A drawing of an interior scene with a group of women gathered around a new-born child at left; an old bearded man standing with others to right; a woman in childbed beyond. 

The drawing comes from the Carracci sequence and was catalogued by Wittkower (in W(C), no. 11) as by Ludovico Carracci, a first study for Ludovico's painting in the Pinacoteca, Bologna; another drawing in that sequence (W(C), no. 12; RCIN 902327) is by Ludovico and much closer to the composition as painted. C. Johnston (The Drawings of Guido Reni, PhD thesis, Courtauld 1974, p. 23) suggested that the present drawing is in fact by Guido Reni, and the drawing described by C.C. Malvasia in 1678 ('un bellissimo disegno compito con lumi e biacca') as having been made by Reni in an attempt to wrest the commission from Ludovico, offering the patron Dionisio Ratta that he would execute the painting for half the price that Ludovico would charge. This episode must have happened in or before 1597, the year that Ratta died. 

Malvasia also stated that Reni's drawing was then in the Bonfiglioli collection, and it is therefore to be identified in the posthumous inventory of Silvestro Bonfiglioli, 1696, as 'Un dissegno con la nascita di S. Gio: Battista di mano di Guido Reni, con cornice dorata, e vetro' ('A drawing with the birth of St John the Baptist by the hand of Guido Reni, with a gilt frame and glass'). (The 1696 inventory also lists a drawing of the scene by Ludovico, presumably 902327, which was - again presumably - the drawing seen by Jonathan Richardson in Palazzo Bonfiglioli in 1722, 'Lod. Car.  Nativity of St. John Baptist, Bl. Pen, Wash. Height. small Pen.')

V. Birke, Guido Reni. Zeichnungen, Vienna 1981, no. 6.