'Adoration of the Shepherds'Jusepe de Ribera (Jativa, Spain 1591 - 1652 Naples, Italy)Artwork Details
 Ribera lived almost his entire career in Italy, where he was known as ‘lo Spagnoletto’ because he was born in Spain, painted for many Spanish patrons, and considered himself to be Spanish, often incorporating his birthplace into his signature. He spent much of his artistic life in the Spanish-controlled kingdom of Naples, where he formed close links to the Spanish viceroys and painted many altarpieces, mythological scenes and portraits. By the 1640s, the decade during which he is thought to have produced the Walker’s drawing, Ribera was enjoying considerable financial and social success in Naples. He had become one of southern Europe’s leading artists, with a flourishing studio, had bought a palatial house and gardens, and in 1644 his fourteen-year old daughter, Margarita, was married to a senior judge. However, by the beginning of the 1650s he had suffered economic hardship due to a recurrent illness, perhaps a series of strokes, which intermittently prevented him from painting between 1644/5 and 1650. In September 1650 he wrote to a patron, Antonio Ruffo, explaining that he had suffered ‘a weakness in the brain’ (flaqueza en el seso) which had delayed his work.2 His economic problems were worsened by the popular revolt against Spanish rule in 1647 and the subsequent political repression by the Spanish king, which may have isolated Ribera from some of his Neapolitan patrons, and the widowing of Margarita in 1651. His precarious health and partial paralysis was evident in the state of some of his drawings, which by 1650 often showed an unsteady line. The subject of the 'Adoration of the Shepherds' was one of Ribera's most popular themes in the 1640s. Between 1640 and 1650 he painted at least three versions of the Gospel story (Luke, chapter 2, verses 15-19) in 1640, 1643 and 1650 and had also begun another one sometime between 1641 and 1647.3 The Walker's composition is not very close to any of these. But only on rare occasions are Ribera’s drawings preparatory for paintings. It does share some motifs with the first painting, commissioned in 1640 by the then Spanish viceroy of Naples, the Duke of Medina de las Torres, who later gave the painting to the Spanish King, Charles II. It was then considered to be one of Ribera's finest works. The Walker’s drawing shares the 1640 painting's horizontal format and nocturnal setting in a stable. More importantly the painting shows the Virgin glancing tenderly down at the Christ Child, whom she holds in her arms, just as she does in the drawing. In the other two finished paintings the Virgin gazes upwards towards the heavens and does not hold the Child, who lies in a manger. As soon as it was painted the Duke's picture was praised. This encouraged Cristoforo Papa, Sicily's Protonotary (who presided over the island’s legal officials) to commission another version for himself in November 1641.4 The Walker’s drawing corresponds in one particular respect with Papa’s commission. He stipulated that the Child should be painted so that rays of light emanating from him would light up the 'beautiful features' of the cloaked Virgin and all surrounding her.5 The warm red chalk which in the Walker's drawing Ribera has manipulated deftly to outline the Child's body, the delicate features of the Virgin and the surrounding human and animal spectators, would seem to have been chosen by Ribera to fulfil these demands. However, Papa was very insistent that his version should be vertical, not horizontal, so that it would match an Entombment by Ribera that he already owned. He also specified other details. In the heavens he wanted a host of cherubs and an angel on a cloud whilst below there should be five shepherds, one of whom should be a woman. The Walker’s composition is not vertical, and never has been, nor does it have an airborne host of cherubs and angels, and has three not five shepherds. So it was probably not drawn in preparation for Papa’s commission. Ribera’s eighteenth-century Neapolitan biographer, De Dominici, described his usual drawing practice thus:
Many of Ribera's drawings, however, were not created as studies for particular paintings, but seemingly as independent variations on an already treated theme. It is possible that the Walker's drawing is one such variation, executed perhaps in the first half of the 1640s after he had painted the Medina de las Torres commission. Previously it was suggested that the drawing might be datable to the second half of the 1640s. The very long fingers of Joseph and the Virgin were considered stylistically closer to the extraordinarily elongated figures that Ribera drew at the end of the 1640s after he was affected by a series of strokes.7 But unlike the later drawings the Walker's does not show any evidence of the shaky, trembling hand, which by the early 1650s could barely produce an uninterrupted silhouette. Far from being the product of a tentative hand the Walker's drawing displays a fine, carefully applied use of glowing red chalk, almost uninterrupted silhouetted outlines and firm black chalk hatching in the shadows of the stable, combined with a dextrous application of brown and grey washes to deepen the shadows around the warmly lit focal point of the Christ Child. Similar lighting effects appear in a large Adoration by one of Ribera’s great Italian rivals, Guido Reni (1575-1642), installed in the monastery of San Martino, in Naples, in the 1640s. The one distinctive feature of the Walker’s drawing is that the standing figure of Joseph is totally bald or shaven-headed. No bald figures appear in any Ribera painting of the subject.8 One does, however, appear in Reni’s variant of his San Martino altarpiece, painted sometime between 1640 and 1642, probably for Prince Karl Eusebius of Liechtenstein (1611-1684).9 Reni’s bald shepherd was based on a terracotta bust entitled 'Seneca' that Reni had sculpted from life and supposedly modelled on a Slav man he met in Rome.10 The bust’s striking realism was popular with other artists and casts of it, as well as copy drawings, did the rounds of painters’ studios according to Reni’s biographer Carlo Malvasia. Reni is the only artist whom Ribera is recorded as copying in a drawing.11 However, as there is no surviving inventory of Ribera’s belongings there is no way of knowing if he had a copy of Reni’s bust that might have inspired this unusual aspect of Ribera’s tender and intimate drawing. Later historyThe originality of many of Ribera’s drawings and his dexterity with both black and red chalk, ink and wash made him a widely appreciated and recognised draftsman in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Walker’s drawing has an accurate attribution to him, which was probably written on its mount in the eighteenth century, either in Italy when Thomas Coke (1697-1759) (later the 1st Earl of Leicester) bought it whilst on his European Grand Tour in 1712-1718 aged 15 to 21, or after he brought it back to England.12 ProvenanceThomas Coke (1697-1759), created1st Earl of Leicester (fifth creation)1744, Holkham Hall, Norfolk; sold Christie’s, London, 2nd July 1991, lot 26; purchased by the Walker Art Gallery with the aid of , The Art Fund and the Foundation for Sport & the Arts, as part of the Holkham sale consortium March 1992.13 Exhibited
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