Prints and Drawings Room
View by appointment- Artist
- Joan González 1868–1908
- Original title
- Couple dans les sous-bois
- Medium
- Ink and watercolour on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 324 × 502 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Mme Roberta Gonzalez-Richard, the artist's niece 1972
- Reference
- T01640
Catalogue entry
Joan González
1868-1908
T01640 Couple dans les Sous-Bois
(Couple in the Undergrowth) c.1900-1
Not inscribed
India ink wash on paper, 12 3/4 x 19 3/4 (32.4 x 50)
Presented by Roberta González 1972
Joan González's development is difficult to establish with any completeness and has to be based mainly on a small number of dated drawings of 1902, 1903, 1904 or 1905. None of the few drawings exhibited in his lifetime has so far been identified. Roberta González inscribed all the drawings she gave to the Tate on the back with a title and date, or approximate date (usually an approximation such as c.1904-7); but she never met her uncle and had no first-hand knowledge of his work. The titles given in these catalogue entries [T01640-T01679] are the ones used by her, but the chronology has been revised through a comparison with other dated works, a study of the costumes and so on. Frequent references are made to the book by Vicente Aguilera Cerni, Julio Joan Roberta González: Itinerario de una Dinastía
(Barcelona 1973), which contains by far the largest corpus of reproductions of his works.
This particular drawing, which Roberta González dates c.1900-2, appears to be the earliest of the Tate's works by him and may have been made within a few months of his move to Paris in 1900. It is more tentative and less accomplished than any of the dated figure drawings of 1902.
Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.299, reproduced p.299