Drawing, ‘Tobit burying the dead outside the walls of Nineveh’, by Andrea de Leone, Neapolitan school, 1648

Miss Emily Dalton (1816/17-1900), bequeathed to the museum in 1900.

The drawing is a preparatory study for a painting recorded in 1808 in the Czernin Gallery (Vienna) as being by the French artist Nicolas Poussin (currently in The Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1989.225) albeit described in the notes of the French merchant and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) with the comment that he would have taken it for the work of Poussin were it not signed with the artist's name, i.e. Andrea de Leone (Abécédario, III, Paris, 1854-56, pp. 205). The painting was subsequently attributed to Sébastien Bourdon, a close follower of Poussin and later restored to the Neapolitan painter Andrea de Leone.

Even though the drawing was not connected yet with the painting, it followed the same series of attributions. Originally acquired by the museum as anonymous, it was then identified as a work by Poussin (Reitlinger, 1921) and subsequently ascribed to Bourdon (V&A file).

The painting and drawing shows the burial of the dead outside the city of Nineveh as related in the Old Testament (Tobias 1:18-21): Tobit, wearing a hood in the foreground, defies Sennacherib's orders directed to the burial of the Jews whom the king had killed outside the walls of Nineveh. Another hooded figure, standing on the stylobate on the right hand-side, may be identified with the spy who informed the king of Tobit’s disobedience.

Blunt first showed that D.1072-1900 was a preparatory design for the picture now in the Metropolitan Museum and attributed the drawing to the Neapolitan painter Andrea de Leone (JWCI, 1940) among a number of related drawings "produced in the studio of Castiglione" (Chatsworth; formerly de Vries collection; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Courtauld Institute of Art, London). The drawing appears to be based on various drawings by the Genoese painter G.B. Castiglione, who was in Rome in 1648. Further evidences had shown that Leone and Castiglione had exchanged motifs over a period of 25 years (1635-1660). However, both influences of the Genoese painter and the classical Roman painter Poussin merge in this composition, which suggest a date around 1648.

Another drawing by de Leone on the same subject in a sketchier manner (Kupferstischkabinett, Berlin – Kd Z 21121) appears to be a variation upon the V&A drawing almost identical in composition with the painting. The kneeling figure in the foreground, probably deriving from Poussin’s Theseus (Musée de Condé, Chantilly), appears in detail in another drawing by Leone (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples). De leone painted another version of the same subject at around the same time which was formerly in the collection of the King of France Louis-Philippe (Private collection).

This subject matter seems to have been quite popular during the 17th century, perhaps following the various episodes of plague that struck the cities of Italy. The French painter Sébastien Bourdon for example provided a few engravings and drawings on the same subject in similar compositions.

D.1072-1900