Head of a young man, his right hand against his cheek

This fresh image of a boy wearing a cap, thoughtfully gazing to the left, records Giovanni Domenico’s outstanding abilities in life drawing. The sheet is masterly executed with wetted red chalk and touches of white chalk on blue paper, thus channeling a characteristic technique originated by his father Giovanni Battista (1696-1770) as documented by similar head studies datable to the 1750s (see, for example, Christie's, London, 5 July 2016, lot 25). This sheet may be grouped with a number of Giovanni Domenico’s chalk head studies that include the Head of a Boy in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence (inv. 73.078; D.J. Johnson, Old Master Drawings from the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1983, no. 23, ill.) and the Head of an Old Man in the Achenbach Foundation, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (inv. 1961.38; E. F. Weeks, The Tiepolos: Painters to Princes and Prelates, 1978, no. 62, ill.). Following his father’s design practice, the artist produced these portrait drawings throughout his career - at least through the 1770s – for a variety of purposes: in preparation for paintings, as exercises to be kept in the workshop as a repertoire of motifs to be studied and copied, or as finished works of art for the market. Certainly the direct and spontaneous quality of this image suggests it was drawn from a live model, a garzone or a workshop assistant, sometimes identified with the artist’s younger brother Lorenzo Tiepolo (born in 1736).