A Spring Shower (1797–1804): Art, History and Details

A Spring Shower (1797–1804) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (Italian, 1727–1804).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, an important Venetian fresco painter of the 18th century, is best known today for his highly finished historical drawings that ingeniously incorporate details from daily life. In his series of 104 drawings known as Divertimento per li Regazzi (Entertainment for Children), he featured the Punchinello character from the Italian tradition of popular theater, a picaresque clown figure with a hooked nose, hunched back, and bloated belly. The character appears repeatedly in Tiepolo's sprawling narrative that rehearses the social mores of late 18th-century Venice through genre scenes of daily life, comic misadventures, and pathetic tragedies. In this enigmatic scene, one of nine sheets from the Divertimento at the CMA, the artist depicted a group of seven figures from the back as they wander aimlessly amid a shower that literally drips down the white paper. Domenico's characteristically tremulous lines and broad, simple washes of brown ink, laid down over an initial sketch in black chalk, capture a fresh and misty atmospheric effect that magnifies the pensive quality of the scene. The artist made this and other drawings from the series as finished works without correlations in other media.

Object facts

• Title: A Spring Shower
• Date: 1797–1804
• Creator attribution: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (Italian, 1727–1804)
• Culture: Italy, Venice
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash over black chalk; framing lines in brown ink over graphite on antique laid paper
• Dimensions: Image: 29.6 x 41.5 cm (11 5/8 x 16 5/16 in.); Sheet: 35.5 x 47.1 cm (14 x 18 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1937.573

A detail from the museum

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, who often depicted multiple Punchinellos (a clown figure) in his drawings, added two in this scene—the figure on the left with a cloak comically draped over his head, and another on the right holding an umbrella.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Art Throughout America: Cleveland: Tiepolo Drawings from a Famous Series.” The Art News 37, no. 34 (May 20, 1939): 15.
• Francis, Henry S. "Six Drawings from the Life of Pulcinella by the Younger Tiepolo." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 26, no. 4 (April 1939): 46-49.
• Golden Gate International Exposition, and Annemarie Henle. Master Drawings, An Exhibition of Drawings from American Museums and Private Collections. San Francisco, Calif: Palace of Fine Arts, Golden Gate International Exposition, 1940.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.