn with the brush in brown and white washes on paper washed grey-brown
321 x 239 mm
Provenance:
Mantova, private Collection; Bergamo, Marelli; New York, Stephen Spector; David Daniels, New York his sale
Sotheby’s, London 25 April 1978, lot 27, Florence, private collection.
Exhibited:
Dayton, Dayton Art Institute; Sarasota, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; Hartford,Wadsworth
Atheneum, 1962-63, Genoese Masters, Cambiaso to Magnasco, 1550-1750, no. 87reproduced; American
Federation of Arts, Circulating exhibition, 1966-67, Seventeenth and EighteenthCentury European Drawings, no.
25, reproduced; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1968, Loan Exhibition of Drawings
from the Daniels Collection, no. 14 reproduced, a circulating exhibition in 1968 that went on to Chicago, Kansas
City, and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.
Literature:
B. Geiger, Magnasco, 1949, p. 161, pl. 189, reproduced.
Although Magnasco is best known for his representation of Catholic monks, he also observed the religious life
of other faiths and recorded the practices of heretics and pagans in some detail. This drawing is a study for one
passage in the third version of his Quaker Sermon, a canvas dated 1712, formerly in the collection of the Magnasco
scholar B. Geiger.
The Quakers or The Society of Friends had been founded in England during the mid-seventeenth century.
Travelling extensively, Quaker preachers had carried their doctrines across Europe, reaching northern Italy among
other areas. The physical manifestations of the spirit, stressed
by the early Friendsas crucial signs of genuine religious
experience, were obviously of great interest to Magnasco.
The seated man represented in the drawing is by far the
most agitated member of the meeting. He literally seems
to quake at the words of the preacher, doubling up in a
contorted, anguished pose. It is only natural that Magnasco,
the painter of contemplation and religious ecstasies, should
have singled out this detail of his composition for a separate
preparatory study. The calligraphic energy of his line together
with his nervous, flickering highlights offer a dramatic visual
Alessandro Magnasco, Reunion of the Quakers. Oil on
canvas, 118 x 175 cm. Venice, private collection
equivalent for this spiritual phenomenon.
(GG )