Seated Nude Woman Lifting a Curtain

The half-naked woman, who is raising a curtain to reveal herself, looks as though she is seductively awaiting or about to greet a visitor, who one imagines is a man just off to the right of the drawing. It has been suggested that the drawing might be related to a sketch of 'Venus and Cupid' (Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands) which was doodled on the back of a letter from Guercino in Cento and dated 28 December 164 [1 or 6]. The Dutch drawing shows Venus half-reclining under a roughly sketched canopy but in reverse to the Walker’s drawing (i.e. facing left rather than right). Guercino often made one or two sketches in a design sequence in reverse. In her right hand she holds a bow which Cupid attempts to take from her. This drawing is not only larger and its composition is much more finished than the small sketch in Haarlem, but it also lacks a Cupid and bow, or the Dutch drawing’s playful atmosphere. The pose of this woman has also been thought comparable to that occurring in a 'Toilet of Venus' (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy) painted by Guercino’s nephew, Benedetto Gennari (1633-1715), in about 1660 and a related drawing in reverse from Guercino’s workshop (Royal Library, Windsor Castle).6 Benedetto Gennari's painting shows a partly naked woman reclining with a drapery swag above her and leaning on her right arm with her left raised, not to draw back a curtain, but to adjust her hair whilst looking in a mirror held by a Cupid standing behind her. This drawing by Guercino might have supplied Benedetto Gennari with a partial idea for a pose, but it is unlikely that Guercino’s drawing was originally intended for a ‘Toilet of Venus’, as it lacks the various other elements of the story. It may instead have been intended as a figure study for a painting from classical mythology or Roman history, such as the life of Cleopatra. The repeated working over of the figure’s silhouette suggests that the drawing was not a spontaneous sketch for a pictorial idea, especially around her right shoulder and arm with dark ink cross-hatched shadows. The hatched and stippled lines and dots visible around the woman’s breasts and on her face are similar to the type of pen-work found on the drawings that Guercino created to be engraved and turned into prints. But in those examples the hatching and stippling is usually much more precise than in the Walker’s drawing. He developed this technique early in his career in 1618/19 when he produced drawings to be engraved by his Centese friend Giovanni Battista Pasqualini (1595-1631), but he continued the style into the 1640s for other non-printmaking purposes. A similar combination of hatching and stippling can be found on the ink drawing 'A Woman Seated' (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), which has also been dated by technique to the 1640s.