[After the Cub Bear Hunt] (recto) / [Sketch of a Man and a Horse] (verso)
Date 1911 - 1912
Medium Pencil and gouache on paper
Dimensions 9,25 x 9,99 in.
Collection Private collection
As a child, Alberto Giacometti made drawings and small paintings with gouache or watercolour, illustrating picturesque scenes or copying the works of the past. His father, the Swiss impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti, was able to help him in the first approaches of his pictorial technique. Alberto has therefore made, during the first twenty years of his life in Switzerland, several watercolours and gouaches, scenes from daily life, portraits of his family, and numerous landscapes. The scene represented is a return from a hunt. In the centre, the animal, very small, is surrounded by numerous characters, among them several are identified by numbers written down with a pencil, which relate to a table with first names hand-written on the back. On the preparatory pencil drawing on paper, big areas of bright colours have been applied. The monogram, which imitates that used by the German painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer, bears witness to the cultural environment in which the young Alberto grew up, among the art history books of his father’s library. It was in those books that Alberto Giacometti familiarized himself with the art of the old masters, by copying, for example, as early as 1915, the engraving “The knight, death and the devil”. The use, on this drawing, of a monogram is a kind of tribute to the German artist in the tradition of which Giacometti placed himself, showing his great artistic curiosity and his interest for the history of ancient arts that, during his whole life, aroused his admiration and were the object of numerous copies. The drawing has remained in Giacometti’s family, in the house of the daughter of one of Alberto’s paternal uncles.
Monogrammed and dated with a pencil en bas, au milieu "A G 1911/12"
Private collection
Private collection
Sale Christie's Zurich Zurich (Switzerland), December 1st, 2008, lot n ° 151
Swiss Art, Zurich : Christie's Zurich, 2008, lot no. 151