A drawing of three figures including a young woman in the centre, an old woman whispering to her on the right and a man in a plumed hat offering a bag of money on the left.

Piazzetta’s paintings and drawings, sombre in tone and of an insistent largeness of form, stand in stark contrast to the high-keyed and airy work of Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo in early eighteenth-century Venice. He was renowned for his drawings of heads; these were drawn in black and white chalks on a dull blue paper that has in almost every case faded to buff, for they were finished works intended to be framed and hung. The Royal Collection holds thirty-six of Piazzetta’s drawings of this type, the largest group in existence, and though undocumented they were most probably acquired by George III with Joseph Smith’s collection. Until the middle of the twentieth century the drawings hung at Buckingham Palace, where they are recorded in 1877 and where they had presumably been since they were acquired.

Few of Piazzetta’s heads are portraits. They are instead character heads, of priests, philosophers, North African people, children and Venetian youths, and belong to a tradition of such heads that had periods of popularity throughout European art, particularly in seventeenth-century Holland. The present sheet is one of a pair in horizontal format, each showing three figures in a lascivious interaction. Here an old procuress takes a coy girl by the hand, as a bravo stands behind dangling a bag of coins. Nearly all of Piazzetta’s drawings in George III’s collection, including the present one, were copied by the King’s daughters.

Catalogue entry adapted from George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, London, 2004